On 13 April 2024, two shots ended Sydney’s worst mass murder in more than a decade. As an inquest into the Bondi Junction stabbings continues, the question remains: what more could have been done?
Well, the usual, actually - like not allowing the floridly mentally ill to wander around off their meds, for a start. But maybe also train your cops to have a little bit more backbone:
When police inspector Amy Scott entered a Sydney shopping centre in pursuit of a man who was stabbing people with a large knife, she did so without a partner or a bulletproof vest. Fear, she said, made way for nausea. “Because, in my head, I had resigned myself to the fact that I was probably going to die”, she told the New South Wales coroners court this week.
Strange, if I was going in armed against a knifeman, my initial thoughts would be that, if he doesn’t obey my commands, he’s going to die…
In her active armed offender training, officers were told they had a 60% to 70% chance of non-survival “and that is if you are partnered up and vested up, and I was neither of those”, Scott said. Instead, as makeshift backup she had Silas Despreaux and Damien Guerot – two French nationals who had become friends since moving to Australia. Guerot arrived in Australia to learn English about 10 years ago and is now a carpenter. Despreaux, who arrived seven years ago, is a construction worker. When they heard a man was stabbing people, Despreaux told Guerot: “Let’s go catch him.”
Surely that only applied if they are going up against a gunman, not someone armed with a knife? It doesn’t seem to have worried the two bystanders, who show a lot more gumption and ‘can do’ attitude than this trained girlboss police officer.
They tried to stop Cauchi using heavy bollards from a clothing store, throwing them down an escalator as he moved up it towards them. Scott told the court that the men told her which way to go. On the way up an escalator to find Cauchi, she unclipped her gun and one of the Frenchmen told her: “You’re on your own [without other police], we’re coming with you.” Guerot told Scott: “It’s a big situation. You have to have your gun ready because this guy is dangerous.”
No doubt the feminists were up in arms at this mansplaining, but good grief, if she needed to be told this, what the hell was wrong with her?
He turned towards her and started sprinting. Shouting “stop, drop it”, she fired three times. As she pulled the trigger, she told the court that she thought “that he was going to kill me”. Less than six minutes after his rampage began, Cauchi lay motionless outside an art and craft shop. Two of the bullets had hit him; one missed and struck a pot plant.
Can’t fault her for that, at least…
2 comments:
I don't know what they are teaching cops in Oz either, but I'm going to check with my brother; he's a copper over there and spent some years teaching armed and unarmed combat in the Western Australia police. It should be noted too, that Aussie cops are routinely armed with the same kind of firepower as their North American counterparts, which if memory serves us currently one of the venerable offerings from Glock. WA police opt for the .40 calibre models, while NSW use 9mm, but still more than adequate to deal with a single knife man.
Well, quite!
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