“You f---ing idiot,” hisses another policeman kneeling on John’s torso as he punches him in the back.

The officer strikes again. And again. Six times in quick succession.

John is being held stomach down when an officer belts his lower leg with an extendable baton. With police all over his back, his leg is the only part of John’s body where the cop can land a clean blow.

Minutes earlier, the police have arrived at John’s home in Preston in Melbourne after his psychologist called triple zero to say she was worried about his deteriorating mental health.

The disability pensioner is pinned down. He is in his own front yard and he is helpless.

John’s fleshy torso tumbles earthwards as police swarm around him. There are six officers in all, two on his back like wolves on injured prey.

There is a watering can in the yard that police could fill up and use to wash out John’s eyes. When the ambulance arrives later, this is what will happen. But for now the police choose a different tool. One officer picks up a garden hose and sets it to the high-pressure jet. He blasts John’s face. John says later he felt like he was drowning.

John moans. Another policeman places a boot on his head and John is handcuffed and pulled up into a sitting position.

Pepper spray burns and blinds the eyes and makes it hard to breathe. The policeman asks again: “You like that? Smells good, doesn’t it?”

What these policemen probably did not realise during these events late in 2017 is that the cop isn’t the only one filming. A CCTV security camera, installed by John after he was burgled, is also recording the scene.

The cop with the camera stops him. He wants the money shot. Grinning, he manoeuvres into position, like a wedding photographer, while his mate waits. Then the camera rolls, and once again the spray buffets John’s face.

As the spray buffets his face, the lead cop – the one who capsicum-sprayed John and punched him in the back – reaches for his mobile phone and appears to activate its video camera. But before he can begin recording, the policeman spraying John’s eyes and nostrils moves to put the hose away.

The torrent stops, allowing John to gather his breath. “You happy? How tough are youse?” he asks his tormentors.

Police coaxed him some more: “C’mon, John. We just want to have a chat.”

John, who in addition to his mental illness and back problems, is in cancer remission, continued pleading: “I’m going through withdrawal ... I’m laying on the floor. Now, please leave me alone … you’ll have to shoot me.”

“Mate, we don’t want to break open the door,” one policeman said.

Police are empowered by the Mental Health Act to use force to take to hospital a person who appears to have a mental illness in order to keep them or others safe. The officers had warned John, who has a decade-old conviction for assault, that they would use a crowbar to force entry.

When it’s later downloaded by John, it also shows the lead-up to his humiliation. He’d been behind his front door, pleading with the police to leave him alone, explaining he was detoxing from painkillers prescribed for his chronic back condition. He had diarrhoea, was “vomiting blood” and was weak, he explained.

But, once John is on the ground, the police conduct becomes something else: there are the baton blows, the punch to John’s back, the capsicum spray to his eyes, the jet spray blasts to his face and the cell phone video recording of his humiliation for reasons known only to the officer doing the filming.

He makes no contact but is pepper sprayed, bundled down his stairs by police and pinned down in his yard.

John is then filmed opening his front door and emerging to plead again for police to leave. The lead policeman appears to move forward and attempt to grab John. John brushes the officer's hand aside and, in the same motion, extends his hand upwards and towards the policeman, as if to push him back with a flimsy jab.

“Why are you doing this to me?”

The lead cop offers his explanation: “Definitely don’t shape up to me, mate. Ever,” he says. Some of the six officers appear to be grinning.

John groans again in pain: “Have a laugh. Have a laugh. I’m a disabled pensioner. That is how tough youse are.”

The lead cop continues: “You came out and tried to take a swing at me. What the f--- did you think would happen?” The cop is casually smoking a cigarette.

“It was the only way it was gonna go down.”

Watch police detaining John. Warning: violence.

Hamburger with the lot

The most unusual thing about what happened in the Preston front yard is, according to Melbourne lawyer Jeremy King, not the conduct of the police. It is the fact that it was caught on film.

