Chris Hurley, the cop who was found by a coroner to have killed indigenous Palm Islander Mulrunji in November 2004, then later acquitted on trial for manslaughter, has come out of the affair with a tidy profit.
His police residence was burned to the ground in riots after Mulrunji's death, and he was given $103,000 ex-gratia by the Queensland police to compensate.
However, it turns out that the value of his household goods, as listed for his insurance company, was only $35,000, and he got that $35,000 from the insurance company.
He also got a third payout, from a public appeal organised by the Queensland Police Union.
After being suspended on full pay for a while after Mulrunji's death, Hurley was promoted. He is now seeking a new promotion. Queasy police bosses are blocking it, but the Queensland Police Union is backing Hurley.
At the time of Mulrunji's death and the subsequent riots, the QPU loudly defended Hurley. A personal friend of Hurley's was appointed as the police investigating officer on Mulrunji's death. QPU President Denis Fitzpatrick demanded the rioters be charged with attempted murder of 12 police.
The background is that roughly one person a month dies in custody in Australia, and indigenous Australians, only two per cent of Australia's whole population, suffer one quarter of the deaths.
According to a report by the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission in 1996, indigenous people were 16.5 times more likely than non-indigenous people to die in custody between 1990 and 1995.
A large part of the higher death rate correlates with the vastly higher rate of imprisonment for indigenous Australians. Mulrunji was locked up for being "a public nuisance", for nothing worse than being loud and maybe tipsy, and died - with broken ribs, and a ruptured liver and spleen - less than an hour after being jailed.
No cop has ever been convicted of any crime in relation to any of the hundreds of indigenous Australian deaths in custody.