Nigel Gladstone reports for The Sydney Morning Herald
Details of the 57,500 times police recorded the use of force in the community between 2014 and 2018 have been released under freedom of information laws, detailing where, when ad the reasons that officers deemed the use of force necessary.
The state’s 16,800 police are required to record every time they draw a Taser or use force against a person in the Computerised Operational Policing System (COPS) database. There are more than 100 descriptions of events they can use, including “Public Mischief” and “Armed/Disguised With Intent”.
Using force is a necessary part of policing and does not indicate police misconduct.
NSW Police use an escalating series of options, including force to respond to a suspect’s behaviour.
Use of excessive force is one of the most common complaints raised by clients at Redfern Legal Centre’s police accountability advice clinic, head of the division, Samantha Lee, said.
“unfortunately, the cases we see suggest that some police are relying on the use of excessive force as routine procedure,” Ms Lee said.
“A common story is: police get called to an incident of threatened self-harm and they are asked to detain and convey the person to a mental-health facility,” Ms Lee said. “The person at the scene is in a high state of distress and shocked when the police turn up on their doorstep. This is a situation that often escalates from verbal instruction to either physical restraint or sometimes the use of a Taser or firearm.”
Mental-health issues were the second most common category flagged by officers when self-reporting use-of-force incidents. Officers responded to 243,181 mental health related events between 2014 and 2018, using force about 5 per cent of the time, in 13,394 cases.
“NSW is becoming increasingly reliant on police responses [to mental health issues] rather than support or treatment in a health setting,” a spokesperson for the NSW Police Association said. “NSW spends less per capita on community-based mental health care than any other state or territory.”
Read the full article here (The Sydney Morning Herald, 24 September 2019)
