April 13, 2025 • 20 mins
A year on from Joel Cauchi's apparently indiscriminate stabbing spree at the Westfield shopping centre in Bondi Junction, what have we learned?
Later this month, an inquest into the attack, which claimed the lives of six people and injured another 10, will begin.
Today, chief reporter Jordan Baker, and crime reporter Perry Duffin, on what the coroner hopes to learn and whether any intervention in the lead-up could have prevented Cauchi’s attack.
For more:
'At 3.33pm the bloody rampage began. By 3.39pm six innocent people lay dead or dying', Baker and Duffin, The Sydney Morning Herald.
Subscribe to The Age & SMH: https://subscribe.smh.com.au/
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
S1 (00:01):
From the newsrooms of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
This is the morning edition. I'm Samantha Selinger Morris. It's Monday,
April 14th. Dawn Singleton was queuing at a bakery in
the Westfield shopping centre in Sydney's eastern suburbs just after
3:30 p.m. on April 13th, 2024, when Joel Cauchi removed
(00:24):
a knife from his backpack and killed her. The 25
year old was the first victim of his apparently indiscriminate
stabbing spree, which lasted three minutes, during which he killed
six people and injured another ten. Four seconds after he
attacked Dawn Singleton, Cauchi stabbed Jade young, Youngs nine year
(00:44):
old daughter, was with her and saw a look of
confusion and pain break over her mother's face before she
died later this month. An inquest into the Bondi tragedy
will begin today. Chief reporter Jordan Baker and crime reporter
Perry Duffin on what the coroner will hope to learn,
and whether any intervention in the lead up could have
(01:07):
prevented Cauchi's attack. So Jordan and Perry, it's really hard
to believe that it's actually been a year and a
day since the Bondi tragedy. Just briefly, can you just
tell us what happened on April 13th, 2024, at the
(01:28):
Westfield shopping Centre in Sydney's eastern suburbs? Perry, I'll go
to you first.
S2 (01:33):
So it began in Maroubra, actually at about 630 that morning.
Joel Cauchi, 40 year old. He was an unmedicated man
living with schizophrenia for his entire adult life. He was
sleeping rough at Maroubra Beach Pavilion. And he woke up.
He went to a storage locker that he had in Waterloo,
(01:53):
and he collected a bunch of items, charged his phone.
And one of the things that he collected was a
backpack that had a very large hunting knife in it.
and over the next few hours. Police have tracked his
movements across the city. He ultimately wound up at Bondi Junction,
Westfield at about 3:30 in the afternoon, and he went
(02:16):
in on the ground floor just off Oxford Street and
stood behind Dawn Singleton, who was at a bakery, and
pulled out his knife after a few minutes and began
stabbing people.
S3 (02:34):
Oh my God.
S4 (02:39):
I can tell you that we believe that up to,
or at least six people have either been stabbed or
shot inside the Bondi Junction at Westfield Centre.
S5 (02:50):
Sorry, can you tell me that, sir? So what you're hearing.
S6 (02:52):
He saved the baby. That man.
S5 (02:54):
There. Shocking footage. Now what you are seeing on the screen. Now,
the man at the top of the escalator is holding
a bollard in the white shirt. he's attempting to fight
off the attacker who is down below.
S2 (03:08):
It was over the course of just a few minutes
and he killed six people, injured more, and was ultimately
shot dead by Inspector Amy Scott from New South Wales Police.
S7 (03:22):
The extraordinary acts of bravery that we saw from everyday civilians,
it was second to none really importantly as well are
those victims, their family and friends, who will be forever
dealing with an unfathomable tragedy.
S1 (03:40):
Jordan, over to you, because you've written so movingly about
just the other day being at the centre and about,
you know, tourists moving about, oblivious to the shadow of
grief in its walls. But what have you heard from
the families of the victims of this tragedy over the
last year? You know, perhaps in terms of its impact
on them?
