Five years ago thousands of Australians defied Covid restrictionsto pour on to the streets of our cities and townsas part of the global Black Lives Matter movement.
The protests here highlighted the appalling rates of Aboriginal people dying in police and prison custody. One death in particular became a rallying point: that ofDavid Dungany Jr, who died while being restrained, pleading that he could not breathe, in similar circumstances toGeorge Floydin the US.
The 26-year-old Dunghutti man, who had diabetes and schizophrenia, was in Long Bay jail hospital in November 2015 when five guards stormed his cell after he refused to stop eating a packet of biscuits.
Dungay, known to his family as Junior, was dragged to another cell, held face down and injected with a sedative. Inharrowing footagelater shown to the coroner and partly released to the public, Junior said 12 times that he couldn’t breathe before losing consciousness and dying.
Junior’s family – especially his mum, Leetona, and nephew Paul Silva – have since been catapulted into representing a movement whose ranks are continuously swelled by more grieving Aboriginal families, all of them forced to deal with alienating and opaque processes of police “investigation”, and coronial inquests that take years to get to court, more years to decide what happened to their loved ones, and then all the years after which nothing appears to change.
In Junior’s case, the coroner heard that medical staff at Long Bay had failed for periods up of up to eight minutes to perform basic CPR. They had then forgotten to remove the safety cap from resuscitation equipment, which came off in Junior’s mouth.
The inquest took four years for the coroner to find that while the nurse who administered the sedative might be referred to a professional standards review, none of the guards who restrained Junior should face disciplinary action as their “conduct was limited by systemic efficiencies in training”.
As we stood outside the court that day, an aunty asked: “How much training do they need to stop killing our people?”
On the streets in 2020, people held up placards with the number 432. At that time, it wasour best calculationof the number of Aboriginal people who had died in custody since the royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody in 1991.
New placards will be needed for this weekend’s rallies in protest at yet another death in custody, in anAlice Springssupermarket last week.
The number now stands at 597.
Kumanjayi White, a 24-year-old disabled Warlpiri man from Yuendumu died after being restrained by police in the confectionery aisle at theColessupermarket.
According to theNorthern Territorypolice assistant commissioner Travis Wurst, two plainclothes officers were in Coles about 1.10pm when they “were alerted to a confrontation” between Kumanjayi and a security guard.
After being restrained by the officers, Kumanjayi stopped breathing. He was taken to Alice Springs hospital where he was pronounced dead about an hour later.
Kumanjayi had disabilities and was living away from his community in supported accommodation.
His unnecessary death is a “tragic case at the intersection of disability and race”, the family’s lawyer, George Newhouse of the National Justice Project, told Guardian Australia.
The family, who are sadly experienced in navigating the nightmare world of police, media and the coronial process, have called for an independent investigation – meaning they want it to be conducted by anyone other than the NT police.
Given their years of deeply negative interactions with the NT police, it’s understandable.
This is the same police force thatshot dead the Warlpiri teenager Kumanjayi Walkerin Yuendumu 2019. The same police force in which Alice Springs officers, including those in leadership roles, were revealed at his inquest in 2022 to have exchanged racist, sexist and homophobic text messages. The same police force alleged to have used military-style tactics in policing, amid allegations of the use of excessive force. The same police force in which the TRG elite group, now disbanded, bestowed a racist mock-award known as the “Coon of the Year” on the officer who behaved “most like an Aboriginal”. The winner was given a club and made to wear a toga.
You can see why they might mistrust the outcome of that investigation.
The federal minister forIndigenous Australians, Malarndirri McCarthy, has said an independent investigation “may be warranted”. The NT Labor opposition leader, Selena Uibo, said she hoped it was “something that could be considered”.
But Wurst has already ruled it out.
The family has also called on the federal government to convene an Indigenous-led independent oversight body to supervise the investigation of First Nations deaths in custody as a matter of urgency.
And, “given the mistrust that exists between the family, First Nations community and the police, it is incumbent on police to show close family members the CCTV and body worn footage of the incident as soon as possible”, Newhouse told Guardian Australia.
The findings in the Walker inquest were due to be handed down in Yuendumu on 10 June. They will now be postponed while the community comes to terms with yet another senseless violent death involving the NT police.
Late on Tuesday a former Coles employee came forward to say he’d known Kumanjayi White and had seen him in the shop from time to time.
Gene Hill told the ABChe used to spot Kumanjayi wandering the aisles and would “simply go up to him and grab the products off him and just explain to him that it’s got to be paid for”.
He suggested that Coles hire more Indigenous staff with local language skills and better support Aboriginal shoppers with disabilities.
Also on Tuesday, Coles finally broke its silence on the matter. A spokesperson said the supermarket was “deeply saddened” and would assist police with their investigations.
Almost a week after Kumanjayi White’s death in the lolly aisle, it seems a thin response from a company proud of being “one of the largest private sector employers of Indigenous Australians”, according to its website and its reconciliation action plan.
One wonders what its chief executive and shareholders think of the optics of Coles now being permanently linked to an Aboriginal man’s death involving police.
As in 2020, rallies are being planned for this weekend in capital cities around the nation, to mourn the loss of another young Aboriginal person, to support another family devastated by the ongoing obscenity of carceral violence.
“This is gut wrenching pain. It is sickening. The kind that stops you form eating and keeps you up at night,” Samara Fernandez-Brown, Kumanjayi Walker’s cousin, said in a statement.
“I can’t believe this has happened again to a young Warlpiri nan, and I am so deeply saddened by the gross injustice of how Kumanjayi White was treated. Absolutely disgraceful.
“Has our community not gone through enough?”
Lorena Allam is descended from the Gamilaraay and Yuwaalaraay nations of north-western NSW. She is the industry professor of Indigenous media at Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education and Research at the University of Technology, Sydney