Police shootings, mental health crises and the shattered families pushing for alternative first responders – Part 1
This is part one in a multi-part series investigating police responses to mental health calls and visions of alternative first responders. Yes, it’s long but we believe these stories deserve humanity, nuance and room to breathe. Regular news journalism rarely allows space for this kind of care.
Content Warning: This article discusses the topic of police violence, self-harm and mental health issues. Reader discretion is advised.
NSW police officers at the University of Sydney. Photo courtesy: Robbie Mason.
“How cooperative or non-cooperative were the police in the aftermath of Jesse’s passing?”
“Not passing,” Judy Deacon corrects, “death.”
“He didn’t really have the chance to pass away. It was a violent death,” Judy’s daughter, Lucinda, states.
How else do you describe a police shooting of a 43 year old man experiencing a mental health emergency, mere seconds after forcibly entering his home?
In July last year, Judy’s son, Jesse Deacon, was going through a mental health crisis at his new home in a public housing block in Glebe. At one point, he approached a neighbour and asked for a cig. He was not aggressive in any way. Jesse’s arm was bleeding and the neighbour, concerned he was self-harming, called an ambulance. But instead of paramedics, police arrived at Jesse’s home. He was holding a knife. One officer fired a taser, which failed to work. The other fired his gun.
Jesse died from the gunshot wound.
There’s fuck all point being delicate here. No amount of cotton wool can soften the jagged edges of this tragedy. With this kind of a state-sanctioned killing, there’s no time for family and friends to say goodbye. In the face of injustice, there’s no opportunity to grieve.
“Passing is a relatively new phrase in the last decade or so. It means people don’t have to accept reality,” Judy tells me. “He’s gone!”
Jesse’s death is a particular type of death – one that, in NSW, has left behind dense paper trails and prompted calls for a royal commission. It’s a pattern frequent enough that I haven’t had to chase up the statistics myself. I haven’t had to pour over published reports, press police departments for answers or make a formal GIPA (freedom of information) request. I haven’t had to shift into the skin of the sociopath news hound.
Over a period of four months last year, NSW Police shot and killed four members of the public with guns and tasers in remarkably similar circumstances. Their names are Clare Nowland, Steve Pampalian, Jesse Deacon and Krista Kach. They were all enduring mental health episodes or dementia that left them detached from reality.
Jesse Deacon. RIP.
Photo courtesy: Judy Deacon.
It was a particularly bad episode for NSW Police. But it wasn’t necessarily an anomaly. According to the Australian Institute of Criminology, almost half of fatal police shootings nation-wide involve people with some form of mental illness. Psychotic disorders, such as schizophrenia, are the most common underlying diagnosis.
In NSW, the issue has reached crisis point. Recent data shows that, across the last 5 years, 52 people in NSW have died as a result of interacting with police while experiencing mental health distress. It’s a steep increase from the 19 people who died in the same circumstances in the 20 years before this (1997 to 2017).
The problem is so severe that not only are health professionals and aggrieved families publicly demanding we make mental health workers the primary responders to welfare checks; some police representatives have now joined the chorus too. Sure, resistance to public scrutiny and cultural issues remains rife within NSW Police and they have actively obstructed the campaigns of families of police shooting victims seeking justice. But what makes Jesse Deacon’s case unique is that his mother, Judy, is working with the Police Association of NSW, the trade union for police officers. It’s ground-breaking and it makes the lack of change at the political level all the more mind-boggling.
Consider this: you or a neighbour of yours or maybe someone sleeping rough is experiencing an extreme psychological crisis. Who do you call? Who do you want attending the scene? It doesn’t seem like there’s much choice at the moment. There are some localised rapid-response programs which involve mental health clinicians as first responders but in NSW they’re far from statewide initiatives, and many people don’t even know they exist. If you’re worried about police escalating the situation or you’re aware that the race, class, housing status and mental illness of the impacted person substantially worsens the chances of a safe resolution – yes, this is statistically proven – what the fuck do you do?
