By Carey Joy, former NT Police Immediate Response Team leader
OPINION: The recently announced decision to investigate a senior detective for allegedly perverting the course of justice in the Zach Rolfe criminal investigation is a good first step, but the culpability of senior officers – some of whom have been promoted to the executive – over the deployment of the Immediate Response Team to Yuendumu that led to the fatal shooting of Kumanjayi Walker, also needs to be thoroughly and independently investigated, along with the criminal investigation, to restore the public’s faith in the NT Police Force.
It is also crucial to restore the trust of the NT Police’s own members in their leaders.
I have detailed in multiple NT Independent opinion and analysis pieces that the response to the shooting has been a massive, targeted cover-up of a multitude of NT Police executive failures and lies. The truth has been reinforced by evidence that came out of Constable Rolfe’s Supreme Court murder trial – where we was found not guilty – the Kumanjayi Walker coronial inquiry, and the previously suppressed NT Police coronial reports into his death.
The main reason for NT Police members’ distrust and desire to leave the NT is directly related to how Constable Rolfe was treated and the manner in which staff involved in this extensive cover-up were treated.
I believe some senior managers have committed a number of potential offences, engaged in serious misconduct and shown high levels of incompetence. But none of these acts have resulted in any form of investigations, charges, disciplinary proceedings or even basic re-training efforts against these officers.
In fact, most of them have been promoted.
Political interference and the unlawful charging of Constable Rolfe
From the evidence we’ve seen of the investigation, I am of the strong belief the arrest of Constable Rolfe was unlawful. There was never sufficient evidence to substantiate a charge of murder. In the NT, like most other jurisdictions, the offence of murder requires pre-meditation – an intent – which clearly did not exist.
NT Police have the powers under provisions in the NT Bail Act to argue against bail being granted, which they could have done in the case of Constable Rolfe. However, an appeal against bail goes before the Supreme Court and NT Police would have had to provide evidence of the strength of the case.
This did not happen as the NT Police had no actual evidence to support a murder charge at that time.
So, what happened to executive members such as then-Commander Martin Dole (a qualified detective) and Detective Superintendent Kirk Pennuto, who performed the unlawful arrest? Not a single thing.
No investigation into this has ever been initiated. In fact, Mr Dole has since been promoted to assistant commissioner for regional and remote operations and is currently in charge of Southern Division.
On the morning of Constable Rolfe’s arrest. four days after the shooting, Supt Pennuto’s notes said it was necessary to urgently compile a mini-brief of evidence for the Director of Public Prosecutions, with no explanation as to why.
Later in the day, with no explanation given to explain his change of thinking, he stated he then had the belief Constable Rolfe should be charged. No more evidence had come to light in that time, just internal meetings with the DPP and senior police, including former police commissioner Jamie Chalker.
That seems to indicate he had just been given a direction from someone above him, and the actual reason behind it is questionable.
It was a case of an unfinished investigation file leading to the arrest and charging of an NT Police officer regardless of deficiencies and actual evidence.
Promotion to assistant commissioner after deployment failure
Then-Darwin Commander Travis Wurst oversaw the deployment of IRT to Yuendumu that ultimately led to the shooting death. He did it in complete non-compliance with all standard operating procedures and basic staff management safety protocols, which has been raised publicly. The same officer was presented with a copy of the standard operating procedures for the IRT during Constable Rolfe’s Supreme Court murder trial and was asked if he had seen the documents before.
“No, I’ve never seen this document before…,” he said.
It is because of Mr Wurst that the IRT deployed to Yuendumu without any form of planning, safeguards, management control or compliance with NT Police protocols for deployments and managing high-risk situations.
How can a senior executive in a Supreme Court trial, under oath, admit he had never bothered to read the rules surrounding the deployment of this team which resulted in a death? It was also revealed that Mr Wurst did not even type the offender’s name into the police database prior to this deployment to research what type of risk this person presented to his staff.
So, what was the outcome of this and what management procedures were put in place to remove this person from these positions or at the very least re-train him to ensure staff members and community member’s safety?
Not a single thing, he was then promoted to Assistant Commissioner of the Greater Darwin region and road safety and support.
Failure to deem Kumanjayi Walker a high risk – no injury plan
Associated with Mr Wurst’s failings in the IRT deployment is another major issue, which is now well documented. At no time were any risk assessments carried out at all prior to the deployment. The Pollock/Proctor police coronial reports and the criminal trial have clearly shown NT Police staff and independent assessors all deemed the deployment was significantly high-risk and that the IRT and Constable Rolfe should never have been deployed to Yuendumu in the first place.
Perhaps if Mr Wurst had actually bothered to read the standard operating procedures deployment guidelines, he would have realised the IRT protocols did not permit sending out the IRT in the manner that they were.
