First Nations Consultations For the Australian Human Rights Commission Appendix A Case Studies A.1 Justice Many First Nations communities face the adverse impacts of frequent interactions with the justice system and the resulting high rates of incarceration. This dates to the start of colonisation and the resulting racist policies and practices including being made to reside in missions and having their movement restricted. Lack of full citizenship until the 1967 referendum also meant First Nations peoples had limited rights or recourse to the law when mistreated by members of the public and police. There have been numerous documentaries and reports into policing and ingrained systemic racism for over 40 years. This has led to numerous initiatives and strategies at a state and territory level to attempt to address this issue. There are still regular reports of racial profiling and surveillance of First Nations young people and almost certainly this is driven by unconscious and conscious bias of officers and leads to over incarceration. Recently in the Northern Territory (NT), police officers were found to have established an informal, yet well organised awards program that racially denigrated First Nations people. These were exposed at an ongoing coronial inquest into the 2019 shooting death of Kumanjayi Walker by an NT Police Officer from the Territory Response Group (TRG). The evidence at the coronial inquest began in 2022 and has continued into 2024. It has brought to light a NT Police culture of using racist language and slurs. These were included in text messages shared between NT Police Officers as well as an unofficial awards ceremony with several certificates awarded with racist phrases. The language used in reference to First Nations people demonstrated a widespread acceptance of racist behaviors in the NT Police force as the NT Police Commissioner Michael Murphy admitted he had been aware of the awards for at least six months and hadn’t treated them seriously. The Independent Commissioner Against Corruption Michael Riches has also found that this was not an isolated incident, and the unofficial awards ran from 2007 to 2015. It took several weeks for the commissioner to admit his prior knowledge of the racist awards in May 2024. In response to the revelations, it was reported that the NT Anti-Discrimination Commission was urgently investigating the matter or conducting a review of systemic racism in the NT Police Force. The Commission released a statement in June 2024 saying this was false as the Attorney General and Minister for Police had not made available necessary resources for the review (NT AntiDiscrimination Commission, 2024). This clearly demonstrates the issue of under-resourcing of the necessary actions to address systemic racism within the NT Police. The NT Police Commissioner made an apology at Garma for a range of historical failings on NT Police in early August 2024. While this was well received by some as an acknowledgement of wrongdoing, for many it is more a public relations exercise until the next time. The NT police association also criticised the speech, saying they had no prior knowledge it was coming, and this led to commissioner Michael Murphy withdrawing his membership of the association. There have been consistent calls for the NT Police force to sack officers involved in this most recent racism scandal and Darwin Barrister John Lawrence says the commissioner needs to go further than an apology (see Backlash to NT Police Commissioner apology - ABC listen). It appears that many of the disciplinary mechanisms are of police investigating police with little or no substantial action and use of guidelines and systems that were designed for addressing corruption An Anti-Racism Framework: Voices of First Nations Peoples Page 61