* * *
Judy wants to make life easier for Australian residents. She wants to see the introduction of a nationwide ‘000’ mental health line. It means when you call 000 the operator will give you a fourth option – police, fire, ambulance and mental health. For now, it’s a vision dependent on a significant injection of federal funding and the building of new health infrastructure. But her demand has attracted widespread support and, irrespective of the feasibility of a 000 mental health line, the Deacon family want mental health workers to be instated immediately as primary responders to mental health crises.
“Police are 100% inappropriate in these situations,” Lucinda Deacon says.
It's little surprise therefore that the family doesn’t like the PACER pilot program. PACER, which stands for “police ambulance clinicians early response”, is a ride-along system funded by NSW Health whereby police and mental health practitioners jointly attend mental health calls.
But it’s far from a fool proof arrangement. Only a handful of police area commands in NSW actually have PACER mental health staff. Furthermore, those staff often only work 8 hours per day and they remain secondary responders, available via phone and only able to offer face-to-face support after police arrive. It means people who have a mental breakdown or psychotic episode late at night may not interact with a mental health worker, even if they’re located in an area with PACER workers, which is a very real hazard for night owls and stimulant drug-using communities.
Additionally, PACER mental health workers will not attend a scene where there is a weapon present – at least until police have de-escalated the situation, which is far from guaranteed. This is the case even when a knife is being used to self-harm, as happened with Jesse Deacon.
NSW Greens MLC Sue Higginson, an outspoken voice in this arena, concurs with Judy. She tells me that, while the PACER program is “promising”, it ultimately “does not go far enough” because “it still relies on police to lead what is fundamentally a health response”. Numerous community organisations – Justice Action, BEING and the Redfern Legal Centre, for example – share this stance. In a way, they’ve drawn a line in the sand, separating themselves from the perceived reformism of further funding PACER.
Sam Lee, senior solicitor at the Redfern Legal Centre, believes that “training police will not be the answer” to welfare checks on people with mental health conditions. “We need a whole new model and for police not to be at the forefront of that model.”
Those alternative models were a big topic of debate during the months-long proceedings of the NSW parliamentary inquiry into mental health accessibility which wrapped up in February this year. Trawl through written submissions and speaker transcripts and you’ll find a whole array of acronyms such as CAHOOTS, STAR and PSR. These acronyms describe overseas alternatives to police as first responders to welfare checks.
The CAHOOTS program, for instance, one of the longer-running examples at over 30 years of age, offers immediate short-term support to vulnerable people in Eugene (Oregon, US). When a dispatcher receives an emergency call, they have the option to send a CAHOOTS team of crisis workers and medics instead of police. Funded by the Eugene Police Department, this program mostly responds to welfare checks and provides transport to and from hospital emergency departments in their own van. The latter may seems like a trivial gesture but it’s a critical piece in the puzzle for treating mental ill-health as a health problem and not a criminal problem. Put another way: it’s a hell of a lot less stigmatising for a traumatised individual to be transported to a place of a safety in a non-police vehicle.
In recent years, the proportion of calls that have initially involved a CAHOOTS response and then police backup has hovered around a lowly 2%.
There are also examples of mental health workers as first responders closer to home. The ACT PACER program, for example, is slightly different in that police attend a mental health call in an unmarked vehicle with a paramedic and mental health worker, and no sirens blaring. Across Adelaide, meanwhile, paramedics and mental health work together without police involvement, attending mental health calls of low to medium severity. In the pilot phase of this “MH CORE” program, team members attended to 607 calls in central Adelaide and helped almost two thirds of those people receive treatment in the community, so the data is promising. These alternatives not only work but work well. They’re intended to pair struggling people with appropriate services and divert people away prison cells and emergency departments. This allows police to focus on policing issues. It also eases pressure on overworked hospital staff, reduces waiting times in emergency rooms and keeps mentally-distressed people away from a loud, fast-paced environment that is likely to increase distress.
“We don’t have to reinvent the wheel,” Judy says. “The solutions are already out there. Get police out of first response.”
While she once called for a royal commission into police responses to vulnerable people, she no longer seems so interested, telling me “that just means more meetings”. She emphasises that the recent Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System already made it clear that health professionals, not police, should lead responses to mental health crises.
