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A disorientated and confused young woman was shot dead by police in western Sydney this week about 10 minutes after becoming involved in a confrontation brought on by notification from management of a Hungry Jacks outlet that a person was "behaving oddly" and carrying a 20cm (or eight-inch) kitchen knife. The girl had been in the outlet's carpark, sipping a soft drink and holding the knife. She was not threatening anyone, or herself. NSW Police public relations is spreading a story, perhaps being helpfully provided by the less-than-disinterested police investigation, that she was threatening self-harm but, by most accounts of independent witnesses, there was nothing dangerous or threatening about her manner until a group of about five police arrived on the scene, surrounded her, and began shouting at her to drop her weapon. She reacted with fear and fright, and was in short order sprayed with capsicum spray, and soon after stunned by electrical current from a Taser. As she still struggled forward, still holding her knife, one of the police present shot her dead. He is said, as is nearly always said after such incidents, to be deeply distressed and traumatised, and the public has been made to feel as sorry for him as for his victim. I feel sorry for him too, because it would appear that he was poorly trained for such incidents, which happen, as a result, all too frequently and unnecessarily, in all jurisdictions, including, sometimes, the ACT. The fault lies in police management and training - a fact recognised by internal investigation after investigation. But accountability - and more importantly, a change in actual police procedure - rarely occurs, if only out of pity for the poor cops who end up as meat in the sandwich. Concluding they did the wrong thing might suggest blame, when, as often as not, they were, or thought they were following standard operating procedure in getting far too close to their victim, depriving both themselves and the victim of room to manoeuvre, in continually escalating the confrontation with more and more deadly weapons, and thinking that they are doing what they have been instructed to do - to take charge of and to secure the scene and the immediate environment. In much the same way as when armed gangs of police storm houses they believe (frequently wrongly, to harbour violent armed criminals) and end up shooting children, themselves or bystanders; getting too close deprives one of room to manoeuvre and perspective on the situation. The victim last week was not mentally ill. She suffered from Asperger's syndrome, or was, as some people put it, on the autism spectrum. The police who confronted her had no way of knowing that, but it happens so often that they cannot be excused because no one had told them. Nor was it counter-intuitive to realise that their focus on getting in her face before disarming her could hardly have been more calculated to increase her fear, and panic and desire to get away - the behaviour defensive police spokesmen were able to characterise as acting against her own best interests. So too increasingly loud shouting, getting closer and closer, and, of course, assaulting her person with powerful sprays and electrical currents. At no stage was this person committing an offence of any sort, apart, perhaps from carrying a knife in a public place without an obvious reasonable excuse. The knife was certainly not of a sort automatically prohibited by the Dangerous Weapons Act. These are hardly offences of the sort that warrant the death penalty. If any police officer, or member of the public, real or theoretical, was in danger it was not because the woman was advancing upon therm. Most often, however, the confrontation occurs because police, as much as their ultimate victim, have entirely misapprehended the situation at hand. And act before anything can be clarified. By the time of the fatal consequences (and, in such situations, it is almost invariably the civilian, not the police officer who is killed) the police officer may well have come into serious danger, but only by behaviour that unwittingly escalated the situation, accentuated the sense of crisis in the ultimate victim, and inspired some epic misjudgment. In about 60 per cent of such cases, the ultimate victim had a disabled perception of reality caused by serious mental illness, or was affected by alcohol or drugs. In most such cases, they were not presenting any clear and present danger to other people, or to police, until police adopted their "never take a backward step" tactics. I suspect the tendency for matters to boil into violent and sometimes fatal confrontation is being aggravated by the increased availability to police of sub-lethal weapons, such as batons, chemical spray and Tasers, and to the fact that these, often are inadequate to defuse matters that got out of hand primarily because police went for the firm and controlling, rather than the calming option. Perhaps - though I doubt it - there are more and more people disabled by drugs or alcohol making trouble for police at any given time. Public drunkenness, and street assaults occur a tiny fraction of that which was common 50 years ago. It is suggested that ice and some other modern drugs more quickly fuel uncontrollable crises than in earlier times, but this has to be weighed against evidence suggesting the level of random public violence has been continually declining for at least a century. (In 1920, for example, the Razor gangs of Darlinghurst caused more lasting grievous injury in a typical week than in an average year these days.) It is being said that there are more people with acute mental illness who are, or are perceived to be, dangerous to themselves and others. We also know that such people form a significant proportion of the homeless population, the jail population, and the population of those who, by living life in the relative