King is an amiable and energetic mid-career solicitor from Robinson Gill Lawyers who’s become the go-to man in Melbourne for those wanting to sue police.

When he started out a decade ago, he encouraged clients to complain to police internal affairs, known as Professional Standards Command, or to the body that oversees it, Victoria’s public sector watchdog the Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission (IBAC), a body formerly called the Office of Police Integrity.

Over time, though, King grew wary of the complaints system.

Lawyer Jeremy King. Credit:Jason South

Complaints about police are mostly investigated by police. Occasionally, they are reviewed by IBAC. Even more rarely, IBAC does its own probes into high-profile cases of brutality. In November 2016, IBAC urged police to overhaul their internal complaint system because it was failing to weed out repeat offenders: the cops known in police circles as “frequent flyers”, who have been repeatedly accused of bashing, humiliating or neglecting people.

An IBAC audit in 2015 of more than 350 complaint files to regional police stations found that fewer than one in 10 cases was proven, a figure that dropped to 4 per cent when the allegations involved police brutality.

The police union has for years insisted that the low figures are indicative not of a culture of cover-up, but of the fact that criminals make unfounded allegations and police work is not only inherently stressful, dangerous and under-resourced, but susceptible to complaints.

“It has been our experience that some charges have been preferred against our members where, objectively scrutinised, they would not be laid against an ordinary member of the public,” Police Association secretary Wayne Gatt recently told a parliamentary committee examining allegations made by academics, law firms, community legal centres and the Law Institute of Victoria that the complaint system is broken.

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In 2016, the policeman in charge of investigating police, Assistant Commissioner Brett Guerin, promised to improve the existing system, with better tracking of problem officers and a focus on restorative justice. But the man responsible for overseeing police ethics had ethical problems of his own. In February, Guerin quit the force after revelations he was using an alias to post racist and repulsive comments on social media, including encouraging violence against Africans.

The recently appointed commissioner of IBAC, former judge Robert Redlich, believes that police should continue to have a role investigating misconduct among their own, a view also held by force command. But Mr Redlich has also called for major gaps in IBAC’s powers and resources to be closed so the agency can make a “major change” to the police complaints system.

Assistant Commissioner Luke Cornelius, who has temporarily replaced Guerin and who declined an interview request, recently conceded major “culture change” is needed, while bristling at the “carpetbagger lawyers” advocating change.

In a statement, a police spokesman employed somewhat softer rhetoric, describing the "significant work ahead of us [the force]" and a need to "work more closely with community advocacy groups".

"We have started the process, but still need to better manage conflict of interest, so that complainants can have confidence in the integrity of an investigation," the police spokesman said.

John at home. Credit:Nick McKenzie

But lawyer Jeremy King says the repeated poor handling of cases and the Guerin saga have contributed to a collapse of trust in the existing system. Reform, he says, is desperately needed, including ensuring an independent watchdog such as IBAC is given a far more meaningful role investigating the more serious complaints against police.

“Internal police investigators don’t seek out all the witnesses, don’t search for CCTV, don’t apply a thorough, critical and probing approach. You see police in the same station or area investigating police they might know. There is little perceived objectivity.”

He says it is not uncommon for police accused of wrongdoing to concoct criminal charges to justify their own conduct or to pressure a complainant. Several experienced police officers who spoke confidentially to The Age acknowledge this occurs. They call it giving a person a “hamburger with the lot”. Some police see this as an appropriate tactic in a justice system that they feel tilts too much towards the rights of the accused.

Not one of the six police who attended John’s Preston home in September 2017 raised any internal complaint about the way he was treated (Cornelius has said the number of police prepared to report misconduct by their colleagues has risen from 8 to 21 per cent over a decade). That left it to John to complain. But John says he was scared. If he complained to police, would it be him who was investigated and charged?