* * *
When you’re staring down a drug-induced psychosis or spinning endlessly in a blender of suicidal ideation, it’s not just the cop shop you want to avoid. Unless absolutely necessary, the last place you want to experience is the sensory delights of a hospital emergency department (ED) and the last way you want to get there is in the back of a police paddy wagon. Arrive at an ED and human groans skirt the edges of your tunnel vision, taunting you. Heart monitors and alarms bleep in discordant tones like a Vaudeville ragtime piano tune. Pail skeletons saunter. Stretchers grind across linoleum floors, as paramedics and nurses rush past. Someone heckles the cops from the other side of the ward.
The sensory barrage is akin to entering a construction site. That’s no exaggeration. One recent Macquarie University study, which measured noise levels at various locations in the emergency department of an urban hospital in Sydney, found that noise peaked at 102.81 decibels in the ambulance bay. That’s equivalent to the sound of a construction site or a jackhammer. In the waiting area, noise reached 99.6 decibels. For context: health authorities recommend hearing protection for prolonged exposure to any noise over 85 decibels.
What’s more: people often wait in emergency departments in NSW hospitals for over 24 hours before seeing a psychiatrist, as a result of understaffing, underfunding for mental health services and poor pay for nurses and mental health workers in the public sector.
* * *
I’m sitting in the backyard of a Newtown terrace with Jesse’s family – his mother Judy, sister Lucinda and father. I’m not the one asking questions; the family is. Still.
While Jesse had his demons – as a teenager he was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, which causes hallucinations and delusions – he was highly sensitive, his family says, and always respectful. He was a musician who made friends with people from all walks of life.
“Gentle Jesse” is inscribed into the memorial book the family brought to his funeral service in the graveyard at Camperdown Memorial Rest Park in August 2023.
In the face of tragedy and horrific violence, activism can become a stable windswept outcrop in a heaving ocean. For Judy, this has become her purpose. In the rock’n’roll world where Judy comes from, you don’t rest on your laurels. You kick back. This is how she nurtures love amid the tempest. In the process, she’s become the public face of the campaign to end police involvement in mental health call outs. She’s a firecracker with flaming scarlet hair, and critical of those who aren’t on her side. But she also welcomes me into her home to chat. Not everyone is so generous to news reporters, even those that work outside the mainstream press.
“I’m not going to quit,” Judy tells me. “I’ve got nothing to lose. I don’t have to protect a job or worry about treading on anyone’s toes or crossing any boundaries.”
I quickly realise that Judy’s calendar bulges at the edges with conferences and meetings. Eyes and ears track her movements through boardrooms and sandstone walls like surveillance cameras. I can’t even begin to fathom how many times she has repeated herself including to me. “I want to be invited to every single panel,” she’s told me repeatedly in the time I’ve known her. (I can only imagine how strong Jesse must have been with the family that surrounded him.)
The family fiercely favour peer support models for mental healthcare whereby those with lived experience of mental health struggles, or caring for someone with mental health issues, dominate the workforce and lead with compassion.
“Friends and families” of the deceased are the “real experts” here, Judy asserts. “We may not have qualifications or wages but we are probably more important in some respects than the people whose job it is to have meetings and give recommendations, which never get implemented anyway.”
What is also clear, Judy emphasises, is that police are not experts when it comes to mental health.
Trying to track the history of police training for responding to mental health emergencies is like attempting to find and then untangle a ball of yarn left outside during a cyclone. The process inhales time and tenses your muscles. It’s a story of stops and starts, public tantrums and, according to an insider source, power struggles behind closed doors. It seems an odd place to aggressively claim the high ground but the force is far from immune to perplexing decisions.
In May last year, the state’s police watchdog, the Law Enforcement Conduct Commission (LECC), released a report that found mental health training in the NSW Police Force is “extremely limited”. The force has scrapped a number of optional mental health courses in recent years due to under-resourcing and COVID-19 complications. While there are intentions to fill this gap, the force is mired in a period of flux. As it stands, trainee police officers only have 18 hours of mandatory mental health training with no further mandatory guidance after graduation. (NSW Police failed to answer a detailed list of questions I sent about operational procedures during welfare checks, the current status of mental health training and delays in offering additional mental health training to police officers).
