Kumanjayi Walker inquest: Senior cop Ian Nankivell denies text message slur ‘racist’

A senior NT police officer has been forced to deny he is racist, after sending a text message to a potential witness referring to the deceased offender by a non-racial slur.

Sergeant Ian Nankivell, who gave evidence at Kumanjayi Walker’s coronial inquest.

A senior Northern Territory police officer who used a non-­racial slur to describe Kumanjayi Walker says he employed the “terrible” term to describe all “bad” guys and it was not directed at Indigenous offenders.

A coronial inquest into Walker’s death on Thursday heard that Sergeant Ian Nankivell, who has spent most of his decades-long career policing in remote communities, texted Constable Mitchell Hansen the day after the fatal shooting, referring to the ­deceased as a “shit c...”.

“You were denigrating a young man who, for all you knew, Mitchell Hansen had watched die?” junior counsel assisting Patrick Coleridge asked him under cross examination.

Sergeant Nankivell said that was “definitely not” how he typically spoke about Aboriginal people who came into contact with police and that he was not proud of what he wrote.

“That’s a reference to any person who was perceived to be a bad person,” he said. “I made a horrible mistake to which there’s no coming back from. They were horrible words used. There’s no excuse. I apologise wholeheartedly to everyone affected.”

Constable Zachary Rolfe shot Walker dead during an arrest at Yuendumu on November 9, 2019. Last year he was acquitted of all charges related to the 19-year-old’s death.

His friend Constable Hansen worked with him in Alice Springs but was not involved in the Yuendumu deployment.

The court heard that on the morning of November 10, 2019, Sergeant Nankivell – then officer in charge at Wadeye – texted Constable Hansen the acronym DIAMO+P which is used to evaluate use-of-force incidents.

Sergeant Nankivell said he mistakenly assumed Constable Hansen had been “on the ground” at Yuendumu because he was also a member of the ­Immediate Response Team which had been deployed to ­arrest Walker. He said he sent Constable Hansen the message to help him process the traumatic event and provide support ­because the young officer was being posted to Wadeye police station a couple of weeks later.

Constable Hansen forwarded the text to Constable Rolfe.

Sergeant Nankivell on Thursday denied he was trying to provide the younger officers with a “tight, intelligent, legal defence” to use when they spoke to investigators or that he was trying to help them “legally justify or falsify their account”.

“I deny that emphatically,” he said. “I know that message was for Hansen as a private message. I had no intention for it to be sent to Rolfe.

“DIAMO+P is distinctly nothing to do with justification. It’s about mental health.”

Sergeant Nankivell also sent Constable Hansen a text saying the acronym would help him ­“answer his critics”. “That was more to do with the demons that you go through when you’re involved in a police incident such as that,” he told the coroner. “Your mind is in a world of fog.”

The veteran officer said he knew, from personal experience, how “highly traumatising” it was to be involved in a critical incident.

Sergeant Nankivell broke down when abruptly asked about the fatal police shooting of Allison Tully at Shepperton in 1994, which he had been involved in while serving with Victoria Police. “As soon as I heard about it (Yuendumu shooting), it brought back a flood of memories,” he said. “I was in a world of hurt myself.”

He told the court he would not apply for remote postings if he was racist. “You’re basically saying that I’m a racist person. That’s far from the truth,” he told barrister Andrew Boe. “I actually applied for the sergeant job at Yuendumu … I wanted to go out there and help these folk. And that’s God’s honest truth.”