Carers’ experiences of police, crisis intervention and coercion

He was sort of functioning but then he had another episode, which I can’t remember exactly which – so I think he had two or three and I called up the CAT team. They came and they were very good. At least he had something – that’s the critical thing for me always, if they come home then he responds well and he wants to talk about it. But it’s always hard to get him to go anywhere. But again once the CAT team thought he’d stabilised they left and there was no other support available and we just got on again and medication helped.

Eventually he, as it always seems to happen, he thinks he can manage without medication and he refused to take it and there’s nothing you can do about it and I think he had a relapse once again. I would prefer [it if] there would be people coming to him regularly at home and you know even [just] talking to him. That always worked with the CAT team when they came, they talked to him and he actually enjoyed that. At least he had something in the day, a visitor almost.

But you know, there comes a point when you have to weigh up the pros and cons. It’s just like ringing the CAT team. You have to say, ‘Do I listen to what their concern is?’ which is, ‘I don’t want to go to hospital’, or do you as a parent say, ‘No, I have to make a choice that’s in my child’s best interest’. And I’ve always done that. I’ve never hesitated to ring the CAT team and say, “”My son’s unwell. My belief is he needs hospitalisation””.

Have there been instances where you’ve felt that your suggestions have not been taken seriously? Or considered as [not] relevant to the case, you know, the [situation]?

Yeah, not really. I mean sometimes when you’ve rung the CAT team I’ve really had to argue hard and they mightn’t act as quickly as I think they should and two days later they are. And I go, “”Well, we could have had this happening two days ago, without me having to then do all this coordination as a carer””. So I’ve got to you know, get up to my son’s house, wait two hours in the car for the CAT team or when he was with his girlfriend, wait two hours in the car out the front while the CAT team coordinates all the people I’ve got to coordinate. Whereas if we’d done it two days before he would have been much more cooperative, you know, that sort of thing. So …

I was always glad when she was in hospital because I knew she was in a safe place. And then go from there, you know. So okay, once she comes out, then [we] clean up and get on with what was left over. But that is always a bit of relief for the carer to know, ‘Okay, so the police was involved and the neighbours were looking. Eh, who cares? It doesn’t matter anymore’. But you knew then they were in a safe place and that is – you can breathe and you can say, “”Okay, now hopefully they keep her for a week or two””, whatever. That is about the only thing, when everything comes to [that] stage, then we say, “”Thank heaven for that””, you know.

And that’s always, oh God, I remember once we called the CAT team and she presented as normal as can be. We all know that, oh God, it comes up all the time, and my husband said to one of the [members of the CAT team], “”Does my daughter have to make front page news before you take her into hospital?”” They wouldn’t. Well, the next day she was picked up by the police. But you know that by now. At the time we didn’t, we thought, ‘Oh yes, the CAT team was coming, oh thank God and they’ll take her in’.

After one of those episodes, I contacted the local mental health unit and – in the hope that he could be admitted for assessment and treatment. Because things were just going from bad to worse and I was very concerned for his safety. On contacting the local mental health unit I was told that if I was concerned about my son’s safety that I should ring an ambulance or the police. I was very loath to do that because there had been previous incidents where the police had been involved. And one police report made it very clear that, in fact, my son had tried to goad them into shooting him. So, obviously, that was a path I didn’t want to take.

And he got angry and I just thought, ‘No, he has to have help, he’s got to have help now, this can’t go on’. So, I went out the front with my mobile and I rang triage and I explained what was happening and she said, “”Well why haven’t you called the police?”” I said, “”Oh, no, he’s really sick and I just want some advice, I want some help, what can I do?”” “”No, we’ll just call the police, you stay outside and we’ll call the police””. I panicked because I didn’t want them to do that. But she said, “”Well there’s no other way, we’ll just have to call the police””. She was very – didn’t like the tone in her voice, it was very unsupportive.

So they arrived and they told me to stay outside, out there and they came in and when, as soon as he saw them, he just went berserk and swore at them and told them – chased them out. So over the next seven hours, I paced up and down the road for a couple of hours, then one of the neighbours called me in. They blocked off the area, told everybody to lock their doors and stay inside. They tried to talk him into coming out. They changed into a siege situation and he refused – he was petrified. He was defending himself. He thought he was going to be killed.

And then they rang, what do they call it, I think they call it, on TV they call it the SWAT team. I don’t know what they call it, critical response? I don’t know. So they came, they arrived at three o’clock in the morning. They were police – they weren’t mental health workers – police. So they came, got in a car and travelled to here. Got out of the car, went around the neighbours, came over the fence, shot him twice.

With rubber bullets?

Yeah, that’s three o’clock in the morning. By about twenty past three they were gone and they came to tell me that he’d been taken away. I didn’t know they were going to shoot him. I heard two gunshots.

So you didn’t know that it was rubber bullets?

No, I didn’t know that they had called the SWAT – that team. So I thought, yeah. So yes, and then the next morning I had a phone call to take down some belongings and in the meantime the police came and photographed, and visited me and wanted me to give an interview right there and then, a statement right there and then. But I didn’t know my – I was a mess and I didn’t know my rights and I would have gone with them then, except they were called away on something else.

