There is a particular kind of tragedy that keeps repeating itself in this country, and it is not accidental. It is the tragedy of meeting human distress with harm instead of care. Of responding to fear, confusion, grief, paranoia, and despair with uniforms, weapons, sirens, and commands. We keep calling these moments tragic, as if they are sudden or unavoidable. They are neither. They are patterned. They are predictable. And they are produced by political choice.
This week, a 36-year-old man died on the Augusta Highway after police responded to reports that he was in possession of a firearm and expressing thoughts of self-harm. It was not reported that he intended to harm anyone else. Police pursued him. They spiked his tyres. They stopped his car. Shortly after, he was found with a self-inflicted gunshot wound. His death is now being treated as a death in custody.
This is what passes for a welfare response.
Again and again, police are sent to people at the worst moments of their lives, moments of psychological distress, altered states, terror, and despair, and again and again those encounters escalate toward injury or death. Afterwards, the language is always the same. Officers did their best. The situation was complex. The job is difficult. It was an absolute tragedy.
But tragedy implies inevitability. What we are witnessing is something else.
Police are not equipped to respond to human distress because they were never meant to. Policing in this colony was established to protect property, enforce racial hierarchy, and uphold white supremacy and racial capitalism. From its origins, policing has been about control, containment, and violence in service of order, not care, not healing, not sitting with people through suffering.
When police attend mental health call-outs, they do not arrive as neutral helpers. They arrive as armed agents of the state, trained to assess threat, establish dominance, and maintain authority. Even when accompanied by clinicians. Even when the stated goal is “welfare.” The presence of police transforms distress into danger, vulnerability into suspicion, and fear into escalation.
We have seen this too many times to pretend otherwise.
In New South Wales, a 49-year-old man was shot dead after a mental health check became a six-hour siege. Police used stun guns and pepper spray. Tactical officers were deployed. Eventually, he was shot multiple times and died at the scene. We were told it was a tragic set of circumstances. We were told it was very hard on police.
Last year, Collin Burling died after being restrained by police during a mental health call-out in Sydney’s inner city. His partner recorded footage of him begging for his life, saying he could not breathe, insisting he was not a threat, asking what he had done wrong. He was restrained. He went into cardiac arrest. He died in hospital. A critical incident was declared. Oversight mechanisms were invoked. Words like “review,” “process,” and “policy” were carefully repeated.
None of them brought him back.
We also need to name what rarely gets said: many people experiencing acute distress do not seek help at all because they fear the response. Others try to exit assistance once it arrives, not because their distress has eased, but because the “help” itself becomes traumatic. The threat of control, restraint, detention, or punishment can be enough to drive people into isolation, even when they are desperate for care.
This fear is not irrational. It is learned. And it compounds harm.
When people disengage from coercive systems, their distress does not disappear, it deepens, untreated and unsupported. The consequences of this are then framed as individual pathology or inexplicable violence, rather than the predictable outcome of a system people are trying to survive.
We saw this logic play out in 2023, when a man, released from psychiatric care just days earlier, stabbed two women in what the media labelled a “random attack,” killing Julie Seed. The language of randomness obscured everything that came before: the inadequacy of care, the absence of ongoing support, and a system that oscillates between containment and abandonment.
The man was arrested and will likely spend the rest of his life under carceral control. This will not bring Julie Seed back. Nor will it prevent future harm. It simply reinforces the cycle: fear of care, withdrawal from support, escalation, punishment, and the insistence that nothing else was possible.
This is what happens when systems built on coercion replace care. Harm is treated as proof that control was necessary, rather than evidence that it has failed to keep anyone safe.
These deaths are not aberrations. They are the foreseeable outcome of a system that treats distress as a threat to be neutralised rather than a human experience to be held.
In response to growing public concern, South Australia now points to its Mental Health Co-Responder Program as evidence of progress. Under this model, a mental health clinician attends Triple Zero call-outs alongside police, with the stated aim of improving outcomes, reducing emergency department presentations, and freeing police to return to frontline duties. The government describes the program as trauma-informed, compassionate, and effective.
But for many of us in the Mad community, co-response does not feel like safety. It still begins with police. It still involves armed officers arriving at moments of vulnerability. It still situates distress as something to be assessed, managed, diverted, and resolved under the authority of the state. A clinician standing beside police does not undo the power imbalance, the fear, or the history that police bring with them into these encounters.
For people who have been restrained, detained, sedated, sectioned, or criminalised in the name of care, co-response is not neutral. It is not an invitation. It is another version of coercion, dressed in softer language. Slightly better than what came before is not the same as safe.
This is where the limits of reform become clear.
This piece is not calling for police to be replaced by social workers or mental health clinicians as the new first responders. Many of us have been harmed by those systems too, through forced treatment, involuntary detention, restraint, sedation, and the stripping away of autonomy in the name of safety. Carcerality does not disappear simply because it wears a different uniform or speaks the language of wellbeing.
Mad people know this. Disabled people know this. Criminalised people know this. We have lived it.
What is required is not a reshuffle of professions, but a radical rethinking of how we respond to human distress at all. A refusal of the idea that crisis must be met with control. A rejection of the belief that safety comes from domination, compliance, or force.
We already see glimpses of what this can look like in our communities. Approaches such as Just Listening, developed through the Humane Clinic Psychotherapy Collective, offer something profoundly different. Just Listening is not about assessment, intervention, or fixing. It is about offering justice to a person’s story through deep, sustained listening. There is no plan, no formulation, no coercion, only the commitment to sit alongside someone in distress without trying to manage or eliminate it.
This approach has been used with people experiencing psychosis, suicidality, and profound emotional distress. It is grounded in psychotherapeutic theory, but its power lies in its restraint: listening without agenda, slowing down, resisting the urge to fix. It demonstrates that connection and presence, not force, can hold people through crisis.
We know how to do this. We just refuse to organise our systems around it.
Instead, we continue to outsource our fear to the state. We continue to treat distress as danger. We continue to send those trained in control to people who need to be met with care.
And when people die, we call it sad and move on.
This is the deeper tragedy, not only the loss of life, but the moral collapse that allows us to keep repeating this pattern while insisting nothing else is possible. We have built a society that responds to suffering with harm and then expresses surprise at the outcome.
Police were never meant to care for us in our most vulnerable moments. They were meant to protect the state from disorder. When we send them to people in crisis, we are not offering help. We are dispatching an institution designed to control, contain, and, too often, kill.
If we are serious about safety, we must stop pretending that armed force is compatible with care. We must stop calling coercion a welfare response. And we must finally ask ourselves why, when someone is at the edge of life, our instinct is still to send those trained to dominate rather than those willing to stay.
Until we are willing to face that honestly, these deaths will continue, and we will keep calling them tragedies, instead of what they are: the predictable consequences of choosing harm over care.