Citing “recurring systemic and organisational issues”, the LECC report found that the Mental Health Intervention Team (MHIT), a specialist police unit, was woefully understaffed, limiting the delivery of an optional award-winning four day course to 300 officers per year. As a result, only 2420 officers completed the program between February 2008 and September 2019, when the program was axed.
According to the NSWPF Annual Report 2022-2023, there were 17,062 officers employed at the time of publication. You do the maths.
As Jesse Deacon’s sister, Lucinda, explains in that Newtown backyard, however, any police mental health training is “still miniscule compared to the many years of experience of a psychologist who works with vulnerable people everyday.”
Lucinda says that more police training for mental health responses is a “waste of time” amid an urgent crisis costing lives for vulnerable people. The family is tired of hearing politicians toss around the phrase “police mental health training” like a political football. Judy doesn’t want to see police given an excuse for further funding because she doesn’t want them anywhere near mental health emergencies.
Lucinda Deacon (left), Leesa Topic (centre), mother of Courtney Topic, who was shot and killed by police while experiencing her first psychotic episode in 2014, and Judy Deacon (right) at a rally at Town Hall, advocating for policing and mental health reforms. 20 July, 2024.
Photo courtesy: Judy Deacon.
* * *
Clare Nowland was somewhat of a local celebrity in the Snowy Mountains region of NSW. In June last year, several hundred mourners attended her funeral. A “beloved matriarch”, one regional newspaper labelled her at the time. On her 80th birthday, she went skydiving with cracked ribs, her family told the crowd that day. She didn’t want to disappoint the family and cancel the booking. She then went skydiving again, 5 years later, because she wanted to know what it was like without the pain of broken ribs. (This is a woman who taught herself to type in the 60s to find work and support her family – she was 1 of 16 children).
But no human, no matter how daredevil or athletic, can cheat old age. For the last 5 years of her life, Clare lived in an aged-care home in Cooma.
She was suffering from dementia when she grabbed a steak knife from the facility’s kitchen in the early hours of the morning on 17 May, 2023. Staff, who were unable to get the knife off her, tragically called the police. When police turned up, she slowly walked towards with them with her walker, holding the knife in one hand. One police officer, Senior Constable Kristian White, chose to fire his taser. Twice. When Clare fell, she fractured her skull.
One week later she died at Cooma District Hospital. She was 95 years old.
In a rare example of real consequences, Senior Constable Kristian White was suspended from duty. He now faces charges of manslaughter.
But a few weeks later, internal emails, obtained by the Australian Associated Press under freedom of information laws, revealed that NSW Police omitted key details in a press release about the tasering of Clare Nowland. The lengthier initial draft contained references to the use of a taser, a “resident armed with a knife” at the aged-care facility and the fact that an officer’s employment was under review. The publicised media released contained none of this information. When this news came out, 2GB radio host Chris O’Keefe grilled NSW Police Commissioner Karen Webb and accused her of using “sanitised language” during their conversation. All the hallmarks of denialism, of resistance to public scrutiny and poor police training, were there for the public to see.
How could a 95 year old woman with a walking frame possibly be a threat, we all asked ourselves.
Roughly three months later, a 47 year old woman, Krista Kach, barricaded herself inside her Newcastle home in severe mental distress after receiving news that she was being evicted. Police attended the scene after hearing reports she had threatened people with an axe. While police swarmed outside, Krista livestreamed the incident within a dark room, rambling, sometimes nonsensically, while a children’s movie played in the background – a probable effort to calm herself. The 10 hour standoff ended when specialist tactical police forcibly entered her home, tasered her and shot her with supposedly non-lethal bean bag rounds.
Krista died a short time later in hospital.
When the LECC, NSW’s independent police oversight body, began to investigate, as they do with all critical incidents, NSW Police tried to obstruct the investigation via the courts, refusing to release the officers’ action logs from the night they killed Krista Kach and other vital materials.
Greens MLC Sue Higginson tells me that this pattern of PR tactics is evidence that NSW Police of nurturing “a deep and dangerous culture of impunity”.
“Unfortunately, there is a culture that when they fail to protect the public, the police close ranks to protect their own,” she continues.
