Police shootings, mental health crises and the shattered families pushing for alternative first responders – Part 2
This is part two 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. You can find part one here.
Content Warning: This article discusses the topic of police violence, self-harm and mental health issues. Reader discretion is advised.
Heavy police presence at a pro-Palestine rally at Port Botany, 21 November 2023. Photo courtesy: Aman Kapoor.
As the girls around her discovered interests in make-up, popstar fashion and boys, Courtney Topic found a refuge in history books and fantasy novels. A walking encyclopedia for animals and mythical creatures, she read her treasured Harry Potter books so many times she made the pages wrinkled. You were more likely to be find her deep in a book or with headphones shrouding her in a protective dome than at a house party. By the time she was in Year 11 and Year 12, her dad would barely have dropped her off at a friend’s place when she’d call him asking to be picked up. During her lunch breaks at the Woolworths job she found after finishing high school she’d enjoy the silence of her own company, always eating alone.
While she was naturally gifted, she struggled with the mental stress of completing the HSC and the pressures of adult life. Most of the time, she kept these internal demons to herself, staunchly refusing to complicate the lives of those around her.
As her mum Leesa explains to me, she certainly never acted out: “She flew under the radar. She never once got a detention at school.”
In February 2015, Leesa Topic heard that police had shot someone holding a knife outside a Hungry Jacks in Hoxton Park, just down the road from where was living with her husband and four children. She called her eldest son, Kris, warning him of the incident as he usually drove home that way. She also tried calling her home a few times to warn Courtney but no one picked up. Leesa didn’t stress. Sure, Courtney was guaranteed to be home – she was a home girl who never left the house without her brothers or parents – but she’d often sit in her room with headphones on.
A couple of hours later, Leesa Topic heard her name blaring over the PA system at John the Baptist Primary School in Bonnyrigg Heights where she was teaching. She strolled over to the principal’s office, her mind refusing to recognise this was no normal day. There, two police detectives broke the news.
Her 22 year old daughter, Courtney, was dead.
Police had found her holding a knife in the car park of a Hungry Jacks in a trance-like state. She was unresponsive to commands, oddly unfazed by the triangle of police officers who surrounded her. One officer tried to taser her but the taser failed. Another discharged his pepper spray canister. With her face burning from the capsicum spray, Courtney moved towards the third officer surrounding her. She didn’t lunge or slash with the knife, the coronial inquest into her death would later reveal.
That officer shot her.
She was dead within 41 seconds of police arriving.
In the Topic household the next morning, Leesa jolted awake after a restless night to the sound of Courtney’s alarm going off.
Courtney Topic. RIP
Photo courtesy: Leesa Topic.
* * *
This is Courtney’s story but she’s far from the only fatality of police violence. Since her death, little has changed. The rate of police shooting and killing people in severe mental distress in NSW has, in fact, increased. 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). In large part, the crisis boils down to government failure. Chronic underfunding plagues NSW’s mental healthcare system, which experts claim is the worst in the entire country when it comes to service delivery gaps. At the same time, rates of mental illness are increasing.
The end of COVID-19 lockdowns has not resulted in mental distress rates plateauing, as may have been expected. In 2023, calls to the NSW Mental Health Line surged 6% and 5% more people than the year prior presented at emergency departments for mental health reasons.
The problem is so severe that not only are health professionals and grieving families publicly demanding we make mental health workers the primary responders to welfare checks; police representatives have joined the chorus too. Sure, resistance to public scrutiny and cultural issues remains within NSW Police and they have actively obstructed investigations into fatal police shootings of people with mental health conditions. But intense pressure is now mounting on the political establishment to solve the crisis following the public release of an internal review into mental health responses by NSW Police. That report argues that no amount of police mental health training will make police the appropriate first responders to mental health emergencies. It’s a ground-breaking acknowledgement which makes the lack of change at the political level all the more mind-boggling.
In a way, police, as the shock troops of neoliberalism, are just the tip of the iceberg. They’re a warning sign that deep-rooted problems lurk underneath choppy seas, and people are waking up to the danger ahead.
In all corners of the state’s community there’s frustration that police are plugging a gap and performing a role that should never be theirs. Hearing about recent fatal police shootings of people in mental distress takes Leesa Topic “right back” to the moment she received the news about Courtney’s death, she says.
