The police officer who made a plan to arrest Kumanjayi Walker has denied the main reason she wanted the operation to start in the morning was so she could have a sleep, a court has heard.
Yuendumu’s Sgt Julie Frost also denied she deliberately withheld evidence, during heated cross-examination in the trial of constable Zachary Rolfe on Friday.
Rolfe, 30, is charged with murdering Walker, 19, in the remote community of Yuendumu on 9 November 2019. He has pleaded not guilty to murder and to two alternate charges.
Frost was the officer in charge of Yuendumu station, about 300km north-west of Alice Springs, when Walker was shot dead.
The Northern Territory supreme court has previously heard Frost requested officers from the immediate response team (IRT) to travel to Yuendumu on 9 November 2019 because of a series of issues within the community, and to assist in the arrest of Walker the following day.
Rolfe, three colleagues in the IRT, which handles high-risk arrests, and an officer trained to handle police dogs, arrived in Yuendumu from Alice Springs later that day.
Frost said she briefed the officers that they were to conduct high-visibility patrols of the community, familiarise themselves with the town, and gather intelligence on Walker, with a view to arresting him the following morning.
Little more than 15 minutes after the briefing, Walker had been located by the officers and shot three times by Rolfe. He died about an hour later.
Under cross-examination by David Edwardson QC, for Rolfe, Frost denied that in a conversation with Rolfe immediately before the briefing she told him the plan to arrest Walker the following day would allow her to have a sleep.
She agreed she wanted to rest after a busy period in the town, but that the morning arrest was a tactical decision designed to reduce the risk of a confrontation with Walker, who had threatened two police with an axe three days earlier.
When Edwardson asked if she had told Rolfe that she had spent much of the past three days locked in the police station, and therefore had no intelligence on where Walker could be, she said she had never told him that.
She also denied a suggestion by Edwardson that she had not printed copies of the operational plans for Rolfe and her colleagues, as she had said in evidence on Thursday.
Supt Jody Nobbs, who oversees policing in 11 remote communities in the southern desert region, including Yuendumu, also gave evidence on Friday.
He said that in a phone call with Frost on the morning of 9 November 2019, she told him she suspected Walker was responsible for a series of break-ins in Yuendumu, including at the house of the nurse in charge of the local clinic. The break-ins, which had not previously been reported to police, had prompted local medical staff to contact Frost telling her they planned to evacuate Yuendumu that day.
The evacuation of medical staff, a large funeral scheduled to take place, the spate of break-ins, and the need to arrest Walker were all mentioned by Frost to Nobbs as reasons for the request for more resources, including the IRT.
The funeral had been for a relative of Walker, and the court has previously heard that he had escaped from an alcohol rehabilitation facility in Alice Springs and removed an electronic monitoring bracelet as he wanted to attend.
Nobbs said he and Frost discussed arresting Walker at the funeral, but decided against it.
The court has previously heard Walker was shot by Rolfe after he pulled a pair of medical scissors from his pocket and brought them down in a stabbing motion into Rolfe’s left shoulder.
A colleague of Rolfe, constable Adam Eberl, then struggled with Walker, who was shot soon after by Rolfe. The first shot is not subject to any charges but the second and third shots, which the prosecution alleges were fired several seconds later from close range by Rolfe when Eberl had control of Walker, are the basis for the murder charge.
Edwardson has previously told the court Rolfe would defend his actions as being reasonable and justifiable in the context of the danger faced by him and Eberl. Edwardson said Rolfe was acting in self-defence, and to defend the life of Eberl, when he fired the second and third shots and his training emphasised that “edged weapon equals gun”. The defence also disputes that Eberl had control of Walker when the second and third shots were fired.
The trial before Justice John Burns continues.