S8 (04:00):
Look, most of them haven't said anything, and Uh, they've been,
you know, dealing with what is a horrific grief. Um,
you know, they've been doing it mostly privately, you know,
and they they owe us nothing, uh, you know, in
terms of sort of updating us. We do know that, um,
(04:24):
Ashley Good's partner, uh, spoke out in August last year,
thanked everyone for their support. Ashley good, obviously was the
young mother with a nine month old baby, uh, whose
baby was stabbed. She, you know, took on the attacker.
She was fatally stabbed and died of her injuries. But
the baby survived. So he talked about, you know, how
horrendous it is to navigate the world. Just him and
(04:46):
his baby, obviously, with their friends and family's support, but
thanked everyone, uh, for the kindness. You know, Jade young left,
two daughters, um, and her husband. So her mother, uh,
did a beautiful eulogy which was then posted on the
mama mia site, uh, talking about how, you know, she
went back to Bondi and and lay on the floor
(05:08):
where her daughter was stabbed and sobbed inconsolably and, you know,
had just been heading into retirement but will now devote
the rest of her life to her, her granddaughters. Um,
you know, Dawn Singleton's was about to get married when
she was killed. She was the first person killed outside
that sourdough bakery on level four at, um, Westfield. And
(05:31):
she's the daughter of the ad executive, John Singleton. Um,
you know her fiance? She was very, very close to
her mother and sister. So they have been dealing with
their grief. But I went up to Bondi, uh, the
other day just to have a look at the shopping
centre to see what it was like there. Now, I
went up to the sourdough bakery. I had a look
(05:52):
at the, um, you know, the level five area where
Inspector Amy Scott shot Joe Cauchi six minutes after he
stabbed his first victim. You know, he was killed. It
was it was a very, very, very fast. fast event. Um, and,
you know, life has got life has returned to normal.
There are shoppers there. There are people sipping coffee in
(06:14):
the bakery. They were, you know, little children playing in
the play gym right outside where he was shot. Life
goes on. There is no permanent marker in the shopping
center to what happened. But you can, you know, you
can feel a sense of it when you're walking through.
S1 (06:30):
And, Perry, I wanted to turn to you because you
have reported on for us to hear. He was the
30 year old security guard who was killed while trying
to save shoppers. Many of us would remember that was
his first day shift as a security guard there. And
his brothers have spoken about Faraz and in in particular,
what they hope might come of the inquest. So can
you just tell me what they've said about that?
S2 (06:51):
Yeah. So they moved over here. Two of his brothers
moved to Sydney, um, pretty much immediately after the tragedy.
And Faraz had been living in Australia and devoting himself
to community work quite a bit. He was, you know,
helping around the mosque and charities and even clean up
Australia Day, and he was sending money back to support
(07:12):
the family. They came over here and, you know, arrived
in the country that for us was really making his
new life. But they arrived for his funeral. And Prime
Minister Anthony Albanese was giving a eulogy there it was,
you know, filled with mourners. And they still go to
that mosque every single day where the funeral was held.
And we spent time with them at the mosque this week.
(07:34):
And they spoke about the inquest with so much grace.
They said that, you know, mental health needs to be destigmatized.
We need to introduce ways in Australia to deal with it,
because their hope is that if we can create a
more robust mental health system, we can prevent something happening
(07:55):
like this again. And so a lot of the inquest
for them, which they'll go to every single day, is
going to be about the mental health system in New
South Wales and more broadly in Australia.
S1 (08:07):
And Perry, I wanted to just ask you more broadly,
what will the corner actually be looking at in this case?
S2 (08:12):
Well, so the coroner's going to be looking at the
way a bunch of systems interacted with Joel Cauchi before
this event. So Joel Cauchi grew up in Queensland, um,
mostly in Toowoomba. And he was treated for his schizophrenia
for a lot of his life. But for the last
(08:33):
five or 4 or 5 years of his life, he
was either coming off his medicine or completely unmedicated at
the direction of doctors. And so there's going to be
a look at his treatment regimes and whether or not
there were opportunities to better treat him with the mental
health system. There's also going to be examinations of police
(08:53):
interactions with Joel Cauchi. That includes Queensland police, who were
called to his parents home, um, when his parents, or
in fact, Joel Cauchi himself, raised concerns about knives, he
had a bit of a fixation with knives. And there's
also going to be an examination of New South Wales
(09:15):
interactions with him, New South Wales Police interactions, where they
spoke to couch while he was at Maroubra Beach. They
had some awareness of his mental health condition and perhaps
his interest in knives. And so there's going to be
a discussion about whether there were opportunities to intervene in
(09:38):
Cauchi's life and prevent this from happening in the first place.
