The reality of ‘less-lethal’ police weapons

This week, in the Coroners Court of New South Wales, an inquest began into the death of Newcastle woman Krista Kach, who was killed when tactical police officers fired a so-called beanbag round into her chest following a near 10-hour siege at her home.

On the afternoon of September 14, 2023, police received a call about a woman behaving erratically and threatening locals with an axe. The first to be threatened, according to evidence given in court this week, was the real estate agent who had served Kach with an eviction notice that morning. Afterwards, Kach was seen wielding the axe in the street while talking to herself.

Police testified this week that upon arrival at her home, they forced their way into her yard, where Kach threw an axe at them, followed by rocks. The officers made a tactical retreat as Kach barricaded herself indoors. For many hours, attempts to negotiate her peaceful exit from the apartment were fruitless and about 9.30 that evening, a decision was made to breach the home.

Once inside, officers from the Tactical Operations Regional Support fired one round from the “Super-Sock” shotgun – a “less lethal” weapon that deploys cloth sacks filled with metal pellets – as well as discharging their Tasers.

The lethality of “Super-Sock” rounds is theoretically mitigated by their not having any penetrative power – that is, they’re designed to inflict blunt trauma. But this trauma alone can prove fatal – a Brazilian soccer fan was killed 10 days later in São Paulo when a round fired by riot police caused him a catastrophic brain injury – and cases have been recorded across the world of these rounds rupturing chest cavities and fatally injuring the heart.

So it was with Krista Kach. An autopsy found the beanbag round had punctured her chest and ruptured a lung.

Her family testified this week that Krista Kach had a long history of severe mental health issues and had likely stopped taking her antipsychotic medication. They also said she had become socially withdrawn and increasingly obsessed with conspiracy theories that related to Covid-19 and paedophiles.

In the interlocutory hearings that preceded the inquest, an application was made on behalf of two tactical police officers that they not be compelled to provide evidence before the court. While the transcript detailing this application redacts specific medical diagnoses, a report shared a psychiatrist’s belief that neither officer was well enough to submit to the court. The coroner granted the application.

The psychological effects upon those who attended that day were also testified in court this week by the senior police negotiator. Tearfully, the officer said he had since left his role. He offered his condolences to Kach’s family and said: “I hope you get the answers you’re after.”

The inquest will continue next week.

Krista Kach’s was not the only fatality involving the use of “less lethal” weapons in 2023 – a series of similar fatalities has raised serious concerns about how law enforcement is using these tools. In May of that year, an officer tasered 95-year-old Clare Nowland in her Cooma aged-care residence. A coronial inquest into her death will begin in May.

In Victoria, two men died that same year following police deployment of Tasers and “Super-Sock” rounds in separate incidents. The first was 46-year-old Mark Smith, who police alleged was armed with knives at his Frankston home and refusing their entry. A coroner will release their report on Smith’s death later this year.

On November 11, 2023, 30-year-old Steven Woodhouse, a father of three, died during a violent arrest at his home in Melbourne’s north. As with Mark Smith, Victoria Police’s Critical Incident Response Team (CIRT), a heavily armed and highly specialised tactical squad, deployed Tasers and, allegedly, beanbag rounds.

No dates for a coronial inquest have yet been set and Victoria Police’s homicide unit, in conjunction with its Professional Standards branch, are still investigating. Details of the arrest and subsequent death of Woodhouse remain publicly uncertain – a fact that, more than two years after the incident, has insulted and pained the family. Victoria Police has expressed sympathy for their frustration at the length of time the investigation has taken but insist it’s a “complex” task.

In December last year, Shaye Woodhouse, Steven’s sister, on behalf of her family, lodged a writ in the Supreme Court of Victoria – the first step in civil litigation against the state which, she argues, failed in their duty of care. “There’s supposed to be a coronial inquest,” she tells The Saturday Paper, “but I have to keep asking my solicitor to see where we’re at with it. There doesn’t seem to be any urgency and this whole delay has taken a big toll on my family.

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“It’s not just the delay. My mother called the ambulance for Steven. Imagine how that feels now? Any family that calls an ambulance for a family member should not fear the arrival of armed tactical squads.”

In response to questions from The Saturday Paper, a Victoria Police spokesperson says their CIRT “stopped using drag stabilised flexible baton rounds, commonly called bean bag rounds, in September 2020”, and no other unit uses them. The spokesperson says they are unable to comment further, “given active legal proceedings on this matter”.

