The supermarket is silent except for wails of grief.
A small procession makes a slow pilgrimage down aisle four of the Alice Springs Coles, where their loved one – a 24-year-old Warlpiri man with a disability – lost consciousness after being restrained by police. He later died in hospital.
Outside, the man’s grandfather, Warlpiri elder Ned Hargraves, addressed a crowd of hundreds from his mobility scooter.
“Enough is enough,” he said on Friday. “This cannot keep going.”
Five years after the Black Lives Matter movement promised a reckoning for racial injustice in Australia, the grim reality facing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people is eerily familiar.
In 2020, the nation was reeling from the fatal shooting of 19-year-old Kumanjayi Walker by Northern Territory police officer Zachary Rolfe in the central desert community of Yuendumu. Rolfe was charged with murder, butlater acquitted.
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This month, as the community braced for the findings of abruising two-year inquest into the death, they learned another young Warlpiri man from Yuendumu – now known as Kumanjayi White – had died after being restrained by police in the Coles supermarket in Alice Springs.
“We were looking forward to truly beginning our healing process,” Walker’s cousin, Samara Fernandez-Brown, said in a statement.
“You have thrown us right back to the start, reopening wounds that were just beginning to scab over.”
Police alleged White was shoplifting and said plainclothes officers stepped in after an altercation with a security guard. Hargraves criticised police for portraying his grandson as a criminal while the incident was under investigation.
Following the deaths of both young men, the family called for investigations independent of the police– a demand Aboriginal communities andseveral inquirieshave been making for decades. In White’s case, police“respectfully” rejectedthe request.
Rallies are once again being held across Australia in solidarity with Yuendumu. Their calls echo those made in 2020, when record numbers of protesters defied Covid restrictions to demand action to prevent Indigenous people dying in prisons or police custody.
At the time, Mililma May, a Danggalaba Kulumbirigin Tiwi woman, helped organise Darwin’s largest-ever protest.
“That was a historic moment for Darwin,” she says.
“It did feel like there was momentum, and most importantly, it felt like the community was empowered and activated and determined.
“I am extremely grief-stricken with the position that we’re at now, and how we went from bad to worse.”
The independent senator Lidia Thorpe, a Gunnai, Gunditjmara and Djab Wurring woman, is similarly scathing about the lack of progress since 2020.
“To see so many people show up was an act of solidarity … you would think that some change would have happened as a result,” she says.
“There’s a glimpse of hope and then that just gets taken away as soon as you have to deal with another death.”
The solutions to preventing Indigenous deaths in custody have been “sitting on the shelves” since 1991, says Thorpe, when a royal commission put forward 339 ways to stop them.
Three decades later, onlyabout two-thirdsof the recommendations had been fully implemented, according to a review described as“misleadingly positive”by academics.
One change has been the real time reporting of deaths through anonline dashboardrun by the Australian Institute of Criminology. It shows 34 people have died in custody this year – 10 of them Indigenous. Prior to this, Guardian Australia’sDeaths Insidedatabase was the only regularly updated source of information.
There have been other changes in response to tireless advocacy from families, but often with a caveat. Police in Western Australia agreed to train officers to use alternative restraints to the prone position, butrefused to banthe technique outright. Public drunkenness was decriminalised in Victoria, but the lawstook three yearsto come into effect. Spit hoods were banned in several jurisdictions, thenreintroducedfor Northern Territory children.
The core advice of the royal commission – to reduce the number of Indigenous people in prison – appears to have been ignored or disregarded entirely.
Despite signing a national agreement to close the gap in incarceration rates, states and territories have passed tough-on-crime measures that arelocking up record numbersof Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
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Nerita Waight, the chief executive of the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service, says governments prefer such “kneejerk, short-term solutions” over deeper, systemic reform.
“They would rather pursue popular votes and pander to conservative media narratives than actually show a modicum of leadership on the issues that affect Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people,” she says.
Former Labor senator Pat Dodson has condemned the gross overrepresentation of First Nations children in the youth justice and child protection systems asan ongoing genocide.
But while the calls for reform have only become more urgent, the level of public support appears to have waned.
At least 20,000 peoplemarched in Sydneyafter George Floyd’s death in the US. A snap vigil in the city on Sunday night saw about 500 people brave the winter chill to gather on the steps of the town hall.
“We have seen the numbers drop,” says Paul Silva, an organiser of both Sydney events.
“I’ll say it for what it is – people will tend to jump on the bandwagon when something is trending.”
Thorpe says between the yawning gap in Indigenous disadvantage and the war in Gaza, people are feeling “traumatised” and “helpless”.
“We’re kind of fatigued by genocide,” she says.
May attributed the sense of apathy to a rise in disinformation on social media; which became more prolific throughout the pandemic, the Trump era and the failure of the Indigenous voice referendum.
“The way that people were accessing news and information was really distorted and dictated by their algorithms,” she says.
“I think it’s emboldened the views of the right and the views of the racists.”
For grieving families, the fight continues.
Silva was 17 when his uncle, David Dungay Jr,died in Long Bay prisonafter being restrained in the prone position by guards. Harrowing footage of the incident, in which Dungay repeatedly says he cannot breathe, has been likened to the death of Floyd.
A coroner found the guards involved in Dungay’s deathshould not face disciplinary actionand the NSW director of public prosecutionsrejected the family’s callsto lay criminal charges.
After exhausting all other avenues, the Dungay family is still pursuing a complaint to the United Nations, in a bid to shine a global spotlight on his uncle’s death.
Now 27, Silva has become one of the loudest voices calling for justice through a portable speaker at Sydney’s protest rallies. He is planning another in the coming days.
The Dunghutti man regularly gets phone calls from distressed families whose loved ones have died lonely, violent deaths at the hands of the state.
“I sit on the phone and listen to them cry, and even cry with them,” he says.
“Deep down, I know that’s something that my uncle would really want, and that’s something he’s guided me to do.”
Indigenous Australians can call13YARNon 13 92 76 for information and crisis support; or call Lifeline on 13 11 14, Mensline on 1300 789 978 or Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636