“It’s the same same same. Our governments are all talk and no action. Things have got to change. The system is sorely broken on so many levels.”
* * *
“She was likely suffering a psychotic episode due to undiagnosed schizophrenia”, the coronial inquest report into Courtney Topic’s death reads. Not only that: it was almost certainly her first psychotic episode.
As reality bent at the edges and the voices inside her head clamoured louder, Courtney walked out of the house that fateful day in February 2015 with a large kitchen knife. It was her first time carrying a knife in public. She was what police call a “cleanskin” – she had no criminal record and no history with local police.
After her death, detectives discovered a journal of private writing under her bed which revealed a range of disturbed beliefs about mind control experiments, others being able to read her thoughts and voices inside her head. The discovery caught her parents by surprise. They had little idea just how much she was suffering.
In many of these fatal police shootings, there’s a common story, a dark stain that blackens the pages of the history books. Many of the victims were properly, or more accurately, diagnosed with a mental health condition after their death. Courtney Topic is one recent example. Steve Pampalian is another. It speaks to a systemic failure in mental healthcare in this country.
Photo courtesy: Leesa Topic.
Barriers to access are simultaneously financial and administrative. Say, for example, you really need 24/7 care for a drug addiction. Publicly-run residential rehabs are not free. You usually need to contribute to your living costs, which comes out of your Centrelink benefits or whatever other income you may have. It’s around $200-300 per week. You’ll likely also spend months waiting to find somewhere that can host you; the waiting lists are absurd. For a private residential rehab in Australia – it’s an unregulated industry – you’re looking at costs anywhere up to $30,000 per month.
Even if you’re just looking for out-patient care, fees for private psychologist sessions and psychiatric assessments can spiral very quickly, even with Medicare support.
Leesa Topic says the financial costs of mental health support for Courtney were “a challenge”.
“We didn’t have private health insurance and money was tight. We have 4 kids. So we did what we could. But we didn’t have thousands of dollars to get her 24/7 care in a facility,” Lessa states. “Our options were public health options.”
As a child, Courtney was diagnosed with ADD, the inattentive kind, and prescribed medication for the condition, which didn’t seem to work for her. When Courtney was 18, another professional suggested she had autism.
In September 2014, just a few months before her death, Courtney told her parents she needed psychiatric intervention again. There was a three month wait for the psychiatric appointment in Parramatta.
This psychiatrist, who saw Courtney three times before her death, cast doubt on the autism diagnosis. Instead, he believed Courtney was suffering from depression. He told Courtney to take antidepressants.
* * *
Alex* sometimes goes 3 or 4 days on one small meal or a coffee when he runs out of money. His pension payment comes through fortnightly, usually at 3 o’clock in the morning. Sometimes he’ll be awake when it enters his bank account. When that happens, he’ll leave his unit in the Northcott public housing tower in Surry Hills under the cover of darkness and walk down the road to a 7/11 to buy a Krispy Kreme donut and chocolate milk. It’s a mechanical movement for him, akin to sleepwalking because it’s so familiar.
On multiple occasions, however, police have shattered the peace of his nighttime stroll, demanding to know why he’s out at this time, where he’s going and where he lives. Telling officers that he lives in Northcott has only ever prompted another barrage of questions and comments that it’s a “drug dealing area”.
* * *
Sam Lee is a senior solicitor at the Redfern Legal Centre. The Redfern Legal Centre is a not-for-profit community legal centre that works closely with disadvantaged people. Many who come through their doors, seeking free legal advice, are homeless or on the precipice. A substantial number are also Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander. So the staff there have their ears to the ground when it comes to the policing of disadvantaged communities in Sydney.
Sam says it’s a “common theme” at her practice to meet clients who have experienced police use excessive force on them while they were in severe mental distress. Many have been arrested in a moment where they really needed a helping hand or an ear.
“A lot of them say they are terrified of police,” she states.
Sue Higginson MLC says that her and her office staff hear complaints “almost daily” about heavy-handed policing of vulnerable people, whether they’re experiencing a psychotic episode, suicidal ideation, public intoxication, dementia or homelessness.
