NT police issue Glock 22, .40 calibre This Musical Dispatch from the Front is a guest post by my old—in both senses of that word—friend Frank Baarda,* a long-term resident of Yuendumu. Greetings, This is a tale of how IMHO the police should be and how it is. On our odyssey when we returned from [...]
NT Coroner Elisabeth Armitage at NT police HQ. Photo: Melissa Mackay, ABC In January 2012 Crikey published a piece I wrote ($) looking at the concerns expressed by an Aboriginal law and justice support group from the about-as-remote-as-you-can-get NT community of Lajamanu—800 kilometres southwest of Darwin and 900 hundred north-west of Alice Springs—in reaction to [...]
Concerns about the Northern Territory Police triple-0 communications system have been around for a while. This is a re-post of a piece I wrote for Crikey in January 2012 on problems with police communications in a very remote community in the Northern Territory. To see how little has changed since that time see this piece [...]
We may never get to a “true” version of what happened on that dirt road forty-one years ago. Further crucial details may be found in the many thousands of pages of Court, Coronial and RCDIAC transcripts and the numerous submissions, statements, correspondence and exhibits used in those matters.
The neck is stretched out, the head thrown back, the legs straight and stiff. The fits are brought on or made worse by the slightest touch, sound or light. Finally, one dreadful seizure follows another, until they are continuous and death ensues.
It was late November 2010, one of those red-hot November days that only the Western Desert can turn on. Over six hundred people travelled for days from far and wide to bury young Jampijinpa at the small town of Nyirripi, a four-and-a-half hour dusty drive west from Alice Springs on rough dirt roads.
It is a matter of some sadness to the Court to have been involved in a matter which has so many unsatisfactory and unsavoury actions of the police force of the Northern Territory ... It may be that the defendant can be described as a serial pest. He may be provocative and cheeky and a trouble causer. He is 19 years old. He is not Jack the Ripper.
“We must remove white police from the aboriginal reserves – and we must tell the black man: 'Don’t you leave your reserve all you will be subject to the white man’s law'. David Jennings, November 1978
“The black of Australia, the full blood or the tribal black, is being led to believe by the Governments, by the half-caste city dweller that has only seen pictures of settlements and by organisations like Legal Aid et cetera, that he had a rightful place in the white community. “Nothing is further than the truth. Who wants included in our society, illiterate, unclean, drunken bludgers, who cannot even sign their names on the Government checks, who is allowed to sign those checks with the cross because he’s too lazy or too ignorant to learn even to write his own name."
"Territory Ku Klux Klansman, David Jennings, has been advised by his American counterparts on how to use even an unwilling press to get his message across. David Jennings resigned from the Northern Territory Police Force last week, one day before he was due to face internal hearing on charges relating to claims of Ku Klux Klan activity in the Territory."