Investigative journalists have brutally exposed this cultural problem across the nation by exploring the ways in which police deal with – or more accurately, often fail to deal with and worsen – domestic violence issues when the perpetrator is a police officer.
This herd mentality, which makes it difficult for alienated cops to speak out, has resulted in a long (now documented) history of queer-bashing and a highly-strained relationship with local queer communities. Past failures to properly investigate gay hate crimes linger and manifest in news ways. Many minority groups still cop it. Data recently obtained by the Redfern Legal Centre shows that not only do NSW police officers disproportionately use excessive force on First Nations people, the rate at which they target mob with this behaviour has increased over the last 4 years.
From the boys in blue continuing to sport “thin blue line” patches, co-opted by right-wing extremists critical of the BLM movement, to cops flashing fascist symbols at protestors, it’s clear right-wing politics is embedded within the NSW Police Force. This conservative worldview is often hostile to “snowflake” leftist discourse around mental health and often at odds with the empathy and open-mindedness of the state’s AOD and homelessness sectors. It begs the questions: are these really the kind of people we want dealing with intimate domestic affairs and public mental breakdowns?
Heavy police presence at a pro-Palestine rally at Port Botany, 21 November 2023. Photo courtesy: Aman Kapoor.
When I ask Judy about police mental health training, she counters that they need training in “how to stop profiling people” and “how to stop mocking people”. She never loses sight of the bigger picture, emphasising the importance of solving Indigenous deaths in custody and the far higher rate of Indigenous suicide in Australia.
“The police force needs to change this kind of culture,” she says. She tells me that she is not only talking to the Police Association of NSW (PANSW) to help make change surrounding responses to mental health call outs. She also wants to “clean up” the force.
Intention within the force to investigate this culture is limited. Last year, in the face of intense public scrutiny, NSW Police Commissioner Karen Webb commissioned an internal mental health review, setting a deadline of November that year. It’s involved sending two police officers to the UK to learn from developments there and a review of the PACER program. In January this year, a news article popped up with sources in the social justice field complaining that nobody had yet seen the review.
When I reach out to Sue Higginson MLC this month, seeking comment, she tells me, “I’ve sought updates on the internal review in the last week and I’ve heard nothing back.”
A NSW Police spokesperson, meanwhile, told No Filter, “the New South Wales Police Force review into the response to mental health incidents in the community will be released in the coming weeks.”
But Sue Higginson MLC kicks back, stating, “the delays of both the roll-out of long-promised mental health training for officers and the publication of the Commissioner’s internal mental health review reflect a broader disinterest in serious and urgent reform to the regular operation of NSW Police.”
It’s difficult to see how this issue will disappear anytime soon. As Sam Lee from the Redfern Legal Centre tells me over the phone, “a lot of these discussions happen behind closed doors which really doesn’t help with transparency”. Moreover, the LECC is “tremendously under-resourced”.
* * *
“We’ve had cooperation but not from the NSW Police Minister [Yasmin Catley] or anyone not on the ground because they’re all working with their lawyers and worried about compromising themselves,” Judy explains.
In the aftermath of Jesse’s death, his sister Lucinda applied for financial assistance and counselling sessions under the Victim Services Scheme, which provides support to injured victims of violent crimes and families of homicide victims. The Department of Communities and Justice, which manages the scheme, rejected both her application and her appeal. This is customary for police matters where there is an internal investigation and a coronial inquest but the Deacon family tell me they feel abandoned.
Reading between the lines the message is clear: Jesse is not a victim and therefore the family are not victims until it’s proven otherwise. In other words: guilty until proven innocent. The family has never seen a police report, so it was via the cold bureaucratic chain-of-command that the family received the first inkling of the stance of NSW Police on the incident.
But that’s not to say all cops have abandoned the family. In reality, the situation is complex. Yes, the state’s police force is highly resistant to external scrutiny. But Judy has had meetings with the PANSW, the trade union for local cops, and they agree that police should not be first responders to mental health calls. They’re keen to support Judy and harness her expertise as a “resource” – that is, a rare case of someone aggrieved who is willing to engage with them.
