An elderly man, who is currently hospitalized and has an “uncertain” vital prognosis, was subdued by police using a Taser on Wednesday. Police did not want to release images of the intervention.
Australian police do not plan to release body camera footage of an officer who used a Taser on a 95-year-old woman with dementia, a police chief said Saturday.
Three days after being shocked by a Taser in an operation that shocked Australians and grabbed international headlines, an elderly woman named Clare Nowland has been hospitalized in a critical condition.
Police said in a statement that officers were called to a nursing home in New South Wales on Wednesday to subdue a “woman with a knife”.
They urged Claire Nowland to drop her knife but she used a walker and walked towards them at a ‘slow pace’, prompting one of the officers to shoot her with his Taser.
Police raise “legal requirements” in disseminating images
Asked at a press conference about political calls to release footage of the intervention, New South Wales Police Commissioner Karen Webb said: “I don’t know why they want to see it.”
Citing “legal requirements” regarding surveillance devices, Karen Webb said she “doesn’t want to release them unless there is a process at the end (of the process).
He estimated that the investigation into the use of the Taser would “take time.”
“The public has a right to know”
Australian Senator David Shoebridge has asked police to release body camera footage.
“The public has a right to know what the police have done, and it cannot be covered up in a private inquiry where the police are investigating the police,” he asserted.
Karen Webb promised that the investigation, led by the State Police Homicide Squad and overseen by a commission on law enforcement conduct, would follow “due process.”
Clare Nowland, who has 24 grandchildren and 31 great-grandchildren, is uncertain about her life, Karen Webb said after spending time with her family in hospital on Friday.
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