4 days ago
Reconciliation Week feels particularly hollow after another death in custody
In Australia's centre, a young Aboriginal man is held down by police officers in plain clothes on the floor of the confectionary aisle in Coles in Alice Springs.
There is much we don't know, and may never know, but several important pieces of information are apparent.
Kumanjayi White, a vulnerable young Warlpiri man with a disability, is dead in Reconciliation Week, at 24 years of age.
Another seismic trauma for a family already in agony.
NT Police say Kumanjayi White had put items down the front of his clothing at Coles, when he was confronted by a security guard on Tuesday.
In a town where impoverished Aboriginal people live hand-to-mouth, Indigenous disability advocates have questioned whether he was hungry, and how a young man on the NDIS could have ended up dead on the floor of a supermarket.
Damian Griffis from the First Peoples Disability Network says his death is devastating.
"We're talking about some of the most vulnerable people in Australian society.
"First Nations people with disability experience intersectional discrimination based on race and ableism, and too often they are treated as criminals when they should be supported."
Police will conduct an investigation into his death. The Indigenous Australians Minister Malarndirri McCarthy suggested she'd like to see a probe take place independently — NT Police "respectfully" told the minister it didn't want the inquiry to go to an external body.
The relationship between NT Police and Warlpiri elders was already shattered after the high-profile death of Kumanjayi Walker, a 19-year-old man who was shot dead in Yuendumu in 2019.
Now the community has another young man to mourn. The NT coroner was due to hand down her findings of the inquest into the death of Kumanjayi Walker in 10 days.
It has been one of the longest-running coronial investigations in Australian history, with a focus on systemic racism in the police force.
Kumanjayi White's grandfather, the well-known elder Ned Jampijinpa Hargraves, described his community's devastation at seeing his "jaja" (grandson) become another Aboriginal man to die in custody.
Add his name to the list of hundreds of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who have died in custody in the past three decades.
Young men and women with unrealised dreams and loved ones left behind.
Frequently these mob have been in and out of the care of the state since birth, often parented by cold, hard systems which re-traumatise the grandchildren of survivors of the Stolen Generations and the assimilation era.
The cases are each unique and tragic in their own way: they have been shot in the dead of night, ignored while they screamed out in pain, dismissed by medical staff, restrained and left unsupervised in jail cells.
The pipeline from cells for teenagers to prisons for grown men is often pre-determined.
On an average day in Queensland, 70 per cent of young people in prison are Aboriginal.
In the NT, prisons are almost exclusively full of blackfellas.
This week, Yawuru elder and the former Labor senator Pat Dodson decried Australia's Aboriginal youth justice crisis as an ongoing genocide and an "embarrassing sore".
He knows better than anyone what has led to so many Indigenous people coming into contact with police and prisons.
A commissioner for the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, he played a role in the seminal investigation which found "a familiar pattern of state intervention into and control of Aboriginal lives."
The commission meticulously examined the stories of the Indigenous people who had died, finding they had lived life pushed to the margins, and, crucially, had come into contact with police and prisons frequently.
From 1991 until now, we're in the sorry and shameful position of seeing hundreds more die in similar situations.
Almost 35 years on, not one single government has felt compelled to properly reckon with the Black deaths inquiry and its broad recommendations to revolutionise the way in which First Nations people are treated in this country.
Police reform would be a start. No state or territory leader has dared question whether police forces — with barely any Indigenous officers in their ranks — are capable of properly serving First Nations people who live with high levels of trauma.
The South Australian Police Commissioner had the courage this week to admit that police are ill-equipped to attend mental health crises.
Indigenous people often live with a disability, a fear and lack of trust in authorities, mental health conditions and a history of institutionalisation.
What's the media's role in drawing attention to deaths in custody? This man's death has barely raised an eyebrow in many publications.
Crime waves plaster front pages and lead stories on TV news bulletins leading to swift policy change from state and territory governments — new prisons, weapons bans, bail laws, 'Adult Crime, Adult Time'.
What about the Black victims of the residual effects of mass human rights abuses gone by? They cannot expect detailed media coverage, seismic policy change or bold leadership.
It's never come. The blueprints are there, and so are the well-publicised governmental agreements to do better. It's two steps forward and two steps back.
In New South Wales, for example, the Minns government signed a major agreement to close the gap, but it also toughened bail laws to the despair of the Aboriginal Legal Service.
The ALS says Aboriginal children are now being locked up in remand for minor crimes that would never attract jail sentences.
Ask Yorta Yorta and Ngarrindjeri lawyer Nerita Waight, the Chief Executive of the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service, why justice reform for Indigenous people has never come and her answer is, "because it's extremely tough work to implement and sell."
"That's a long process, not a quick process. Saying you're going to change bail laws, putting more investment into prisons, those are easy decisions, quick fixes."
Every single day, dozens of Aboriginal people are arrested in Victoria alone.
"We're seeing people picked up because they're stealing food because they can't put food on the table. They're treating mental illness through substance abuse because there's no adequate mental health support.
"We're talking [about] people with intellectual disabilities," Nerita tells me.
The problems that have led to vast numbers of deaths are so complex, so multifaceted, that it is not credible to expect a few terms of government to solve them.
Yet it's almost 35 years since the Royal Commission into Black deaths in custody, and the country is so far behind, something must change.
Off the back of a highly charged referendum that has largely left Aboriginal communities with reduced political capital and attention, perhaps this is the issue that the prime minister could take up in his second term.
It seems unlikely, but Indigenous leaders across the country are mobilising, distressed at the sense that things seem to be going backwards, fast.
Aboriginal people are grieving another round of sorry business this Reconciliation Week — supposed to be a time for all Australians to consider their part in the enormous schisms between Black and white communities.
It feels particularly hollow this year.