But taken further, and added into more general NT Police failings over a long period of time, the coronial report stated: “Once the IRT SOP [standard operating procedure] was ratified in 2017 it is apparent that strict adherence to the SOP was not maintained in several critical areas”.
The next most concerning issue we also learnt from the Supreme Court trial and those police coronial reports is that Kumanjayi Walker’s injuries were potentially survivable had the remote health clinic staff been in the community.
Trained police officers with tactical backgrounds or with knowledge of high-risk management should be aware that a medical plan and injury action plan is part of basic deployment plans which must be approved before deployment to high-risk situations.
This means that had Assistant Commissioner Wurst read the SOP document and complied with the deployment regulations, a plan would have been in place to respond to a staff member, civilian or offender being injured.
This could simply include having an ambulance crew stationed within the Yuendumu police station for the duration of the weekend as all staff knew that prior to the deployment that the NT Government had evacuated all medical staff from the community due to unrest and violence and staff safety concerns.
As we have seen from the deployment, the IRT weren’t even given a first aid kit or satellite phone when they were sent to the remote community some 300km away from Alice Springs to locate and arrest a known violent offender.
Evidence of senior detective interfering with evidence, interfering with witness
One of the most concerning events throughout the investigation is that then-Detective Sergeant Wayne Newell was tasked to source an overseas use-of-force expert to complete an independent review to support a charge of murder against one of his colleagues.
This, it was claimed, was done because there were no Australian use-of-force experts who were willing to provide any such report. That’s because many with knowledge of the incident did not agree that this circumstance constituted a criminal offence at all, let alone a murder charge.
We have now seen that this detective, whilst sourcing the use-of-force report from Professor Geoffrey Alpert, emailed and called him in the United States, asking him to add to and alter his report.
As we have now seen, this has the potential to be seen as interfering with evidence, interfering with witnesses, and perverting the course of justice, which the NT Police this week confirmed Snr Sgt Newell is being investigated over.
There is no way Mr Chalker can claim he had no knowledge and no part in this course of events as he would have approved the interactions and the release of taxpayer funds to secure these reports.
The total payment to Prof Alpert was later publicly disclosed through an NT Government tender that showed he was awarded a three-year contract with the NT Police Fire and Emergency Services with a total pay packet of $99,750 in taxpayer dollars.
Now surely the current investigation will also look into the use of public monies to obtain these documents which were altered at the request of the investigators.
Who would suspected criminality be referred to?
Newell was promoted to Detective Senior Sergeant and later again promoted by Mr Chalker to head up the very powerful Special References Unit. It is unclear what his present status is after the investigation was confirmed.
The current mandate of the SRU is to investigate offences and misconduct committed by NT Police executive staff members.
Under section 35 of the Coroners Act, a coroner may report to the Commissioner of Police and Director of the DPP if the coroner believes that an offence may have been committed in connection with a death or disaster investigated by the coroner.
So let’s assume here that Coroner Elisabeth Armitage – who is running the Kumanjayi Walker inquest – refers any senior police officer’s actions as she may be legally required to do.
If Mr Chalker was still in control, and the coroner identified any possible offences, I am confident the necessary investigations and consequences would not flow, because a large portion of them would relate to multiple executive police members’ conduct.
The offences would also be referred to the SRU which, as I pointed out, was most recently being managed by Senior Sergeant Newell.
Police suppression of evidence, more altering of evidence
In giving evidence to the coronial inquiry, former superintendent Scott Pollock, who was running the coronial investigation, said former assistant commissioner Nick Anticich, who was the man in charge of the criminal investigation, kicked him off the investigation in November 2020 and shut it down temporarily. Mr Pollock had made findings that undermined the criminal case against Constable Rolfe. It is understood they were forced to start it up again at the demand of then-coroner Greg Cavanagh.
As the NT Independent recently reported, after Mr Pollock was taken off the investigation, Commander David Proctor, who was put in this place, substantially altered the report to remove many of Pollock’s findings, including an entire section on the investigative bias against Constable Rolfe during the criminal investigation, training failures at the police college, failures by the senior officers responsible for deploying the IRT to Yuendumu and the policing culture in Alice Springs.
Much was added back in after the NT Police executive learned Rolfe’s defence team had discovered the existence of that Pollock report.
Which brings us to the fact the NT Police had suppressed the existence of it, not making it available to Constable Rolfe and his legal team, who were only made aware of it after a tip off. It was not disclosed before Constable Rolfe’s committal hearing.
When subpoenas were issued by Rolfe’s lawyers for access to the draft reports, Justice Dean Mildren said the NT Police’s “failure to provide” the documents to Constable Rolfe’s defence team and possibly the DPP “may have caused the trial to miscarry”.
