Coroner’s finding comes five years after acquitted policeman Zachary Rolfe fatally shot 19-year-old Kumanjayi Walker.
An Australian police officer who shot dead an Indigenous teenager was a racist drawn to “high adrenaline policing”, a landmark coronial inquiry has found.
Racist behaviour was also “normalised” in Zachary Rolfe’s Alice Springs police station, said the 682-page findings released in a ceremony in the remote outback town of Yuendumu in central Australia on Monday.
The findings were delivered five years after the shooting of 19-year-old Kumanjayi Walker, leading to protests around the country. But Rolfe was found not guilty of murder in a trial in the Northern Territory capital of Darwin in 2022.
Walker was shot three times during the attempted arrest in Yuendumu – one of 598 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who have died in custody since 1991 when detailed records began.
“I found that Mr Rolfe was racist,” said Northern Territory coroner Elisabeth Armitage, delivering her conclusions after a nearly three-year inquiry.
Northern Territory Coroner Elisabeth Armitage has handed down her Findings into the death of Kumanjayi Walker #auslaw https://t.co/4uAEzIkwhd pic.twitter.com/hNb6UPnDUT
— NT Courts (@CourtsinNT) July 7, 2025
Rolfe, who was dismissed from the police force in 2023 for reasons not directly related to the shooting, worked in an organisation with the hallmarks of “institutional racism”, she said.
There was a “significant risk” that Rolfe’s racism and other attitudes affected his response “in a way that increased the likelihood of a fatal outcome”, she said.
Walker’s family and community will always believe racism played an “integral part” in his death, the coroner said. “It is a taint that may stain the (Northern Territory) police.”
The coroner cited offensive language used in a so-called awards ceremony for the territory’s tactical police, describing them as “grotesque examples of racism”.
“Over the decade the awards were given, no complaint was ever made about them,” she said.
The policeman’s text messages also showed his attraction to “high adrenaline policing”, and his “contempt” for some more senior officers as well as remote policing. These attitudes “had the potential to increase the likelihood of a fatal encounter with Kumanjayi”, she said.
In a statement shared before the coroner released her findings, Walker’s family said the inquest had exposed “deep systemic racism within the NT police”.
“Hearing the inquest testimony confirmed our family’s belief that Rolfe is not a ‘bad egg’ in the NT Police force, but a symptom of a system that disregards and brutalises our people,” the family said in the statement shared on social media.
“Crucially, the inquest heard evidence backing a return to full community-control, stating what yapa have always known: when we can self-determine our futures and self-govern our communities, our people are stronger, our outcomes are better, our culture thrives,” the statement said, referring to the Warlpiri people, also known as Yapa.
Armitage’s presentation was postponed last month after 24-year-old Warlpiri man Kumanjayi White, who was also from Yuendumu, died in police custody in a supermarket in Alice Springs.
White’s death also prompted protests and calls for an independent investigation into his death.