Of these four deaths, only the circumstances of Clare Nowland’s have so far been publicly ventilated, examined and judged. The police officer responsible, Constable Kristian White, was convicted of manslaughter in 2024.

The details are now notorious. In the early morning of May 17, 2023, nurses at the Yallambee Lodge aged-care home called triple-O, requesting only an ambulance, after finding Nowland slowly wandering the residence with a kitchen knife and jar of prunes. While not formally diagnosed, she suffered from some cognitive decline that was assumed to be dementia.

Once notified of the knife, the triple-O dispatchers were obliged to engage police. Just before 5am, White – a police officer of 12 years’ experience – arrived with his partner.

Clare Nowland was very old, very frail and very confused. She wasn’t threatening – in fact, to repeated requests to surrender the knife, she said nothing. She was resting upon her walking frame, upon which she depended for mobility.

While White was acting with supreme urgency – a mere two minutes and 40 seconds elapsed between his finding Nowland and the deployment of his Taser – his victim was not. In those two minutes and 40 seconds she had shuffled only one metre.

At 5.09am, White fired his Taser at Nowland. Its barbs entered her chest and abdomen, gravely shocked her, and she fell backwards, heavily striking her head. It was a catastrophic trauma and she died a week later after extensive brain bleeding.

“Try as I might, I am unable to conclude that it could not and should not have been handled differently, by the calm and patient application of a commonsense understanding that a frail and confused 95-year-old woman in fact posed nothing that could reasonably be described as a threat of any substance,” Supreme Court Justice Ian Harrison said in his sentencing remarks one year ago. “One might have expected that Mr White’s training as a policeman and his experience in life ought better to have alerted him to these obvious realities.”

This fatal lapse of judgement from so experienced an officer seemed inexplicable, and remained so after the facts were tested in court before a jury. While body-worn cameras captured every moment, they could not record the contents of White’s head. Perhaps the closest it came were the words it caught from White’s mouth in the moment before he triggered the electric pulse: “Ah, bugger it.”

White was sentenced to a non-custodial period of community service. There had already been, Justice Harrison said, substantial extra-curial punishment to White and the odds of his reoffending were slim – not least because he had lost his job. White had also been diagnosed with a major depressive disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder, and his local notoriety had compelled his family’s move from the area.

Nowland’s family were appalled and prosecutors thought the sentence unjustifiably lenient. The appeals court did not agree. White will likely be compelled to appear before a court again for the coronial inquest.

In 2022, Victoria’s Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission (IBAC), whose statutory responsibilities include police oversight, released a critical report on the CIRT. It had examined several violent incidents, including the 2017 shooting of a man – who wore a fake gun as part of his fancy dress costume – and his girlfriend at a nightclub sex party, and the violent arrest of an armed-robbery suspect who, while being the wrong man, sustained gruesome injuries.

IBAC found that CIRT “officers have repeatedly failed to accurately and comprehensively report their use of force”.

“This shortcoming is due in part to a lack of training and supervision, and to the complexity of Victoria Police’s reporting processes. Inadequate reporting reduces the transparency of CIRT’s operational use of force, and prevents improvements from being identified to limit the use and misuse of force.”

The next year, in 2023, the Law Enforcement Conduct Commission – NSW’s independent police oversight body – released the results of their investigation into NSW Police Force’s use of force. These were separate reports in separate jurisdictions and with different terms of reference, but they had very similar findings. “This report describes widespread inconsistencies identified by the Commission in the way the NSWPF records information about the force used by police officers,” it said. “We also identified under-reporting of the use of force by the NSWPF.”

Here, then, were criticisms almost identical to those from IBAC the previous year in relation to Victoria Police. “Our analysis … shows: widespread inconsistencies in the information the NSWPF collected in [Computerised Operational Policing System] and under-reporting of the use of force; gaps in training and instruction to police officers on the recording of tactical and use of force options in the NSWPF system; and a lack of quality assurance processes that could identify and address inaccuracies in use of force data.”

The commission noted that common inaccuracies in police reporting “undermine the effectiveness of the potential uses of the data by NSWPF – for example, in identifying trends in types of force used, identifying risks to officer or public safety from such use, or focussing training to address particular issues arising in the use of force”.

NSW Police Force acknowledged these flaws. It wrote a new manual to govern the use of force and committed to clearer guidelines about recording, which are now in practice.

After the raft of current investigations and inquests in NSW and Victoria, there will likely be further recommendations about the use of “less lethal” weapons and the fraught engagements between police and those experiencing mental health crises.