Warning: this article contains the names of First Nations people who have died and distressing content.
Ned Jampijinpa Hargraves, the grandfather of a 24-year-old man who passed away in Northern Territory police custody, has told Living Black his community won’t feel safe in public until they get justice.
Kumanjayi White, a Warlpiri man with disabilities, passed after being restrained by police at the Coles supermarket in Alice Springs in May.
“When I heard, I didn't believe, ‘What are you talking about?’ ‘What are you trying to say?’ ‘What are you telling me? Tell me,’" Uncle Ned explains to Living Black.
“I didn't wanna talk to anyone at that very moment because I was very, very angry and frustrated.
"And I was shocked.”
Kumanjayi White’s passing sent shockwaves around the country, sparking series of vigils and thrust the issue of Indigenous deaths in custody back into the national spotlight.
Uncle Ned says people claiming to have witnessed the incident have come forward.
“They said that they saw everything. The police was on top of my jaja (grandson) and their knee on his neck and on his back,” Uncle Ned says.
“And face down on the ground, and had him, he couldn't breathe.”
Yuendumu hurting
Uncle Ned, a respected Warlpiri Elder from Yuendumu, has become a voice for a community that has seen two of its young men pass in police custody since 2019.
Both were Uncle Ned’s grandsons.
After Constable Zachery Rolfe shot Kumanjayi Walker dead, the official explanation took six years.
On July 7, Northern Territory Coroner Elisabeth Armitage visited Yuendumu to hand down her findings.
“I found that Mr Rolfe was racist and that he worked in, and was the beneficiary of, an organisation with hallmarks of institutional racism,” the coroner said.
The community is angry and hurting and struggling to come to terms with yet another fight for answers about how their relative passed.
“They're not giving us the footage of the CCTV ... why is that?” Uncle Ned asks.
“We have the right, as the family, we have the right to see it.”
The coronial inquest into Kumanjayi White's passing has been paused while the major crime division of NT Police investigates but the family’s lawyer is calling for an independent investigator take over.
The family’s lawyer, George Newhouse from the National Justice Project, says they’re being kept in the dark.
“First Nations people have a terrible relationship with the NT Police," he says.
"They don't trust them.
"And so, at one level, it's vital that an independent body or an independent investigator take over to give them some faith in the system.”
Uncle Ned says he believes the officers involved should be stood down, pending an independent investigation.
“What? You just, you just kill a bloke and just walk away from it? Just like nothing happens? That is disgusting!" he said.
The hurt and anger has distilled into a national demand for justice and Uncle Ned says he will not stop until the family’s demands are met.
Uncle Ned wrote to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on the 18th anniversary of the NT Intervention to make the point that federal leaders have the power to step in.
He says, if leaders in Canberra can intervene to take away Indigenous people's rights, they can also act to protect them.
“We want the Prime Minister to say something, to stop this madness. It is disgrace to us,” Uncle Ned says.
“We can't live or walk in the street.
"We feel uncomfortable living in our own community, we cannot live like this in our own country.”
Doubly disadvantaged
Kumanjayi White had a cognitive disability and was living in Alice Springs because he needed access to a level of care not available on Country in Yuendumu.
The family wants to know how a young man with a disability and on a guardianship order came into contact with the criminal justice system again and again during his young life – including with time in jail on remand.
When the coronial inquest resumes, it will consider the broader circumstances that led to Kumanjayi White's passing.
First People’s Disability Network chief executive Damian Griffis says Kumanjayi White’s passing highlights that, if you are an Aboriginal person living with a disability, you are very likely to experience both racial discrimination and disability prejudice.
“And we need to change attitude dramatically,” Mr Griffis says.
“Police need to recognise that some people are very vulnerable.
"Some people may have difficulty understanding instruction because of their nature of their disability – that's not their fault; that's not their failing.
"It's on everyone else to accommodate people with disability.”
He says that often disability rights is framed as the last bastion of human rights.
“If we want to talk about people that are more vulnerable, extremely vulnerable to abuse and neglect, for example, it'd be pretty uncommon for an Australian with disability and for also First Nations people with disability not to have experienced abuse or neglect or some form of interaction with police that is gonna be very adverse," Mr Griffis said.
Shameful record
That adversity permeates jurisdictions around the country.
There have been a staggering 598 deaths of First Nations people in custody since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody in 1991.
Thirteen First Nations people have died in custody so far this year, according to the Institute of Criminology.
A 68-year-old NT man died in Royal Darwin Hospital two weeks after Kumanjayi White.
Other high profile cases include Dunghutti man David Dungay Junior in 2015. He had diabetes and schizophrenia.
He was held down in the prone position by five specialist prison guards in Long Bay prison in NSW.
They kneeled on his back as he died, despite Mr Dungay's repeated cries that he couldn’t breathe. No one was charged.
In Western Australia in 2008, Ngaanyatjarra Elder Mr Ward spent four hours in a prisoner transport van being taken from Laverton to Kalgoorlie.
It was 42 degrees and the WA coroner said Mr Ward was effectively “cooked” to death.
The company that transported Mr Ward, G4S, the company that the Northern Territory recently entered into a partnership with for "court custody and escort duties".
Unfinished business
Australian Human Rights Commission President Hugh de Krester told Living Black that, 34 years after the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, Indigenous people are still dying in custody because a key recommendation has been ignored.
“The absolute key to reducing Aboriginal deaths in custody is reducing the over-imprisonment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people,” he said.
“We have the Closing the Gap commitments, we have governments around the country saying 'we're committed to this' but the rates are going in the wrong direction.”
He told Living Black that all governments, state, territory and federal, need to do more to meet their human rights obligations.
“The number one thing that governments need to do to stop that over imprisonment, is to pursue fair, effective criminal justice policies that address the reasons that people are coming into contact with police, coming into contact with the criminal justice system in the first place," Mr de Krester said.
“Those reasons are related to things like education, to healthcare, to supporting communities, to disability supports.
"Until we get that right, we'll continue to see over imprisonment.”
Education and healthcare
Damian Griffis says there are some tough lessons that all levels of government should learn from Kumanjayi White’s passing.
“There's still a very serious lack of fair and equitable access to the NDIS for our people with disability, and particularly those mob who are in regional or remote parts of the country," he said.
“The fact that he had to live off Country is a failure of the service system; a failure of the system to recognise that everyone should be entitled to live on Country and it's on the system to build the support so people can stay on Country.
“The fact that he was off Country a long way away from home, made him very vulnerable and that's another element of this that's wrong and very sad.”
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