When I reach out to the union, Kevin Morton, President of the PANSW says, “a health issue needs a health response, not a police intervention.”
“Our police officers are already operating under an increasing workload with lower staffing numbers and less resources than ever. Along with this pressure, they are being dealing with the added stress of having to respond to situations that they are not trained to deal with in relation to mental health related incidents. They are being required to respond to welfare checks and transport patients to medical facilities without the proper equipment or restraints on behalf of health agencies that don’t operate 24/7,” he explains.
“Being the 24/7 problem solvers in every instance also takes them away from responding to their core duties in urgent frontline response. It’s only natural that this would take an emotional toll on our police, who are already coping with the strain of being stretched too thin across so many fronts.”
As critical as those scrutinising the NSW Police Force are, many – Judy Deacon and Sam Lee, for instance – also acknowledge that police are in a tough position with their near-complete lack of mental health training. There’s almost certainly a direct correlation between this kind of ‘police’ work and the fact that suicide rates among Australian police forces are increasing. While the union may have the welfare of cops foremost in mind and the struggle to attract new recruits - although it’s impossible for the public to know - there’s an alignment with Judy’s view.
In the current climate of political polarisation where ACAB is the flavour of the day, it’s almost unheard of for someone embedded in leftist circles like Judy – she has previous activist credentials – to work with a police union. But I see from our numerous conversations that she isn’t less radical for making this decision. It’s about building a broader mass movement and stepping away from the viciousness of online cancel culture.
With the support of Socialist Alliance, the NSW Greens, Action for Public Housing and Justice Action, she managed, at very short notice, to hold a memorial rally last month to mark one year since Jesse’s passing. Families of police shooting victims, lawyers and politicians all turned up. It’s clear she already has the support of key stakeholders and activists on the far left side of the political spectrum. The challenge now is gaining the support of non-traditional stakeholders. It’s a path Judy prays will lead to a personal meeting with the Prime Minister.
Greens MLC Sue Higginson (far right) and then Judy Deacon, Leesa Topic and Sam Lee from the Redfern Legal Centre at a memorial rally for Jesse Deacon on 20 July, 2024. Photo courtesy: Robbie Mason.
* * *
1 PM, 20 July, 2024. Town Hall.
“41 seconds was all she was given,” Leesa Topic says into the microphone. She’s describing the amount of time her daughter, Courtney, had left on this planet after police found her holding a knife out the front of a Hungry Jacks in western Sydney in a trance-like state. Police shot her dead.
“She was likely suffering a psychotic episode due to undiagnosed schizophrenia”, the coronial inquest report reads.
Leesa’s speech is filled with pauses and choked gasps. 9 years on from her daughter’s death, the pain hasn’t lessened. For years Leesa has sat down with journalists and politicians – anyone willing to listen – just like Judy. For years, she’s seen very little progress. But I sense this all may be about to change. As I look around me I see the beginnings of what Judy calls “Ted’s Team”. (“Ted Frost was Jesse’s alias”, she confides in me later.)
The memorial rally for Jesse Deacon, marking one year since his death, feels less like a protest and more like an open forum, or perhaps a campfire yarn where everybody has the dignity of a name and everybody in the circle is allowed the opportunity to speak. There are impromptu speeches from some members of the crowd. Even the police keep at a respectful distance.
This is what support and community looks like. It doesn’t come from Victim Services providing help. It may not even come from repeated sessions with a psychologist. Support looks like bereaved mothers sharing a microphone. Support looks like that line of strong women behind them bearing tear-stained papers with scribbled words. Support looks like Lucinda belting out song, drum in hand, before a crowd of 100 mourners. In that moment, her voice fills George Street in Sydney’s CBD. The haunting, otherworldly prayer sweeps me aside and presses me into the skyscrapers behind me. Town Hall fades into the distance. We’re no longer there. As Lucinda’s voice wavers, it’s as if she’s talking directly to Jesse. It’s as if she’s ducking and weaving, dodging wombat holes and low-lying branches in a bushfire-scorched eucalypt forest while she guides Jesse into another realm.
He's with her, next to her, in front of her. Around her.
"Ted's Team". Photo courtesy: Robbie Mason.