Jessie Scarlett-Rhodes. Credit:Joe Armao

Head-first into a divvy van

Jessie Scarlett-Rhodes’ experience suggests this fear is not unfounded.

Jessie, a mother of two young children who has worked as an administrator in schools, has the build of a female jockey: 155 centimetres tall (five foot one) and 55 kilograms.

On December 14, 2012, the 27-year-old and her husband, Rhys, a quietly spoken electrician, went to their local pub in working class Sunbury for drinks with another couple. They were celebrating good news: Jessie’s fertility treatment looked promising.

Rhys, who was on medication to help him quit smoking, felt ill after a few beers and went to a lane outside to vomit. As Jessie stood by him, four police officers arrived, one shining a torch in the pair’s face and demanding they show their identification. After unsuccessfully pressing the officer to lower the torch and explain why they needed to show their ID, Jessie swore at the officers.

Jessie has never spoken to the media about what happened next.

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In the police version of events, an aggressive and foul-mouthed Jessie spat at and poked an officer in the head and then attacked the biggest of the four police, Sergeant Carl Wagner, as he arrested Rhys. According to police, Jessie whacked Wagner – who is a foot taller and twice her weight – on the head then climbed onto his back.

Police then claimed that, as Senior Constable Cem Ertekin and a second officer moved to defend Wagner, Jessie fell to the ground. Next, she was handcuffed and placed carefully into the back of a divvy van.

Jessie describes this story as a series of lies. She says she never jumped on Wagner. Rather, after she swore at police, she says Senior Constable Ertekin violently forced her to the ground. She says she was then set on, suffering at least one blow to her head. Next, she was handcuffed and hurled head-first into the divvy van. After her head collided with the vehicle’s wall, she remembers a burst of pain and blood running down her face.

Jessie Scarlett-Rhodes' injuries.

Police did not immediately charge Jessie or take her to the local cells. Instead, they dropped her home.

The next morning, her face badly bruised and her nose fractured, Jessie visited Sunbury police station to complain. She left after being told there was no one senior enough at the station. Her phone rang a short time later and a senior police officer was on the line.

“He sounded annoyed. I said to him, ‘You’re not going to make this easy for me, are you?’ He said, ‘No, we are not’.”

Jessie called a family friend, a police inspector. He told her to complain to the police internal affairs unit (now known as Professional Standards Command). Jessie filled in an online complaint and was later interviewed by a senior officer from Broadmeadows police station, where she says two of the officers involved in the arrest had worked.

“It was a massive conflict of interest,” she says.

“Lots of family friends of ours are police. I don’t look at the whole force as the devil. But the whole process made me lose trust.”

Her ebbing faith was further eroded when, many weeks after she lodged her allegations, she was notified she would be charged with assaulting police and resisting arrest. It wasn’t until three months after she accused police of assaulting her that the officers made their statements against her.

“I was petrified. I was scared. I felt sick with worry,” she says. “And I felt powerless. But I immediately knew the charges were a tactic to make me go away.”

A criminal conviction could prevent her working with children and imperil her job at a school.

The police were offering to expedite Jessie’s entry to a diversion program, where she could avoid a criminal conviction if she admitted wrongdoing and apologised to the police. She wanted to air her story in open court, but her barrister urged her to confess and move on with her life.

It would mean losing her chance to prove what had really happened: “I felt gutted, but I felt I had no choice,” Jessie says.

She accepted a diversion program and wrote letters of apology. Then she learned her internal affairs complaint was not upheld, having been dismissed by police. By now her physical injuries had healed.

But the mental scars remained. So did a sense of injustice.

“I had to stick to my morals. I didn’t like the idea it would happen to someone else,” says Jessie.

Jessie googled the words “police brutality and lawyer” and began to call up law firms. She was handballed from lawyer to lawyer, firm to firm. Finally, someone referred her to Jeremy King.

Watch an interview with Jessie Scarlett-Rhodes.