S8 (09:42):
As Perry has said, it's going to be very much
about the management of his mental health issues. You know,
we know he grew up in Queensland. While he'd never
been charged by police with anything, we know that police
had interacted with him and we know that Queensland police
was aware of his, um, mental illnesses. At one point,
(10:05):
he was sort of pulled over for erratic driving. Um,
at what point they became aware of his mental health issues.
He'd also called the police. I think he was living
in Toowoomba at the time. Called the police because he
he was concerned that his father was stealing his knives.
He had a fascination with knives. And at that point,
the officers who went to the Calgary home were told
(10:27):
about his mental health issues or were told about his
that he was living with schizophrenia. Um, they were told
about his father's concerns about his access to these knives. Um,
they did. We understand from the information that's already given
to a preliminary opening of the inquest. Uh, notify a unit,
a mental health unit within Queensland Police to raise concerns.
(10:49):
But it appears nothing else was done at that point.
He was unmedicated for the last a few years of
his life. And by 2023, was living. Living homeless, really
around the Maroubra Beach area.
S1 (11:06):
We'll be right back. And Jordan, you have written that
this inquest really is going to explore, I guess, what
is really a significant issue facing police forces across Australia,
and that is the role that police play or should
play in mental health care. So can you walk us
through this a little bit?
S8 (11:25):
New South Wales Police did a recent mental health review
their interactions with with mental health patients and mental health systems.
So they found that on average, a mental health incident
was attended by New South Wales Police officers every nine minutes.
So police have really become a frontline response to mental
(11:47):
health issues within the community. Now, what the Mental Health
Act says is that the threshold at which police should
become involved is if the officer believes on reasonable grounds.
And I'm just reading this out that the person is
committing or has recently committed an offence, or that the
person has recently attempted to kill themselves, or it's probable
(12:10):
that they'll attempt to kill someone else. So it's actually
quite a high threshold for police to become involved in
mental health issues. But because often there is no other
available response, it is the police that are getting called
to these things. And we've seen time and time again,
this can actually end in tragedy. One recent case, which
(12:33):
was Clare Nowland, was a dementia patient.
S9 (12:37):
Good evening. We begin with breaking news in the tasering
of 95 year old Clare Nowlan at a nursing home
in the New South Wales Snowy Mountains region.
S8 (12:45):
Police were called there because the hospital didn't quite know
how to handle that, and that ended in Clare Nowlan's death.
S5 (12:53):
Aggressive brutality, inhumane, incomprehensible and avoidable. Those are some of
the words from the now.
S8 (13:01):
So police will argue that it's that it shouldn't be
their responsibility. And a lot of other people agree with that.
The problem seems to be resources elsewhere. And police have
been talking to, you know, New South Wales Health. They've
been talking to ambulance services and mental health services. And
(13:22):
what there seems to be is, is just a lack
of resources from those other agencies to take the heat
off police. You'll find a lot of people in the
mental health world believe the police are absolutely not the
right people to deal with this and that. In fact,
their presence, particularly if the if the patient has had
(13:42):
interactions with police before, can actually be really distressing and
escalate the situation. So there's been a sort of all
sorts of work done to try and work out how
to manage this. You know, do we have police mental
health officers in police stations? But again, you know, unless
they're fully resourced, unless you have these people available for
24 hours a day in every single police station and
(14:04):
multiple people, it's not working. And the other issue is
Amanda Cohen, who is a Greens MP in New South
Wales who headed a parliamentary committee into mental health responses
in the community, basically said, look, unless we really beef
up the resources here, then this will continue to fall
into the laps of police who really shouldn't be dealing
(14:26):
with it. They have they have a job and their
job is crime. It's not healthcare.
S1 (14:33):
And Perry, this coronial inquest, it's actually not without its
own controversy. So why is that?
