One of Queensland\u2019s most senior police officers says the state\u2019s mental health legislation should be amended to make it easier for police to intervene when a person\u2019s mental health makes them a risk to others.<\/p>\n
Acting deputy commissioner Mark Kelly told the New South Wales<\/a> coroner\u2019s court on Wednesday that Queensland\u2019s Mental Health Act had caused \u201cconfusion\u201d.<\/p>\n Kelly was speaking on the final day of testimony at the five-week inquest into the April 2024 stabbing attack at Westfield Bondi Junction.<\/p>\n Schizophrenic man Joel Cauchi, 40, killed Ashlee Good, 38, Jade Young, 47, Yixuan Cheng, 27, Pikria Darchia, 55, Dawn Singleton, 25, and Faraz Tahir, 30, and injured 10 others before being shot and killed by police officer Amy Scott.<\/p>\n State coroner Teresa O\u2019Sullivan has heard officers who attended Cauchi\u2019s Toowoomba home in January 2023, after his father confiscated his knife collection<\/a>, considered he had a mental disturbance but that it didn\u2019t meet the threshold for intervention under the act.<\/p>\n Queensland\u2019s mental health legislation differs from NSW in that emergency mental health interventions by the police are only covered when people pose a serious risk to themselves.<\/p>\n Kelly agreed on Wednesday with expert witnesses who appeared previously when he stated that the Mental Health Act should be changed so police could send people for emergency assessment if they posed a risk to others.<\/p>\n \u201cIt should be amended,\u201d Kelly said of the act, which was changed in 2016 and included \u201cvery high\u201d thresholds for emergency intervention.<\/p>\n \u201cThe legislation does provide some confusion for our police,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n The senior counsel assisting, Dr Peggy Dwyer SC, said the inquest was likely to recommend that the legislation be amended.<\/p>\n Kelly said police were increasingly called to mental health incidents. The growth in cases was related to domestic and family violence, homelessness and increased awareness of the issue.<\/p>\n Queensland police service call-outs involving a person with a mental illness or disturbance averaged 51,000 a year over the past four to five years, he said.<\/p>\n That number had risen this year, with 21,600 calls in the first four months of 2025. \u201cIt is the burden of demand that is putting pressure on police,\u201d Kelly told the court.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Sign up to Breaking News Australia<\/p>\n Get the most important news as it breaks<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: <\/strong>Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Dwyer said \u201cwe hear throughout Australia that police are increasingly asked to respond to mental health crises as part of their day-to-day work\u201d and the \u201csystem is groaning\u201d under that pressure.<\/p>\n Supt Kirsty Hales, the NSW police commander overseeing mental health, said that \u201cwould be a fair assessment\u201d.<\/p>\n In NSW, police attend or record a mental health incident every nine minutes and there was a 40% rise in incidents between 2018 and 2022, the court heard.<\/p>\n Hales said the problem was \u201cinternational\u201d and the community needed alternatives to the police when someone was in mental health distress.<\/p>\n Hales said police officers were not clinically trained and were forced to make \u201ca lay person\u2019s assessment\u201d of a person\u2019s mental health when considering the Mental Health Act.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not necessarily just a police position that we shouldn\u2019t be the main responding agency to community distress,\u201d she said, adding that police officers could be an escalating factor in mental health incidents.<\/p>\n Police faced the consequences of discharging a firearm when \u201csomething goes wrong\u201d, the court heard. They also faced the recognised phenomenon of \u201csuicide by cop\u201d.<\/p>\n NSW ambulance officers held broader powers than police when dealing with a person who was mentally ill or mentally disturbed, the court heard. The inquest continues.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One of Queensland\u2019s most senior police officers says the state\u2019s mental health legislation should be amended to make…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":137755,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4317],"tags":[105,218,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-137754","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mental-health","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-mental-health","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114583670487227560","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137754","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=137754"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137754\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/137755"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=137754"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=137754"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=137754"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}