Australia: Video of Nonagenarian Taser Unreleased

Australian police don’t want to go public Pictures A body camera of one of its officers used a Taser on a 95-year-old woman with dementia, the 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 were called to a nursing home in New South Wales (southeast) on Wednesday to subdue a woman “wielding a knife,” police said in a statement. 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.

Legal requirements

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 would want to see it.’ He said he did not want to release them unless there was a process. He estimated that the investigation into the use of the Taser would “take time.”

Australian Senator David Shoebridge has called on police to release body camera footage. “The public has a right to know what the police have done, and the police cannot cover it up in a private inquiry where the police are investigating,” he asserted.

Uncertain prediction

Karen Webb promised the investigation, led by the State Police Homicide Squad and overseen by the Commission on Law Enforcement Conduct, would follow “due process”. The prognosis for Clare Nowland, who has 24 grandchildren and 31 great-grandchildren, is uncertain, Karen Webb said after spending time with her family at the hospital on Friday.

(AFP)