I see constant interactions between Indigenous people and the police, most of them reasonably polite (and not thuggish like QLD/NSW/VIC cops very often are). However, their distaste for Indigenous people is often evident.

Yes, they do have an extremely trying job but that’s no excuse for this sickening video. Chappy is a lovely bloke who’s not violent and to film this sort of thing, to goad him into singing and saying happy birthday whilst watching with amused, arrogant contempt is disgusting. The police involved should be sacked, not merely ‘counselled’, whatever that means.

I have - at rare times - seen argumentative Indigenous people, but I’ve never seen violence towards police (I’m sure that it happens on occasion); to casually paint Indigenous people as inherently violent and aggressive, as some of the comments have, is reprehensible.

Indigenous people’s lives are so governed by white norms and strictures, enforced by poor old Constable Plod that it’s surprising the friction isn’t greater. There is however a very wide dislike of the police, engendered not just by the brutal and violent (not-so-distant) past, but by continued disrespect and arrogance.

Compare Indigenous attitudes to the police and the Indigenous-run Night Patrol services which, like the police, have a high level of involvement with intoxicated people. Night Patrol services are generally strongly supported and trusted and those working within them strongly committed to helping their people.

When I lie down with my goldie and labbie, I wake up … wait for it … an honorary dog. Please don’t perpetuate the constant and age-old insulting of dogs - as a species they are infinitely superior to the homo sapiens variety and in particular, the racist White Australian kind.

The video is sad, honest and cringe-worthy. Frankly, I’m ashamed of the cop who made it and posted it. But branding it racist simply because ‘Chappy’ is Aboriginal is the sort of knee-jerk reaction which helps no-one. I have seen more Aboriginal people intoxicated to that point than I ever care to remember, and yes many of them are aggressive, as the Country Liberal Party suggested. That is not an Aboriginal reaction, it’s a human one. The same can be said of all the fall-down drunk people I’ve dealt with, regardless of race.

What I find most interesting is Mr Graham’s insistence that all police mistreat Indigenous people, or support those who do. This is a hugely divisive and untrue claim to make. Police culture has changed dramatically in the past 20 years and this statement is not longer acceptable. We’ve worked hard to change.

Mr Graham, why is it so offensive for a white police officer to film a drunk man dancing and singing, but there is no problem with white police being called ‘fat white c-nts’ or ‘white dogs’? I witnessed appalling racist behaviour from the Aboriginal people of Redfern. An Asian man used to leave left-over food from his shop at the top of the Block for the residents, and every day he would be told to ‘go back to your own f-ing country, you slope’. Even as he was putting the bags of food on the ground. Funny how that never made the Koori Mail.

Mr Graham, go with the NT cops on patrol one night. Perhaps police culture has changed a bit more than you think. Perhaps racism isn’t as black and white as you think.

Saying that though, the moral highground claimed by the writer was thrown away with that last line - “if you lay down with dogs, you wake up with … white Australians.”

Both racist and inflammatory, I’m not sure how Crikey’s editorial let that one through.

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However there is no acknowledgement from Chris of the hard reality that many police, nurses, teachers, ambos and other people who give their service in aboriginal communities come to regard aborigines with clear and sometimes outspoken contempt. Either all people who enter those front line public services are racists when they join or their experiences with aborigines make them that way. I know which seems most likely.
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1) the whole premise of the article is that many white Australians regard Indigenous people with contempt - surely that is “an acknowledgment”?
2) maybe many do end with that contempt - but I’ve seen many people in those professions and others who start with no idea, continue with no idea and end with no idea, and blame all their own personal and professional failures on Indigenous people
3) many don’t end with that contempt, but leave with frustration at bureaucracies, dysfunctional organisations, ridiculous and unresponsive policy and with a deep and impotent sense of pity for community people whose lives are at the mercy of the whole Kafkaesque debacle of governmental machinery and the wider non-Indigenous refusal to engage with Indigenous people as human beings on their own terms.
To suggest that it’s “aborigines” fault that white people don’t like them is more or less saying Indigenous people are fatally flawed and have themselves to blame for our stupid incomprehension.

The “hard reality” is that non-Indigenous Australia would rather continue the status quo than look at itself honestly, admit a few faults, go out and get to know Indigenous people and start closing the gap in understanding of each other - and non-Indigenous people are a lot further behind in that than Indigenous people.