In May 2021, the Public Interest Advocacy Centre (PIAC) and Homelessness NSW published a report on the policing of public spaces and rough sleepers. Pages of testimony from people with lived experience of homelessness lay bare near-daily harassment from police, verbal abuse, excessive force and improper uses of searching powers. “Several service providers we spoke to suggested a need for police to develop a better understanding of the intersections between trauma, mental health and substance use disorder that commonly affect their clients,” the report’s authors write.
Alex*, who lives in the Northcott public housing building, tells me that the frequency of negative police interactions means there is a “deficit in trust” in the police among neighbours. He also works for StreetCare, an advisory and advocacy panel made up entirely of people with lived experience of homelessness, so he’s become a mouthpiece for his community. He tells me a range of stories that are noteworthy for how normal they are inside the nation’s public housing estates: a swarm of navy blue uniforms encircling someone experiencing a psychotic break, cops accusing him of selling drugs and being high when he himself called them for help, explaining to senior police officers what trauma-informed training is. You get the picture.
He says his neighbours are “being judged for where they live, not who they are or what they’re doing.”
* * *
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. It’s especially a problem in regional and remote areas of the state.
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?
If you’re located in Western Sydney and find yourself needing immediate intervention, you can call 000 and request help from the Mental Health Acute Assessment Team (MHAAT).
MHAAT is a rapid-response team of mental health workers who attend 000 mental health calls alongside paramedics. The service is intended to offer immediate assessments from highly-qualified personnel and refer patients to appropriate care facilities or ensure medical follow-up. An evaluation in 2017 clearly laid out the program’s positive results, which has included treating almost 70% of patients outside of hospital emergency departments and transporting two thirds of patients directly to mental health facilities.
Unfortunately, this service isn’t available to people outside western Sydney.
In some parts of NSW, there are Acute Care Teams (ACTs) attached to major public hospitals. They’re sometimes also called “crisis assessment and treatments teams” or “CATTs”. Made up of mental health specialists and social workers, these teams are available 24/7. They’re all about community-based treatment and short-term help for severe mental health episodes, and you can obtain help from one by calling the NSW Mental Health Line on 1800 011 511.
One word of warning, however: these CATTs are heavily under-resourced. They’re often swamped, meaning they assess calls based on urgency. Sometimes they have to make tough decisions about how quickly someone can receive help or if they’re eligible to receive help at all. In a submission to a recent NSW parliamentary inquiry into mental health accessibility, Justice Action reported the public has developed disparaging nicknames for CATTs including “Come Again Tomorrow”, “Can’t Attend Today” teams and “gatekeepers of hospital beds”.
That said, many people do find these programs helpful and less stigmatising than police, or even paramedic, intervention. In short, there’s a mixed bag of highly-varied experiences out there.
The real issue is funding.
In May this year, NSW Health released a report which illustrated that 58,000 people in NSW with severe and complex mental health needs are currently unable to access care due to a lack of services, staff and funding. It makes for grim reading. In statistic after statistic, NSW ranks as the worst, or one of the worst, when compared to other Australian states and territories. NSW, for example, has the second lowest per capita expenditure on community mental healthcare in Australia. Yikes.
A few weeks after the public release of that report, the NSW Government announced its latest budget. It was a small step towards remedying the funding imbalance but it received widespread condemnation from mental health organisations. Key voices in the sector told media that government funding still isn’t substantial enough.
I hear similar story from the relatives of Jesse Deacon, who was shot and killed by police in a Glebe public housing block during a welfare check in July last year. A neighbour had called 000, concerned that Jesse was self-harming. (Jesse’s story is the subject of the first part of this multi-part policing series).
Lucinda Deacon, Jesse Deacon’s sister, tells me the budget announcements were “a joke and an insult”.
Jesse’s mother, Judy Deacon, meawnwhile declares, “we need workers paid a decent wage so they can afford to pay rent and they don’t move into private practice and they don’t move interstate. We want them to stay in NSW. We don’t want cosmetic buildings with many beds but no one to work them.”
Lucinda Deacon (left), Leesa Topic (centre) and Judy Deacon (right) at a rally at Town Hall, advocating for policing and mental health reforms. 20 July, 2024.
Photo courtesy: Judy Deacon.
* * *
When Wayne Gardener first moved into the Franklyn Street Estate in Glebe, a public housing block, he seemed happy.
“He was talking to people, not hiding in his apartment,” Emily Valentine, a neighbour and artist, tells me over the phone. “He did up his unit and put in new curtains and a new wardrobe.”
