Ex-NT cop Carey Joy says racist, homophobic slurs commonplace on the beat

The former sergeant told the inquest he remembers ‘a former Police Commissioner and Deputy Commissioner who both regularly engaged in racist, offensive commentary’.

Former NT Police Sergeant Carey Joy outside the Alice Springs Local Court this week during an inquest into the death of Kumanjayi Walker. Picture: Jason Walls

Police in Alice Springs in the early 2000s were so prolific at locking up Aboriginal people senior officers distilled the practice into a pithy idiom — “if they are black, they’re in the back”.

The revelation is contained in a 15-page statement by former cop Carey Joy tendered at an inquest into the police shooting death of Kumanjayi Walker and released by the Territory Coroner on Friday.

In it, Mr Joy says during his 17 years in the force up until 2016 “not a week would go by” without hearing “what the general public would describe as racist, offensive or homophobic” remarks.

“In my first year, I heard a term which has always stuck in my mind from a senior member who said to a group of us get out there and ‘if they are black, they’re in the back’, referring to the fact that our shift had reports of intoxicated Indigenous persons all through the CBD,” he said.

“This would indicate we need to get out there and locate as many protective custody episodes and put them in the back of a police car to move them on.”

The statement follows revelations from the inquest that the force’s elite Territory Response Group handed out “c--n of the year” awards to its members, but Mr Joy said racist comments were “commonly made” by officers “across the organisation”.

“I recall as a probationary constable being told by our supervisors if I felt the need to say inappropriate things and vent, it was to be done within the station or in private among colleagues and not in public,” he said.

One of the now infamous ‘nuggadah’ awards handed out within the TRG.

“I recall times in the drug squad around 2002-3 I was in the office with colleagues that included peers who went on to very senior positions in NTPF, a former Police Commissioner and Deputy Commissioner who both regularly engaged in racist, offensive commentary”.

Mr Joy also raised what he described as another “inherently racist” practice, of Aboriginal Territorians being transported from remote communities in paddy wagons.

He said Indigenous people were “so accustomed to being in the back of metal caged police vehicles” they “don’t ever raise this as an issue”.

“If I was to say, for example, advise an educated caucasian from another major city that I was placing them in the back of a 4WD vehicle, locked in a metal cage, with metal bench seats, no seatbelts, no airbags and I was going to travel with them in there at speeds of 100km/h on rough, non-maintained, dirt roads, I could guarantee some form of legal challenge,” he said.

“The day we have a police vehicle accident on one of these roads, the caucasian police drivers get out without injury as they are in seatbelts, surrounded by airbags, yet the two Indigenous persons in custody in the metal cage did not survive, there will be an absolute outrage and serious questions to answer.”