raw on the streets are likely to come into collision with police. Yet it should be remembered that deinstitutionalisation, good and bad, has been a feature of Australian life for more than 40 years. Government, society, the helping professions and, all too often because of the failures of the first three, the police, have to cope with the consequences of inadequate services and solutions. But it is not clear that the quantity or quality of such cases is increasing, or that it is necessary to give police more and more powers, and weapons, either to deal with them or to protect themselves from their depredations. Indeed it was once an ordinary part of the skill set of any police officer, male or female, that they could handle a drunk, however aggressive, or even a small crowd of angry and belligerent men without any need for recourse to weapons, let alone arms. For many such police, resort to weapons and even tactical retreats tended to be seen as personally humiliating. One now retired ACT policeman once disposed of a man charging him with an axe, and another, foolishly I thought, once came on to a person desperately trying to light a stick of dynamite. Neither needed stress counselling or debriefing, and neither, in retirement, is said to suffer from post-traumatic stress. For a good many such older hands, the wisdom and street smartness of an earlier day is increasingly being buried under verbiage about risk management, occupational health and safety, and the promulgation of rules and regulations by bureaucratic middle management, a good deal of whom have never, in the expressive and dismissive police phrase "faced an angry man". But it also gets lost in a thicket between some police impulse to be tough, and to be seen to be tough, some yen for excitement against the boring humdrum of the patrol (the sort of foolishness that makes police car chases seem so exciting), and a tendency for police bureaucrats to think that they will be thought weak by their underlings if they fail total support to underlings, for action however unwise. The latter tendency is compounded by an undoubted tendency for cover-up when police investigate each other, and by the reluctance and timidity of many minor judicial officials, including coroners, to investigate or criticise police seen to be following regulations, however silly or homicidal. A definite proportion of such cases involve what police and others sometimes describe as "suicide by policeman" --- a desire on the part of the civilian that he or she escalate the conflict until police have little option but to defend themselves by deadly violence. But the problem is with the phrase little option --- police who think they are taking charge, and taking command and control of the environment by getting right up close are depriving themselves, as well as distressed and potentially dangerous people, of options. It is quite noteworthy that in a siege situation, for example at the Lindt cafe, the accepted protocol is to stand back, to play for time, and to negotiate. At all stages the intention is to de-escalate the situation, not to heighten the sense of confrontation by loud and louder commands, advancing on the person in question, and the offering of violence. As often as not, moreover, it is not only the eventual victim who is becoming wound up, but the police officer as well. American and British studies of the problem show that the prospect of an incident becoming fatal increases enormously when there is a language barrier problem, or when the civilian's own speech and behaviour suggests incoherence. As any tourist ultimately learns by experience, merely shouting more loudly and hysterically about dropping weapons, putting hands up and so on does not increase comprehension or compliance. The same studies suggest that the more police on the scene the higher the potential for someone to do something silly and dangerous, as often as not to a fellow officer. The longer the confrontation, the more likely that it will end with no one (including no police officer) hurt. The more that at least one officer is standing right back, directing the whole scene, including the officers closest to the event, the more likely that the issue will be resolved without injuries. The more trouble that police take, before bringing the incident to any conclusion, to discover something about the identity (and the condition) of the civilian, the more likely the issue will be defused, even when acute mental illness or drug incapacitation proves not to be a factor. There is no evidence that resorting to higher levels of violence has made police themselves safer, or less at risk from weapons in the hands of offenders. Indeed a good many old cops consider that it has been police, rather than criminals, who have caused what passes for an arms race between police and criminals, and that it has been police, rather than criminals, who have suffered most from the apparent psychological need felt by some cops that they carry a weapon. The evidence that being armed makes themselves, or the wider community safer is, on the evidence, as spurious as the American National Rifle Association argument that shooting massacres at American schools can be prevented by requiring teachers to carry. Police deal with hundreds of incidents involving people behaving oddly and perhaps menacingly every week. The overwhelming proportion are resolved by tolerance and common sense, as often as not without injury or arrest. Most cops have that common sense. But the alarming thing is that those who make a study of the very few cases that end up disastrously can hardly ever pinpoint what it was that made one incident (resolved easily) different from one that end in death and tears. It is not, usually, the behaviour of the person who dies. It's the judgment and counsel of those who are supervising the man and women who end up firing the weapons.

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