NSW Premier Chris Minns defends force as release of confronting video puts police brutality in spotlight
One State premier has defended the system after footage showing a woman being assaulted by police while experiencing a psychotic episode was made public.
Police culture including how officers treat people suffering mental health episodes is under scrutiny again, but one premier insists it’s not a widespread problem.
Footage from 2023 showing two NSW Police officers bashing a schizophrenic woman who was having a psychotic episode has sparked condemnation after it was released to the ABC’s Four Corners program.
It showed Senior Constable Nathan Black and Constable Timothy Trautsch - who have both since been sacked from the force and jailed - pepper spraying 48-year-old Jodi Knott in the eyes and genitals, kicking her, stomping on her and dragging her by the hair.
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“It was shocking ... there’s no buts about it,” he told reporters on Monday.
“It was a terrible, terrible crime, and it resulted in the dismissal of the officers, charges being laid against them, and then them being sent to jail.”
Advocates say the shocking footage is not an isolated failure of individual officers, but symptomatic of a police force that does not treat people suffering from mental health episodes correctly.
The National Mental Health Consumer Alliance (NMHCA) said 52 people experiencing mental health crises were killed by NSW police officers in the five years to July 2023.
“The behaviour of these officers reflects a deeper discriminatory culture that criminalises and stigmatises mental health consumers, normalising the daily breach of our human rights,” an NMHCA statement read.
“Distress must be met with compassion and peer-led support, not criminalisation and physical force.”
Former officers Black and Trautsch were each jailed for at least three years for actions Judge Graham Turnbull described as “gratuitous cruelty”.
“There was no real attempt by the officers to speak with her, to pander to her, persuade her, dupe her, or control her without violence,” the judge told Penrith District Court in August.
“There was no attempt to engage with her in her disturbed state ... no offer to have a female attend to this naked disturbed female, there was no gentleness.”
NSW Police pointed to a statement given by then-Acting Commissioner David Hudson lashing the officers shortly after the incident.
“As a police officer of over 40 years this is one of the worst examples of contravening our core values and ethics I have ever seen,” he said.
“I’m very sorry for what the victim endured especially when it was at the hands of police officers who were called there to assist her.”
A recent notorious case involving NSW Police officers mishandling mental health cases involved the fatal tasering of 95-year-old grandmother Clare Nowland.
Then-senior constable Kristian James Samuel White fired his weapon after being called to Yallambee Lodge nursing home at Cooma in southern NSW early on the morning of May 17, 2023.
Mrs Nowland, who had symptoms of dementia, had taken two steak knives from a kitchen area and refused to give them up.
White was convicted of manslaughter by a NSW Supreme Court jury in November 2024, losing his job with the police force a month later.
In 2019, Todd McKenzie was fatally shot by tactical police while experiencing a severe psychotic episode.
An inquest found the death was preventable and urged police to alter procedures regarding mental health episodes.
