Page 5140 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 27 October 2010
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perhaps when other procedures or tools may be more appropriate. But I think that the evidence that they have been drawn—correct me if I am wrong, minister—11 times and only used two times certainly indicates that within ACT Policing the use of tasers has been prudent. It has been restricted and it demonstrates, I think, that the techniques and training used by ACT Policing in the use of tasers is very effective. That is proved essentially by their very limited use here in the ACT.
I would like to refer now to the use of tasers on people with mental illness. Sadly, that is an event that occurs quite regularly. In fact, in 85 per cent of cases where the Victorian critical incident response team activated tasers it was on people with a mental illness. The point is, though, that when people are suffering from a mental illness and are having an episode, de-escalation techniques may not be able to be used. You cannot deal necessarily with somebody who is suffering from a mental illness by use of non-lethal force, by grappling and so on.
There have been some sad incidents when people who are suffering with a mental illness, because police have not had the necessary tools available to them, such as tasers, have had to resort to lethal force. As a result, people suffering from a mental illness have actually been shot and either killed or very seriously injured. I believe that this was an issue that was discussed at the Labor Party conference this year. There was an example from an individual who had experienced this.
The same situation applies in respect of the use of weapons, including tasers, on children. Increasingly, police are confronted by children. There is a sad case reported in the Canberra Times today of a 15-year-old in Melbourne who was shot by police. I think it is a well-documented story. I am not going to assert that the use of or the availability of tasers necessarily would have prevented that, but I think that you could look at cases like that where if the front-line officers had had access to tasers, perhaps—I emphasise “perhaps”—a tragedy of that sort could certainly be avoided.
I was recently given the opportunity to join our local police force and the Chief Police Officer. I thank the minister for allowing me, Mr Seselja and Meredith Hunter to go out with the police force at night to experience what it is that the police have to deal with. It is a very difficult situation that they have to deal with. I think it is becoming well understood within the community that as the night goes on, our police force is confronted by people who are behaving extraordinarily violently. These are people who are often working in groups.
Police are confronted by males, and increasingly females, who are affected by drugs and alcohol, often in a cocktail that means that these people are actually almost impossible to deal with. Obviously, at the moment our police force have to deal with that with measures that basically are either non-lethal—by use of their batons, by capsicum spray or by grappling—or, the next measure they can use, by lethal force.
I think that all of us can envisage scenarios where our police force would be confronted by violent offenders, in Civic as an example, who are affected by drugs and/or alcohol and where the use of a taser could be highly appropriate to protect the public, to protect the individual that is conducting that behaviour and also very importantly to protect the police who are confronted by people who are behaving in that manner. I quote from Roman Quaedvlieg in the Canberra Times of 16 October:
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