S2 (14:38):
Well the coronial inquest was expedited. So it's come around
within a year. That's pretty unusual. Inquests usually take a
couple of years. Often they'll wait for a criminal trial
to wrap up. And so as a result you can
often be, you know, 3 or 4 years before it
gets to this point, but there's not going to be
a criminal trial because Joel Cauchi is dead. And so
(15:00):
part of the reason for that was to be more, um,
victim focused and to get answers for the families as
quickly as possible. But it's very obvious that a lot
of the families are still really very cutely grieving. This,
and the Singleton family is perhaps the clearest example where
(15:20):
Dawn Singleton's father, John businessman, a very prominent Australian, has
actually asked for the inquest not to go ahead. He
says that it doesn't really offer anything. It's not going
to provide any answers. Whereas other members of his family
or Dawn's family are very keen for it to go ahead.
They want this to happen. They've wholeheartedly supported it and
(15:43):
many other families supported as well. They're just trying to
figure out if there were opportunities to stop this that
were not taken. And but it's just a fact of
how quickly it's come around. You can you can tell
when dealing with these people, when speaking to these people
that they're still it's very, very raw and that, you know,
(16:05):
has to do with the magnitude of the loss and
it has to do with the time.
S1 (16:09):
And so, Jordan, finally, you know, what do you hope
the outcome of this inquest will be? Do you think
it will expose a single missed opportunity that could have
prevented such an attack, or prevent future incidents like this
from occurring?
S8 (16:22):
Look, I think there'll be a couple of things. The
mental health care element of this will be very, very interesting.
Not just the interaction with police and police powers in
this space, but also how county's mental health issues were managed.
He had been in the public system for about ten years,
and then he moved into the private system. So the
(16:43):
doctors who medicated him and made decisions about his medication
will be called to give evidence. So that will be
a big part of it. The other interesting element, I think,
in terms of public safety will be how the shopping
centre handled it, because there have already been sort of
issues raised in the inquest about the fact that while
even the injured security guards, there were two security guards,
(17:07):
one of them died, one of them was injured, but
the injured one called this in to his bosses at
the management of the shopping centre. And yet the alarm
didn't go off until after Joel Kowsky. Had been shot dead.
So there was a lot of confusion. And obviously this
happened very quickly, six minutes between the first stabbing and
Cauchi's death. You know, it it unfolded very, very rapidly.
(17:28):
But there will be questions there, I think, about systems
in shopping centres, you know, how do they respond to
this sort of stuff going forward? Are the security services,
you know, properly briefed? Do they understand what the systems are?
So I think in terms of public safety, that will
actually perhaps be one of the more interesting areas that
(17:51):
they could make some findings in.
S1 (17:54):
Definitely. And I guess, Perry, just over to you. Is
there any outcome that you hope for from this inquest?
S2 (17:59):
I think I am most interested in how do we
treat people who are acutely unwell, but have, you know,
a chronic mental health issue? Um, if you talk to police,
they don't want to bear the sole responsibility because very
often it does end in tragedy. Um, and it, it ruins, um,
(18:21):
you know, the lives of people who have to respond
to people who are very unwell. Um, just days before
Joel Cauchi's attack, I was speaking to a police officer
who said that he was called to a person who
said they were going to stab their family unless they
were sectioned. The police tried to section this person, but
(18:41):
within 24 hours they had been ejected from the mental
health system, which is really understaffed, under-resourced. And that person
went back to their family and tried to kill them,
stabbed them. And these there were 2 or 3 people
left fighting for life. And that was days before Bondi.
So police deal with it every day. Um, they don't
(19:04):
want this. They know that this doesn't work. They want
to see changes as much as anyone in the community
who's paying attention to this issue wants to see changes.
There has to be a way to deal with it.
That isn't just by sending the cops. Um, you know,
there has to be ways to deal with this before
it gets to that point.
S1 (19:26):
Well, thank you so much, Jordan and Perry, for your time.
S2 (19:30):
Thank you.
S8 (19:30):
Thanks, Sam.
