A 95-year-old Australian woman is in a critical condition after being verbally abused by police at a retirement home.
Police were called to the Yallambee aged care home in Cooma, about 300km south-west of Sydney, on Wednesday after staff found resident Clare Nowland outside her room with a steak knife in her hand, New South Wales police assistant commissioner Peter Cotter said.
Two officers spoke to Ms Nowland for several minutes, but when she did not drop the knife and approached them, one of them fired a taser and tackled her to the ground.
“At the time she was tasered, she was approaching police but it is fair to say at a slow pace,” Mr Cotter said during a press conference, reports RTE.
Ms Nowland, who has dementia, took the knife from the facility’s kitchen.
She is now in a critical condition in hospital.
This incident sparked public outrage in Australia.
“The use of a taser when a kind word was all she needed, she was confused which is what happens with people who have dementia, she needed kind words and assistance and help,” Community advocate Andrew Thaler said, reports RTE.
“She didn’t need the force of the law. Clare is 95-years-old, she’s about 5ft 2 (1.57m) and weighs all of 43kg, she can’t walk on her own without walking assistance. As they (police) said she had a walking frame or a wheelie walker. She doesn’t get to see her family. She might not open her eyes again,” reports RTE.
“She has had a great life, a great service to the community and her church, very fondly regarded by a lot of people and she has a big family, and that’s now been taken away from her … because of something that is so patently absurd, we want to know how did it happen. And we also want to make sure it does not happen again,” he added, reports RTE.
Australian police have said the homicide squad has joined a high-profile investigation for the incident.
The officer who fired the taser was off duty pending a “level 1 critical incident investigation”, a category police reserve for exceptional cases where injuries lead to death or imminent death. If a threshold is met where it changes from being a departmental issue to being a criminal issue, we are certainly mature and transparent enough as an organisation to do what has to be done,” said Mr Cotter, reports RTE.
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