Authorities Continue in Refusal to Disclose Circumstances Surrounding First Nations Death

The 27 November 2025 marked six months since Kumanjayi White, a 24-year-old Warlpiri man with disabilities, had his life cut short by two plainclothes police officers in Alice Springs Coles, and while the internal Northern Territory police investigation brief of evidence was handed to the NT Director of Public Prosecutions in September 2025, the young man’s family has been left in the dark.

White was restrained by the officers in a supermarket in Mparntwe-Alice Springs. The young man was restrained to death. Despite his family’s request for transparency around the investigation and the CCTV footage, they’ve been told nothing. And the officers involved in the killing are still on duty.

“They are still treating us like the flora and fauna of this country,” Kumanjayi White’s family said in a statement last week. “They are just bypassing our requests. We aren’t being treated like human beings.”

Kumanjayi’s grandfather Warlpiri elder Ned Jampijinpa Hargraves added, “Tell us what happened. Stop beating around the bush. We are sick and tired of your lies.”

The family has been clear on its demands from the start. The police involved in Kumanjayi’s death should be stood down. The investigation should have been conducted independently. The CCTV footage should have been released. The family would also like an apology for statements that denigrated Kumanjayi immediately after the incident. However, the authorities have ignored all this.

Kumanjayi was living away from home, the remote community of Yuendumu, in assisted state care in Mparntwe, at the time that his life was taken. Yuendumu has a population of 870-odd people. In November 2019, an NT constable shot and killed another young Yuendumu man named Kumajayi. On that occasion it was 19-year-old Warlpiri Luritja teen Kumanjayi Walker.

Indeed, not only are the two officers acting in the capacity of NT law enforcement officers at present, but one of them is NT police prosecutor Steven Haig, and in an exceedingly deplorable arrangement, he’s been involved in the prosecution of Kumanjayi’s father over this period, on an unrelated matter.

Two tiers of justice

“We know that if an Aboriginal person had done this, they would be behind bars,” said Uncle Ned in a late October statement. “We want parumpurru – Justice. It is sacred. Kardiya — white people — don’t respect it. But we respect it, because parumpurru is the truth. We are still fighting a bunch of rlinjirrpa — aggressive bullies. We’re not getting any truth from the colonial system.”

“For the last six months, I haven’t heard from them… they haven’t got back to me about many things, the other things that I wanted to ask about [included] the CCTV and [an] independent inquiry,” Hargraves told the ABC recently. “That hasn’t been given to me, nobody [has] come forward to tell me that.”

The office of the NT DPP did have time, however, to speak to the national broadcaster. A spokesperson advised that the director has requested more evidence from NT police in respect of the incident. Then a complete assessment of the evidence can be made, they insisted, which will lead to a decision on whether charges will be laid against the officers involved.

Lawyer representing Kumanjayi’s family the National Justice Project’s George Newhouse recently said that “the ongoing delays and uncertainty are eroding what little faith the family has in our legal system”, and he added that “how the police and the DPP have handled this situation is another example of how the colonial justice system fails First Nations people”.

Australian Lawyers Alliance spokesperson Greg Barns SC put to the ABC that a small organisation like the NT police investigating itself in relation to such an incident had the potential to undermine community trust, and he suggested there was no reason officers from other jurisdictions shouldn’t have been involved in the inquiry and it was certain that the family ought to have been kept updated.

This is Australia

That Kumanjayi White is the second young Warlpiri man from Yuendumu to have recently had his life taken during a death in custody incident involving NT police, has obviously heightened sensitivities around this matter. As for confidence in the NT policing agency, well, this was gravely shattered by the coronial inquest into the death of Kumanjayi Walker.

In handing down her damning report into the police killing of Walker midyear, NT coroner Elisabeth Armitage found that former NT police constable Zachary Rolfe had directly shot the teenager in the side of his ribcage twice, whilst his partner was on top of him, as he was lying on the floor of a family member’s house after he’d been first shot in the back.

The nation stopped for a moment as Armitage delivered her findings, outlining that Rolfe was a racist, who “was the beneficiary of an organisation with all the hallmarks of institutional racism”. So, over his mid-to-late 20s, Rolfe ran wild as he worked for the NT police. He routinely dehumanised and brutalised Aboriginal men and boys. And the fault lies both with him and the institution.

However, Rolfe had been acquitted by an all-non-Indigenous jury in March 2022. The officer had been charged with a sliding scale of offences. Rolfe was primarily charged with murder, but if that wasn’t proven, manslaughter was the backup offence, and a third option to fall back on, the offence of violent act causing death, had also been available.

The tensions in the NT caused by racialised policing have been exacerbated ever since the August 2024 election of the Country Liberal government run by NT chief minister Lia Finocchiaro, who is also the police minister. Following delivery of the inquest, Finocchiaro stayed silent for two weeks, prior to deriding it as expensive and drawn out and calling for an overhaul of the coronial system.

The disparities involved in the NT justice system were in stark relief in September, when local white man Jake Danby was up on a charge of hit-and-run causing death, after he’d run down two Aboriginal men outside a Garramilla-Darwin shopping mall and killed one in June 2024, as the 24-year-old nephew of the NT attorney general was then sentenced to a 12-month community correction order.

An unjust system

The silence in the wake of the police killing of Kumanjayi White, the second young man from the small remote community of Yuendumu in just six years, is all the more confronting when the fact that the institution that Armitage identified as a highly racist institution has been in charge of the investigation of the two officers involved in the incident is considered.

In the wake of Walker’s death, Uncle Ned Jampijinpa Hargraves launched the Karrinjarla Muwajarri campaign, calling for a ceasefire, in terms of police guns in remote Aboriginal communities, in mid-2022. However, such is the situation in the Red Centre that Hargraves has now lost his grandson, his jaja, to the same racially prejudiced criminal justice system.

“We want an end to this government and their policies that are locking up and killing our people. We are suffering,” the Warlpiri elder said, last month after his family had been given no updates by NT police or the local government five months after his jaja had been taken.

“We want the prime minister to take action and force them to change,” Uncle Ned continued. “We will keep fighting for justice for Kumanjayi White and all our people.”