Police in the remote central Australian community of Yuendumu created a detailed plan for arresting troubled Aboriginal teenager Kumanjayi Walker.

But a crack team of heavily armed officers from Alice Springs had other ideas, the Northern Territory Supreme Court has been told.

CCTV footage at the local police station shows Immediate Response Team members Constables Zachary Rolfe and James Kirstenfeldt arriving in the early evening of November 9, 2019.

“I found (Kirstenfeldt) to be very dominating. He tried to take over the conversation and would not listen,” Yuendumu’s senior police officer Sergeant Julie Frost said on Thursday.

She had prepared a plan to arrest Mr Walker about 5.30am next day when the 19-year-old was likely to be sleeping and easily apprehended.

“An early morning arrest like that is a far safer time. It gives the element of surprise,” she said.

Sgt Frost said Yuendumu police had a “huge resource problems” with too few officers and the IRT was primarily in town to give them a rest that night.

Rolfe, 30, and the three other IRT members were ordered to carry out a highly visible evening patrol in the community of 800 to deter ongoing property crimes.

“I wanted them to saturate the area around where all the unlawful entries had been taking place,” she said.

They were also supposed to escort medical clinic staff to jobs if required, familiarise themselves with the community and gather information about Mr Walker’s location.

Asked by the team, who arrived with an AR-15 assault rifle and shotgun, what they should do if they found Mr Walker, Sgt Frost said: “By all means, lock him up”.

They left the station at 7.06pm with a detailed map of the community, not Sgt Frost’s plan.

Fifteen minutes later Rolfe fatally shot the teen after he inflicted a minor stab wound on the constable’s left shoulder with scissors during an arrest attempt.

Prosecutor Philip Strickland SC has said the IRT ignored Sgt Frost and was “intent on arresting Mr Walker that evening”.

The first of the three shots did not kill Mr Walker and is not the subject of the murder charge Rolfe is on trial for in Darwin.

The charge relates to Rolfe’s second and third shots, which the Crown says were not legally justified.

They were fired when Mr Walker was on the ground with Constable Adam Eberl “effectively restraining” him with his right arm pinned beneath him, Mr Strickland has said.

Earlier the court heard the Yuendumu traditional owners tried to convince Mr Walker to give himself up to police in the days before he died.

On November 6, Mr Walker aggressively threatened two other policemen with an axe in Yuendumu, 290km northwest of Alice Springs.

They had been attempting to take him into custody at the home of his partner Rakeisha Robertson’s grandmother Lottie Robertson.

Body-worn camera footage shows Mr Walker picking up the axe, raising it above his head and running at the officers, who had cornered him in a bedroom.

He dashes past the officers out of the house and into surrounding bushland. 

Lottie Robertson says that after the “axe incident” her husband Eddie told Mr Walker to hand himself in.

“We tried very hard to talk to him,” she said.

“For cultural reason I was not able to talk to the young fella.

“He’s not a man of many words. He never spoke anything.”

But she did tell Mr Walker the axe incident was unacceptable after he came out of hiding.

“I told him to stop it because it was dangerous for him. He will get himself into more big trouble,” she said.

The trial continues on Friday.

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