Patrick Cumaiyi has been imprisoned for three years after pleading guilty to several charges, including assaulting two officers. But records indicate he was a victim of police brutality.
He was being flown to Darwin, the capital of Australia’s Northern Territory, to face a domestic-violence complaint. But before takeoff, an argument broke out. An officer delivered a sharp blow to Cumaiyi’s head with a metal flashlight, according to witnesses on board, then another officer dragged Cumaiyi headfirst onto the tarmac.
In places like Wadeye, this casual disregard for black lives is frighteningly common. The town, which can be reached only by boat or plane during the rainy season, is a world unto itself. Systemic racism and abuse often grow unchecked in remote hamlets like this one, where a white minority dominates the police, health care and other services for a population that is almost entirely Aboriginal.
Levitt said the evidence of a cover-up was clear: The official police account said nothing about the eyewitness reports that Cumaiyi was struck in the head with a flashlight and slammed onto the tarmac. A year later, David Dungay Jr., a 26-year-old Indigenous Australian with asthma, died in a Sydney prison cell after repeatedly telling officers he could not breathe.
Especially in places like Wadeye , scholars say, Australia’s colonial past cannot be separated from its present. The town, about 400 kilometres from Darwin, has been a tribal meeting place for thousands of years. But it is also a mission town where in 1935 a Catholic priest gathered 20 different clans to be “civilised”.
Two prisoners who were on the plane with Cumaiyi, Levitt said, insisted in separate interviews that a police officer hit him with a 2-foot metal flashlight.
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