NT Police chiefs face calls for confidence vote

The NT Police Specialist Services unit has become the third police faction directing their union to hold a ballot to determine member confidence in the police commissioner and one of his deputies.

NT Police Commissioner Jamie Chalker. Picture: Glenn Campbell

The Northern Territory Police Specialist Services unit has become the third police faction to direct their union to hold a ballot to determine member confidence in the police commissioner and one of his deputies.

The Specialist Services unit – which includes the Territory Response Group, Air Wing, Water Police, Dog unit and Intelligence unit – has called on the Northern Territory Police Association to hold a Territory-wide ballot to clarify whether frontline officers still have confidence in their Commissioner, Jamie Chalker, and Deputy Commissioner, Murray Smalpage.

About 40 police officers from those specialist sections attended the March 24 branch meeting in Darwin where they unanimously passed a motion for a ballot.

This comes after about 60 police officers who attended a union branch meeting at Palmerston, near Darwin, on Wednesday voted in favour of the ballot.

About 30 police officers in Alice Springs unanimously passed the same motion at their second branch meeting last week.

Rank and file officers have been pushing for the ballot since Constable Zachary Rolfe was last month acquitted of murdering Indigenous teenager Kumanjayi Walker at Yuendumu in November 2019.

On verdict day, The Australian revealed that within 36 hours of Constable Rolfe fatally shooting Walker, senior Territory police were preparing to charge the young policeman with murder, alarming experienced detectives who were working on the case. Within a fortnight, the Northern Territory ­Independent Commissioner Against Corruption launched an investigation, now under way, into why the murder charge was laid with such “abnormal” haste.

Rank and file officers are now voting at union branch meetings in an attempt to trigger a Territory-wide ballot.

But many of the Territory’s dozen union branches need to pass the motion ­before NTPA president Paul McCue will take the issue to its conference in ­August.