But thank goodness they had because then I had time to get advice on what I should be doing to support my son. Ah yes, they did tell me that they nearly had to shoot him properly.

Well, he was quite depressed there for a while and he cried a little bit, but he’s been in hospital 11 times all told, some voluntary and some involuntary, but the involuntary ones were the worst. When he was taken away by the police and handcuffed, that really upset us. He never attempted suicide, but he had a fixation with water.

And he was jumping into, even in the freezing cold days, he would go to the beach and jump in the water. At my sister’s place he jumped into her pool with all his clothes on. And it was a freezing cold day, but he wasn’t attempting suicide. He just seemed to have a fixation with water. But now thankfully that has passed and he’s alright.

Well he was very ill, and the ambulance came and he wouldn’t get in. So then they had to get the police, and the police handcuffed him and took him out and that was very, very upsetting because it was – he was walked out and he didn’t want to go and it was very, very upsetting.

And did that happen just the once?

I think it happened twice.

And did you have to call the ambulance?

Yes. And I think the ambulance called the police.

And was that at your home?

Yes.

And everyone could see, all the neighbours?

Yeah, they could see, yes.

And did you feel that you were supported by your neighbours or …

Well, nobody said anything. They mightn’t have seen it because not everybody’s out in the street.

We got a phone call saying, “Can you come down to [outer city suburb] to the police station and pick up your child?” And we said, “He’s in bed asleep”, and they said, “No, he’s not. He’s here”. So we went down to the police station. We didn’t know, he’d got up out of bed and sneaked out through the front. Our bedroom was at the back of the house, his was right at the front of the house and he’d just sneaked out the front door.

And so when we got there his face was all smashed up. Police had taken him out of the car and thrown him down on the floor, put their foot on the back of his head and the only thing that was holding his teeth in was his braces. They were all smashed and broken. And I said, “I want to have a doctor look at him before you interview him”. And they said, “Why?” And I said, “Well, look at the state of him, and also he suffers from depression”. So they sort of whispered amongst themselves and they got a doctor to come out and he checked him over and he said, “Yeah, he’s okay to ask questions”.

And I said, “I want a psychiatrist to speak to him. He suffers from depression”. He said, “Doesn’t look too depressed to me”, and that was it. And the sergeant said to me as we were leaving – oh the, sorry, the officer came in and they’d obviously done a check on him. It was the first time he’d ever been in trouble with the police. And the police officer walked in and he said, “He’s clean”. He said to [son], “Where did you learn to drive? Where did you learn to drive like that?” And he said, “Oh, my stepfather takes me to the go-kart track and I’ve learnt to drive the go-karts”, and it wasn’t funny, you know – weird.

And anyway, so when we were taking him home the sergeant came out and he said, “And, you needn’t bother reporting this because I can tell you right now it won’t go anywhere”. And the first thing I wanted to do was report it. I felt like, you know, he’d been beaten really badly. If you want to deter a child, you don’t beat them up.

We’ve had some bad times when he’s been really ill and we’ve – the police have been involved. I guess that’s something else that I haven’t touched on, is the police being involved and I guess there are times and situations where the police do need to be involved but I think the police need training too in how to deal with a person with a mental illness. I guess it’s, you know, it’s a hard call for them and I really don’t know at the time if the police should have been involved. I feel if I had have been contacted in a couple of incidences [sic] I could have avoided the police being there.

Could you talk about what happened?

Well, one time he wandered off. It wasn’t a big deal, so at that stage the police were very helpful. We went looking for him – weren’t able to find him so we contacted the police and they found him, which was fine. They brought him home and they knew that he wasn’t well and that was good.

But there were times when his late dad called the police because they used to have arguments and the police would bundle him off in a divvy van a couple of times. Took him down to the police station, put him in a cell, called at a local GP and yeah, you know, I guess there’s been a couple of times that things like that have happened. If I had have been notified first I would have been able to help him avoid that situation.

That must have upset him a lot being put into a cell?

Oh yeah, and upset him a lot because – and sort of the trust in police diminished a lot. Whereas I’d always taught him if he needed help, you know, to – the police they would help him and get him home to me or get in contact with me.

When people are picked up because they’ve broken the law or they’ve had antisocial behaviour or they’re psychotic and it turns out, okay, this person’s been on ice (crystalline methamphetamine),* what’s the treatment plan? What do we do with them? We put them in jail, we charge them. We send them home when we think that they’re okay. That’s happened with my son, “”Send him out on the street again””. It’s not okay. It’s not okay.

These people need treatment and going into the court system, okay if they’ve broken the law that’s what’s got to happen. But they need treatment. Not time in jail where they will have access to even worse drugs, more freely available than they probably are on the street, which everybody is aware of. There’s sexual abuse, there’s all sorts of things. Jail is not the answer.

Prior to being taken into custody, [son] – actually, my understanding is, he contacted the police himself and said that he thought he’d done something wrong, something silly and he wanted to talk to them. They came up here, he apparently let them into the house, they sat down and chatted to him and one of them gave him a card and said, you know, “If you feel like you’re out of control, give us a call”. But when push came to shove, all they did was toss him in the clink and apparently there was a psych assessment done, by whom, I don’t know, in the cells and then he was released. So he was angry about that too.

Note: For information about ice (crystalline methamphetamine), see Australian drug information page.