Roughly three months later, in November 2020, public housing tenants at the Franklyn Street Estate received an early Christmas present from Big Brother: eviction notices in the mail. Soon after this, Rachel Evans, a long-time housing activist and Socialist Alliance organiser, received a phone call from Wayne Gardener. Wayne knew Rachel as a staunch defender of public housing. Distressed and seeking solace, he told Rachel that he was frightened about his future. The next day Wayne boarded himself inside his apartment and set the place alight, killing himself.
Wayne’s neighbours maintain that the news of eviction tipped the scales, dumping Wayne headfirst into a mental abyss from which he could not escape.
Following the suicide of Wayne Gardener, Hands Off Glebe, a local activist group, reached out to then City of Sydney Councillor Kerryn Phelps, seeking advice and help. Phelps organised for a delegation to meet the Mental Health Minister at the time who listened intently. After this meeting a Hands Off Glebe activist received one phone call from a health representative. Nothing eventuated for the tenants at Frankly Street in terms of direct intervention by mental health support services.
Emily, meanwhile, sent a letter to the NSW Coroner’s Court, hoping to make the court aware of the links between poor mental health and the demolition of public housing. In that letter, dated 11 May 2021, Emily wrote that Gardner took the news of eviction badly: “He only took the tenancy about 3 months earlier. I believe he had been ‘moved on’ [evicted] before and so he was fearful and depressed by the Housing NSW procedure and total lack of care and respect. His need to harm himself and the department’s property is confirmed by the way he chose to die.”
Despite sending multiple emails, Emily received no feedback beyond court staff requesting she send comments. The court never passed a report onto any tenants or activist groups and discontinued the investigation.
This failure – some might call it negligence – is so hard to take because the manner of Wayne Gardener’s death is hardly an anomaly. At this point, it’s almost a given that, across the nation, the demolition of public homes and eviction will trigger a spate of deaths within the blocks under threat. Within Sydney alone, there are numerous cases of suicides in the days and weeks after politicians make headline-grabbing announcements. It happened during the campaign to save Millers Point. And again, more recently, during the campaign to save a public housing complex at 82 Wentworth Park Road, Glebe. The phenomenon is well documented in the media and prevalent in the academic literature. The knowledge is there in the public domain, hidden in plain view.
But it’s a familiar story for public housing tenants: a tragedy strikes and concerned citizens reach out to local politicians and bureaucrats who send off a few emails and tee up a meeting. Like traffic cops in the blazing sun, they pass requests along the chain of command, ensuring the local constituents are happy and the traffic continues to flow, but they do so without exerting too much energy. Almost inevitably, housing activists reach a bottleneck.
“We’re always the last on the agenda list,” Emily says.
In July last year, in the very same public housing complex in Glebe, a 43 year old man called Jesse Deacon was going through a mental health crisis in new home. He’d only moved in three months prior. At one point, he approached a neighbour and asked for a cigarette. 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.
“Where is the support?” Emily asks me on the phone. “What support was available to either of them [Jesse Deacon and Wayne Gardener]? It’s not good enough.”
“That’s the other side of the story. Jesse went to a neighbour he didn’t know and he knocked on the neighbour’s door because he wanted help.”
Writing these multi-part series for No Filter on mental health and policing, I’m struck, overwhelmed even, by the recurring patterns. I’m rewriting the same stories over and over and over and over again. This probably helps explain why I can’t turn away, why I can’t move onto another topic. If you haven’t guessed, this is a story of inaction. It’s a story of news not happening and grieving families and friends, even neighbours, waiting for change.
Housing and financial stress, as well as a lack of available and efficient mental health services, is an underlying factor in so many of these avoidable deaths.
In September last year, for instance, 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.
It’s no coincidence that mental health is worsening in Australia amid a nationwide housing crisis. In Sydney, the squeeze not only comes from inflation, which has climbed in recent years to levels not seen since the first Nintendo Game Boys hit the market. The inundation of reports and studies pinpointing Sydney as the most expensive city in Australia for housing – both home purchasing and renting – is significant enough to turn the city into an Atlantis. There are simply too many options to cite. In global rankings, Sydney consistently ranks well above ritzy metropolises such as London and New York for housing costs.