S1 (19:32):
Today's episode of The Morning Edition was produced by myself
and Josh towers. Our executive producer is Tammy Mills. Tom
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(19:54):
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your inbox every morning. Links are in the show. Notes.
I'm Samantha Selinger. Morris. Thanks for listening.
From the newsrooms of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
This is the morning edition. I'm Samantha Selinger Morris. It's Monday,
April 14th. Dawn Singleton was queuing at a bakery in
the Westfield shopping centre in Sydney's eastern suburbs just after
3:30 p.m. on April 13th, 2024, when Joel Cauchi removed
(00:24):
a knife from his backpack and killed her. The 25
year old was the first victim of his apparently indiscriminate
stabbing spree, which lasted three minutes, during which he killed
six people and injured another ten. Four seconds after he
attacked Dawn Singleton, Cauchi stabbed Jade young, Youngs nine year
(00:44):
old daughter, was with her and saw a look of
confusion and pain break over her mother's face before she
died later this month. An inquest into the Bondi tragedy
will begin today. Chief reporter Jordan Baker and crime reporter
Perry Duffin on what the coroner will hope to learn,
and whether any intervention in the lead up could have
(01:07):
prevented Cauchi's attack. So Jordan and Perry, it's really hard
to believe that it's actually been a year and a
day since the Bondi tragedy. Just briefly, can you just
tell us what happened on April 13th, 2024, at the
(01:28):
Westfield shopping Centre in Sydney's eastern suburbs? Perry, I'll go
to you first.
S2 (01:33):
So it began in Maroubra, actually at about 630 that morning.
Joel Cauchi, 40 year old. He was an unmedicated man
living with schizophrenia for his entire adult life. He was
sleeping rough at Maroubra Beach Pavilion. And he woke up.
He went to a storage locker that he had in Waterloo,
(01:53):
and he collected a bunch of items, charged his phone.
And one of the things that he collected was a
backpack that had a very large hunting knife in it.
and over the next few hours. Police have tracked his
movements across the city. He ultimately wound up at Bondi Junction,
Westfield at about 3:30 in the afternoon, and he went
(02:16):
in on the ground floor just off Oxford Street and
stood behind Dawn Singleton, who was at a bakery, and
pulled out his knife after a few minutes and began
stabbing people.
S3 (02:34):
Oh my God.
S4 (02:39):
I can tell you that we believe that up to,
or at least six people have either been stabbed or
shot inside the Bondi Junction at Westfield Centre.
S5 (02:50):
Sorry, can you tell me that, sir? So what you're hearing.
S6 (02:52):
He saved the baby. That man.
S5 (02:54):
There. Shocking footage. Now what you are seeing on the screen. Now,
the man at the top of the escalator is holding
a bollard in the white shirt. he's attempting to fight
off the attacker who is down below.
S2 (03:08):
It was over the course of just a few minutes
and he killed six people, injured more, and was ultimately
shot dead by Inspector Amy Scott from New South Wales Police.
S7 (03:22):
The extraordinary acts of bravery that we saw from everyday civilians,
it was second to none really importantly as well are
those victims, their family and friends, who will be forever
dealing with an unfathomable tragedy.
S1 (03:40):
Jordan, over to you, because you've written so movingly about
just the other day being at the centre and about,
you know, tourists moving about, oblivious to the shadow of
grief in its walls. But what have you heard from
the families of the victims of this tragedy over the
last year? You know, perhaps in terms of its impact
on them?
S8 (04:00):
Look, most of them haven't said anything, and Uh, they've been,
you know, dealing with what is a horrific grief. Um,
you know, they've been doing it mostly privately, you know,
and they they owe us nothing, uh, you know, in
terms of sort of updating us. We do know that, um,
(04:24):
Ashley Good's partner, uh, spoke out in August last year,
thanked everyone for their support. Ashley good, obviously was the
young mother with a nine month old baby, uh, whose
baby was stabbed. She, you know, took on the attacker.