“Worse, if the documents are never revealed, it may be that an innocent person has been wrongly convicted,” Justice Mildren wrote in his decision.
There are very serious questions that arise from all of this.
Who told Mr Anticich to shut down the coronial investigation?
Who told him to kick the well-respected Mr Pollock off the investigation?
And who suppressed its existence from the Rolfe team?
Further, who told The Australian in early 2020 that he was confident the criminal case would withstand “every oversight”, including criminal court proceedings?
Draining the swamp
The above serious examples, are only a few of what has been discovered and highlighted throughout this highly questionable campaign, and one would surmise, this will be an amazing book when Zach Rolfe has completed his legal requirements with this tragic event.
These, and many other reasons are why Acting Police Commissioner Michael Murphy, or whoever becomes police commissioner, must “drain the swamp”, and remove the weeds in order to restore faith within the police force, or full trust and success will never be achieved again.
The police force itself has seen the worst phase in its entire history with unethical and ego-driven leadership which saw the absolute demise of staffing levels, destruction of community faith, multi-million dollar losses to our community, record NT Police suicide rates, and a very deliberate agenda of division between Indigenous and other Territorians.
We all observed the vote of no confidence against Mr Chalker, which happened for the first time in the history of the NT Police force. The then-NTPA president Paul McCue labelled these votes as surveys, but we all know exactly what these were.
Our force endured the highest level of deliberate and targeted attacks on general duties staff, as well low and medium-level management, in order to remove all senior members who had knowledge of the executive’s backgrounds.
Our entire Territory watched as those who followed the clear direction of the NT Police executive to throw Rolfe under the bus with the murder charge were promoted or transferred to a desirable posting.
Anyone who objected to this was investigated, disciplined and either fired, or they removed themselves on sick or stress leave.
The majority of the attacks on lower-ranking members involved targeting those involved in the Yuendumu shooting, or those who had contacted Constable Rolfe, and focused on potentially unlawfully obtained “racist” text messages that were exchanged.
Interestingly, Mr Chalker himself defended NT Police who threatened Indigenous youth in custody in Alice Springs in December 2020.
“Anyone else want to be fucking smart? I’m right in the mood to fucking lose my job tonight and I don’t mind losing it over belting the fuck out of one of you little cunts. Do you understand me? Good. When you’re given an instruction, you follow it and that’s it,” were some of the comments made by an officer to a young Indigenous man that Chalker defended.
This was the former commissioner’s response: “Policing is an incredibly hard job and that’s a snapshot of where sometimes we don’t always get it right, but I’m not going to throw anyone under the bus here”.
If only Mr Chalker had kept his word and applied the same level of respect towards his staff throughout the Yuendumu fatal shooting investigation.
Many police do not trust the leadership. This is because, as anyone involved knows, when Mr Chalker made these comments defending racism he knew of those potentially unlawfully obtained private text messages from Constable Rolfe’s phone sent by some of his own staff who he intended full well to “throw under the bus” in the very near future.
Those officers were going to be the centrepiece of the coronial inquiry to try and show racism caused Kumajayi Walker’s death, not the serious failings of high-ranking officers – failings the executive tried very hard to suppress.
It would help to try and make up for Mr Chalker’s personal humiliation with the murder charge acquittal, and “prove him right” somehow, and show that the “truth” he had often talked about had come out. These are the beliefs of a distorted mind.
Record amounts of NT Police members left their job during this period of unethical management. Record amounts still remain on sick leave. Morale has been destroyed.
It seems executive staff however, have been allowed to conduct themselves in any manner, without any form of discipline, or reprisals or even re-training.
We even saw Deputy Commissioner Murray Smalpage live on Facebook joking about the collective noun for NT officers being a “murder”.
And then there were the claims of multiple executives having sexual affairs in the NAB headquarters with another general duties’ member’s wife.
Yet they were allowed to quietly resign after evidence provided by the woman’s husband on their NT government work phones showed their denials of the affair were blatant lies.
Both executives were subsequently allowed to resign with no comment.
One was immediately transferred to another high paying government executive job as his so called punishment.
Not exactly meeting the expectations of the community or the officers who used to take pride in serving the Territory through the once-proud NT Police Force.
Carey Joy was recruited by the NT Police in 2000, and has worked in general duties, remote postings, the drug squad, juvenile crime, social order response, and in general crime whilst in the drug squad. His career was spent largely in the Territory Response Group, and working as a senior bomb technician. Mr Joy was also a federal agent in the Tactical Response Team, which was a national and international police tactical group working on deployments around Australia and overseas. His last five years in law enforcement were in Alice Springs with the NT Police as a general duties shift sergeant and bomb technician for the Central region. Mr Joy resigned in May 2016, and started his own business to spend more time with his children.
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