Officer in charge of immediate action team says he was not told nurse only wanted Dungay to stop eating biscuits

This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

The officer in charge of a rapid response team involved in the forcible transfer of an Indigenous inmate who then died has said he was not told medical staff only wanted the inmate to stop eating a packet of biscuits.

The man, referred to as Officer A for legal reasons, said he was made to think by Corrections staff it was a “security situation”, which justified the use of his immediate action team (IAT). He said he was not told a nurse only wanted Dungay to stop eating biscuits, or that a doctor had allegedly refused to sign a medical certificate endorsing the transfer.

Dungay, a 26-year-old Dunghutti man, died on 29 December 2015 at the Long Bay jail mental health ward after he was repeatedly restrained face-down by five guards and injected with a sedative by a nurse. In footage played repeatedly in court and released publicly on Monday, Dungay said 12 times that he could not breathe. Officer A, like several officer witnesses before him, told the court he did not believe Dungay.

Dungay had refused to stop eating biscuits and the court has heard staff had concerns the biscuits would affect his blood sugar levels as he was diabetic, despite him being asymptomatic for hypoglycemia at the time.

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Key questions to emerge during the inquest have included whether Corrections or health staff made particular decisions, and what information they were based on.

On Thursday Officer A told the court he was in charge of the IAT on the day ward staff radioed for a transfer of Dungay to a cell with a camera.

He had a phone briefing with an officer he recalled was the acting assistant superintendent, referred to in court as Officer F, which left him with the assumption it was a security and self-harm situation that legitimately required the use of his team.

Counsel assisting the inquest asked Officer A if he was told a doctor had been asked to sign a medical certificate for the transfer but had declined on medical grounds. He had not.

“That would be something [I’d expect] would be passed to me during the briefing,” Officer A said.

He later added: “If those things were present they should have been communicated to myself, in my opinion.”

Officer F earlier this week denied he sought a certificate from a doctor and it had been refused.

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Officer A also said he was not told about anything relating to blood sugar levels other than that Dungay “was messing with them” by eating the biscuits.

He said it would have been relevant to know that a nurse was treating Dungay, had taken his blood sugar levels and wanted the biscuits to be taken from Dungay.

“That would change the course of the job,” he said.

He said while inmates dictate “the terms of any given job” with their resistance, removing biscuits from an uncooperative inmate would have likely been faster than restraining and transferring them to another cell.

He said not knowing about medical factors and complications with an inmate meant he was not properly equipped to do his job, and it was a failing in the system.

Officer A was the more experienced member of the IAT and was in charge on the day. He told the court it was his responsibility to determine whether they should attend a situation, unless it was an executive officer like an assistant superintendent, in which case they had to follow orders.

If a request was clearly not a legitimate job for the IAT he would raise it with the requesting officer but essentially “it wouldn’t be proper for me to query a high ranking officer”, the court heart.

He accepted from Officer F’s briefing that the Dungay transfer was legitimate because Dungay was non-compliant.

Corrections officers have given evidence the situation was “purely medical” in nature.

Like another IAT member to appear before the inquiry, Officer A also believed Dungay was saying he couldn’t breathe as a “diversionary tactic”, and he disputed that Dungay was audibly “gasping” during the transfer.



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Taken through the video again, Officer A said Dungay was “struggling [to breathe] because he was physically exerted from wrestling”.

He conceded the other alternative was that the person could not breathe.

Officer A based his assumption that Dungay could breathe because he could speak not on any training from Corrective Services but on his own history of panic attacks when his father would tell him “you can talk so you can breathe” in reassurance.

At the time he did not know about positional asphyxia.

“I’m not going to say I’d never heard of it before but it’s not something that had come up in the workplace,” he said.

He said if he had the knowledge of positional asphyxia then that he had since been given in a July 2017 memorandum, he would have been in a better position to assess the veracity of Dungay’s claims and also to place him in a safer position. He would also know to get medical assistance.

The only retraining he has been given since joining the IAT was in equipment and hostage negotiation – which included de-escalation techniques - but not in identifying and responding to potential positional asphyxia.

“It would be nice to have a course or training activity [with health and corrections] to identify how to take action,” he said. “It’s something that would be beneficial for all corrective services officers.”

The inquest continues.