She was fatally stabbed and died of her injuries. But
the baby survived. So he talked about, you know, how
horrendous it is to navigate the world. Just him and
(04:46):
his baby, obviously, with their friends and family's support, but
thanked everyone, uh, for the kindness. You know, Jade young left,
two daughters, um, and her husband. So her mother, uh,
did a beautiful eulogy which was then posted on the
mama mia site, uh, talking about how, you know, she
went back to Bondi and and lay on the floor
(05:08):
where her daughter was stabbed and sobbed inconsolably and, you know,
had just been heading into retirement but will now devote
the rest of her life to her, her granddaughters. Um,
you know, Dawn Singleton's was about to get married when
she was killed. She was the first person killed outside
that sourdough bakery on level four at, um, Westfield. And
(05:31):
she's the daughter of the ad executive, John Singleton. Um,
you know her fiance? She was very, very close to
her mother and sister. So they have been dealing with
their grief. But I went up to Bondi, uh, the
other day just to have a look at the shopping
centre to see what it was like there. Now, I
went up to the sourdough bakery. I had a look
(05:52):
at the, um, you know, the level five area where
Inspector Amy Scott shot Joe Cauchi six minutes after he
stabbed his first victim. You know, he was killed. It
was it was a very, very, very fast. fast event. Um, and,
you know, life has got life has returned to normal.
There are shoppers there. There are people sipping coffee in
(06:14):
the bakery. They were, you know, little children playing in
the play gym right outside where he was shot. Life
goes on. There is no permanent marker in the shopping
center to what happened. But you can, you know, you
can feel a sense of it when you're walking through.
S1 (06:30):
And, Perry, I wanted to turn to you because you
have reported on for us to hear. He was the
30 year old security guard who was killed while trying
to save shoppers. Many of us would remember that was
his first day shift as a security guard there. And
his brothers have spoken about Faraz and in in particular,
what they hope might come of the inquest. So can
you just tell me what they've said about that?
S2 (06:51):
Yeah. So they moved over here. Two of his brothers
moved to Sydney, um, pretty much immediately after the tragedy.
And Faraz had been living in Australia and devoting himself
to community work quite a bit. He was, you know,
helping around the mosque and charities and even clean up
Australia Day, and he was sending money back to support
(07:12):
the family. They came over here and, you know, arrived
in the country that for us was really making his
new life. But they arrived for his funeral. And Prime
Minister Anthony Albanese was giving a eulogy there it was,
you know, filled with mourners. And they still go to
that mosque every single day where the funeral was held.
And we spent time with them at the mosque this week.
(07:34):
And they spoke about the inquest with so much grace.
They said that, you know, mental health needs to be destigmatized.
We need to introduce ways in Australia to deal with it,
because their hope is that if we can create a
more robust mental health system, we can prevent something happening
(07:55):
like this again. And so a lot of the inquest
for them, which they'll go to every single day, is
going to be about the mental health system in New
South Wales and more broadly in Australia.
S1 (08:07):
And Perry, I wanted to just ask you more broadly,
what will the corner actually be looking at in this case?
S2 (08:12):
Well, so the coroner's going to be looking at the
way a bunch of systems interacted with Joel Cauchi before
this event. So Joel Cauchi grew up in Queensland, um,
mostly in Toowoomba. And he was treated for his schizophrenia
for a lot of his life. But for the last
(08:33):
five or 4 or 5 years of his life, he
was either coming off his medicine or completely unmedicated at
the direction of doctors. And so there's going to be
a look at his treatment regimes and whether or not
there were opportunities to better treat him with the mental
health system. There's also going to be examinations of police
(08:53):
interactions with Joel Cauchi. That includes Queensland police, who were
called to his parents home, um, when his parents, or
in fact, Joel Cauchi himself, raised concerns about knives, he
had a bit of a fixation with knives. And there's
also going to be an examination of New South Wales
(09:15):
interactions with him, New South Wales Police interactions, where they
spoke to couch while he was at Maroubra Beach. They
had some awareness of his mental health condition and perhaps
his interest in knives. And so there's going to be
a discussion about whether there were opportunities to intervene in
(09:38):
Cauchi's life and prevent this from happening in the first place.