It may be simplistic to reduce the mental health epidemic in Australia to financial stress. Some may even suggest it’s class reductionist, pointing to the identity crises spurred by social media as a counter-argument. But housing stress is a tangible obstacle, especially for older generations and rough sleepers for whom Instagram is the planet Mars.
* * *
A couple of weeks ago, the NSW government finally released the findings of an internal police review into mental health responses. It was expected almost one year ago, so it was heavily delayed. But it’s available for public consumption at last. The report argues there is “an overreliance on police as the primary responders to emotional distress and mental health crises”. Like the grieving families impacted by fatal police shootings of people in mental distress, mental health activists and health organisations, the report declares that more police mental health training is not the answer. It recommends that the NSW Police Force and NSW Health collaborate to implement an alternative model for mental health responses in line with the ‘Right Care, Right Person’ model in the UK.
In the UK, police leaders, frustrated by the diversion of resources towards mental health issues and stalling at a government level, simply gave the National Health Service (NHS) and social work organisations a deadline of when they would stop attending mental health call outs. While it caused tense behind-the-scenes rows, the move worked. The UK now has a world-leading model where police only intervene if there is a threat of violence to health professionals attending the scene.
The findings of the police report are similar to the findings of the recent parliamentary inquiry into the state’s mental health systems. That inquiry urged the NSW Government to “explore” alternative first responders to mental health emergencies.
In short: there is a cacophony of noise building in favour of treating mental health as a health issue, not a criminal issue, a barrage enveloping the walls of NSW Parliament. There are signs that NSW Labor politicians, not just sections of the far left, want change. But there is little in terms of direct commitments yet. The NSW government media release relating to the internal police review into mental health responses contains little more than platitudes. Both the offices of Police Minister Yasmin Catley and Mental Health Minister Rose Jackson failed to reply for comment on this article.
When I follow up with Leesa Topic over email, seeking her view on the police internal review, she is keen to contribute. She tells me “the focus on a trauma-informed response to mental health callouts is a positive step in the right direction” but she also declares the report “doesn’t go far enough”.
She expresses disappointment that the report only contains one recommendation (albeit an important one) given the extended time frame. The report, she points out, also fails to suggest any kind of timeframe for action.
“Time is of the essence, otherwise more people will die,” she states.
“Ongoing dialogue with those of us with lived experience, to form and implement a health approach not a police approach to those suffering with mental illness, is also vitally important. Include us in the solution!”
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.
Echoing the demands of the Deacon family, she says that “a dedicated 000 mental health line must form part of the solution.” It’s a vision dependent on a significant injection of federal funding and the building of new health infrastructure but the demand has attracted widespread support. The idea is that when you call 000 the operator will give you a fourth option – police, fire, ambulance and mental health. Phone operators trained in mental health support will function like air traffic controllers who ensure there are no head-on plane collisions. They will assess calls, bring people into landing safely and follow their journey the whole way to ensure they receive appropriate care and they aren’t abandoned. If (and only if) necessary, they will suggest police intervention.
* * *
“Courtney wouldn’t hurt a fly,” Leesa Topic says. “She wouldn’t have hurt anyone. She was the most gentle soul who died in the most horrific of ways.”
At the start of our phone calls, Leesa warns me that I’ll struggle to shut her up. It’s been 9 years since her daughter’s death and Leesa’s spirit has shown no sign of flagging. She monologues for long periods, making my list of prepared questions largely redundant.
“Courtney shouldn’t have been shot that day. She should have received the care she needed and we wouldn’t be here having this conversation. Sadly we are. As we are, we need to do what we can to get police and the wider community nationally to understand that mental illness shouldn’t be treated as a crime.”
“We’ve seen the footage of the day she died and all they [police officers] were saying was ‘drop the knife, drop the knife’. The knife wasn’t the issue. In the coronial inquest it came out that the knife was there because she was scared someone was going to get her. Someone got her all right, didn’t they? The people who were supposed to help her were the ones who got her.”
“41 seconds was all the police gave her. They shot her dead through the heart and she bled out by the side of the road.”
“I put my rice in the microwave at work for 40 seconds for God’s sake.”
Leesa pauses.
“I would have taken that bullet for her and I wish I could have.”
* This name has been changed to protect privacy.
Protestors at a rally at Town Hall, advocating for policing and mental health reforms. 20 July, 2024. Photo courtesy: Robbie Mason.