Nothing short of disgraceful

Where most lawyers would have seen Jessie’s admissions to avoid a conviction as fatal to any police brutality case, King studied the evidence. He didn’t buy the story of the small woman leaping on the back of a policeman twice her size, or spitting in the face of another. Why were some parts of the police statements copied word-for-word three months after the event?

King was also familiar with past accusations made against Sergeant Wagner, who had, according to one of his colleagues’ testimony, taken the “lead” in investigating the assault allegations against Jessie.

Sergeant Wagner allegedly had form. In 2012, he had been accused in a human rights case lodged by the Flemington Kensington Legal Centre of repeated misconduct. The case was settled but later detailed in a submission to force command by Victoria’s former director of public prosecutions Jeremy Rapke and a La Trobe University adjunct professor of law, Peter Seidel.

Wagner was named as one of a small number of officers accused by youths from the Carlton housing estate of repeated police brutality and racism. Wagner had allegedly made “the young men who alleged abuse by him … [feel] powerlessness, terror, fear, shame … and in some cases suicidal responses to the treatment they were receiving.

“While it was alleged that Wagner was a key officer involved, it was also alleged that the treatment was regularly observed and assisted by other police officers,” Seidel and Rapke’s submission alleged.

Wagner had also been the subject of multiple complaints to professionals standards.

Jessie Scarlett-Rhodes arrives at court. Credit:Joe Armao

Jessie’s evidence was that, while Wagner did not assault her, he played a key role in her subsequent treatment, which included dismissing her claims against Senior Constable Ertekin.

King advised Jessie it was time to consider going back to court. The lodging of a civil action against the state was high risk, but it would also enable her to tell her story on the stand. Jessie gave the order and King issued subpoenas requiring Jessie, husband Rhys and the four police who helped arrest them to testify.

On October 19, 2017, after weighing their evidence, County Court Judge David Brookes delivered his judgment: he found that, based on the police evidence, Jessie had probably jumped on Wagner’s back in defence of her husband (a finding Jessie still finds bewildering).

But Judge Brookes also said he was “less than satisfied” that Wagner’s arrest of Jessie's husband “was justified … considering the state of his health and thus his vulnerability, his lack of aggression”.

Wagner had been “swearing a lot, really trying to rev Rhys up”. The evidence, Judge Brookes declared, left open an “interesting question”: did Jessie act lawfully in defence of her husband?

In contrast to Jessie’s evidence, the judge attacked Senior Constable Ertekin’s evidence as “totally unreliable”. Despite Ertekin's denials, Brookes concluded he had thrown a handcuffed Jessie head-first into the van in a way that could cause “significant injury”. The judge said the policeman’s actions were “a breach of the trust” and nothing short of “disgraceful”.

The police had used “disproportionate force” on the evening, while Jessie’s handcuffing was “excessive”.

Judge Brookes also accepted that Jessie had felt bullied into accepting the diversion after police charged her. For the injuries to her body and the trampling of her rights, Brookes ordered the Victorian government to pay Jessie $86,000 in compensation.

While it appeared to be a win for Jessie, her lawyer, Jeremy King, says the case left him frustrated. Victoria Police, and the public sector watchdog, IBAC (which inherited the file from its predecessor, the Office of Police Integrity), did not have to account for why Jessie’s initial complaint was dismissed or the lack of action taken against the officers involved.

Jessie says the compensation does little to alleviate the ongoing impact of the ordeal. While she wants to be focusing on her young children, memories from the night – the shining torches and the violence – regularly invade her mind. There is a glimmer of good news, though. After The Age quizzed police about Jessie's case, a spokesman said the force would re-open the internal investigation "as a result of new information disclosed in civil proceedings".

King, meanwhile, is planning another court action. He’s advised John to sue police for brutalising and humiliating him in his front yard.

A police spokesman said the force could not comment on John's case as it is with IBAC, which King has begrudgingly notified about what happened.

But King has told John not to bother complaining directly to police.