S8 (09:42):
As Perry has said, it's going to be very much
about the management of his mental health issues. You know,
we know he grew up in Queensland. While he'd never
been charged by police with anything, we know that police
had interacted with him and we know that Queensland police
was aware of his, um, mental illnesses. At one point,
(10:05):
he was sort of pulled over for erratic driving. Um,
at what point they became aware of his mental health issues.
He'd also called the police. I think he was living
in Toowoomba at the time. Called the police because he
he was concerned that his father was stealing his knives.
He had a fascination with knives. And at that point,
the officers who went to the Calgary home were told
(10:27):
about his mental health issues or were told about his
that he was living with schizophrenia. Um, they were told
about his father's concerns about his access to these knives. Um,
they did. We understand from the information that's already given
to a preliminary opening of the inquest. Uh, notify a unit,
a mental health unit within Queensland Police to raise concerns.
(10:49):
But it appears nothing else was done at that point.
He was unmedicated for the last a few years of
his life. And by 2023, was living. Living homeless, really
around the Maroubra Beach area.
S1 (11:06):
We'll be right back. And Jordan, you have written that
this inquest really is going to explore, I guess, what
is really a significant issue facing police forces across Australia,
and that is the role that police play or should
play in mental health care. So can you walk us
through this a little bit?
S8 (11:25):
New South Wales Police did a recent mental health review
their interactions with with mental health patients and mental health systems.
So they found that on average, a mental health incident
was attended by New South Wales Police officers every nine minutes.
So police have really become a frontline response to mental
(11:47):
health issues within the community. Now, what the Mental Health
Act says is that the threshold at which police should
become involved is if the officer believes on reasonable grounds.
And I'm just reading this out that the person is
committing or has recently committed an offence, or that the
person has recently attempted to kill themselves, or it's probable
(12:10):
that they'll attempt to kill someone else. So it's actually
quite a high threshold for police to become involved in
mental health issues. But because often there is no other
available response, it is the police that are getting called
to these things. And we've seen time and time again,
this can actually end in tragedy. One recent case, which
(12:33):
was Clare Nowland, was a dementia patient.
S9 (12:37):
Good evening. We begin with breaking news in the tasering
of 95 year old Clare Nowlan at a nursing home
in the New South Wales Snowy Mountains region.
S8 (12:45):
Police were called there because the hospital didn't quite know
how to handle that, and that ended in Clare Nowlan's death.
S5 (12:53):
Aggressive brutality, inhumane, incomprehensible and avoidable. Those are some of
the words from the now.
S8 (13:01):
So police will argue that it's that it shouldn't be
their responsibility. And a lot of other people agree with that.
The problem seems to be resources elsewhere. And police have
been talking to, you know, New South Wales Health. They've
been talking to ambulance services and mental health services. And
(13:22):
what there seems to be is, is just a lack
of resources from those other agencies to take the heat
off police. You'll find a lot of people in the
mental health world believe the police are absolutely not the
right people to deal with this and that. In fact,
their presence, particularly if the if the patient has had
(13:42):
interactions with police before, can actually be really distressing and
escalate the situation. So there's been a sort of all
sorts of work done to try and work out how
to manage this. You know, do we have police mental
health officers in police stations? But again, you know, unless
they're fully resourced, unless you have these people available for
24 hours a day in every single police station and
(14:04):
multiple people, it's not working. And the other issue is
Amanda Cohen, who is a Greens MP in New South
Wales who headed a parliamentary committee into mental health responses
in the community, basically said, look, unless we really beef
up the resources here, then this will continue to fall
into the laps of police who really shouldn't be dealing
(14:26):
with it. They have they have a job and their
job is crime. It's not healthcare.
S1 (14:33):
And Perry, this coronial inquest, it's actually not without its
own controversy. So why is that?
S2 (14:38):
Well the coronial inquest was expedited. So it's come around
within a year. That's pretty unusual. Inquests usually take a
couple of years. Often they'll wait for a criminal trial
to wrap up. And so as a result you can
often be, you know, 3 or 4 years before it
gets to this point, but there's not going to be
a criminal trial because Joel Cauchi is dead. And so
(15:00):
part of the reason for that was to be more, um,
victim focused and to get answers for the families as
quickly as possible. But it's very obvious that a lot
of the families are still really very cutely grieving. This,
and the Singleton family is perhaps the clearest example where
(15:20):
Dawn Singleton's father, John businessman, a very prominent Australian, has
actually asked for the inquest not to go ahead. He
says that it doesn't really offer anything. It's not going
to provide any answers. Whereas other members of his family
or Dawn's family are very keen for it to go ahead.
They want this to happen. They've wholeheartedly supported it and
(15:43):
many other families supported as well. They're just trying to
figure out if there were opportunities to stop this that
were not taken. And but it's just a fact of
how quickly it's come around. You can you can tell
when dealing with these people, when speaking to these people
that they're still it's very, very raw and that, you know,
(16:05):
has to do with the magnitude of the loss and
it has to do with the time.
S1 (16:09):
And so, Jordan, finally, you know, what do you hope
the outcome of this inquest will be? Do you think
it will expose a single missed opportunity that could have
prevented such an attack, or prevent future incidents like this
from occurring?
S8 (16:22):
Look, I think there'll be a couple of things. The
mental health care element of this will be very, very interesting.
Not just the interaction with police and police powers in
this space, but also how county's mental health issues were managed.
He had been in the public system for about ten years,
and then he moved into the private system. So the
(16:43):
doctors who medicated him and made decisions about his medication
will be called to give evidence. So that will be
a big part of it. The other interesting element, I think,
in terms of public safety will be how the shopping
centre handled it, because there have already been sort of
issues raised in the inquest about the fact that while
even the injured security guards, there were two security guards,
(17:07):
one of them died, one of them was injured, but
the injured one called this in to his bosses at
the management of the shopping centre. And yet the alarm
didn't go off until after Joel Kowsky. Had been shot dead.
So there was a lot of confusion. And obviously this
happened very quickly, six minutes between the first stabbing and
Cauchi's death. You know, it it unfolded very, very rapidly.
(17:28):
But there will be questions there, I think, about systems
in shopping centres, you know, how do they respond to
this sort of stuff going forward? Are the security services,
you know, properly briefed? Do they understand what the systems are?
So I think in terms of public safety, that will
actually perhaps be one of the more interesting areas that
(17:51):
they could make some findings in.
S1 (17:54):
Definitely. And I guess, Perry, just over to you. Is
there any outcome that you hope for from this inquest?
S2 (17:59):
I think I am most interested in how do we
treat people who are acutely unwell, but have, you know,
a chronic mental health issue? Um, if you talk to police,
they don't want to bear the sole responsibility because very
often it does end in tragedy. Um, and it, it ruins, um,
(18:21):
you know, the lives of people who have to respond
to people who are very unwell. Um, just days before
Joel Cauchi's attack, I was speaking to a police officer
who said that he was called to a person who
said they were going to stab their family unless they
were sectioned. The police tried to section this person, but
(18:41):
within 24 hours they had been ejected from the mental
health system, which is really understaffed, under-resourced. And that person
went back to their family and tried to kill them,
stabbed them. And these there were 2 or 3 people
left fighting for life. And that was days before Bondi.
So police deal with it every day. Um, they don't
(19:04):
want this. They know that this doesn't work. They want
to see changes as much as anyone in the community
who's paying attention to this issue wants to see changes.
There has to be a way to deal with it.
That isn't just by sending the cops. Um, you know,
there has to be ways to deal with this before
it gets to that point.
S1 (19:26):
Well, thank you so much, Jordan and Perry, for your time.
S2 (19:30):
Thank you.
S8 (19:30):
Thanks, Sam.
S1 (19:32):
Today's episode of The Morning Edition was produced by myself
and Josh towers. Our executive producer is Tammy Mills. Tom
McKendrick is our head of audio. To listen to our
episodes as soon as they drop, follow the Morning Edition
on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Our
newsrooms are powered by subscriptions, so to support independent journalism,
(19:54):
visit The Age or smh.com.au. Subscribe. And to stay up
to date, sign up to our Morning Edition newsletter to
receive a summary of the day's most important news in
your inbox every morning. Links are in the show. Notes.
I'm Samantha Selinger. Morris. Thanks for listening.
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