Death in Custody: Body Cams Catch Disposable Nature of Criminalised People

Adam Shepley should have been treated as a patient.

Instead, in October 2020 in South Australia, he became another example of how quickly a person’s humanity is stripped once they are placed in police custody.

Within minutes of being restrained by police, and while under the care of paramedics, Mr Shepley would die. What followed was not just a series of individual failures, but a case that exposes how systems respond differently when the person in front of them has already been categorised as criminal.

In the hours that followed, Adam Shepley died from cardiac arrest while in the hands of paramedics from the South Australian Ambulance Service, shortly after paramedic Mr Clarke Timmins was tasked with assessing him following his arrest.

The arrest came moments after Mr Shepley had fallen from a roof during a scuffle with police. He was restrained by police shortly after. A combination of factors were later said to have contributed to his death, including the presence of drugs, psychological distress, and the physical exertion associated with the fall and restraint.

But what happened next is where the system begins to reveal itself.

The failings of the attending paramedic were captured on body-worn camera footage. What that footage shows is not just a failure of individual practice, it exposes something far more troubling: a complete absence of care at the very moment care was required.

Following the death, Mr Timmins stated in his affidavit that he had conducted an assessment of Mr Shepley and determined his Glasgow Coma Score (GCS) to be 3, the lowest possible score, indicating a state of unconsciousness.

But the body-worn camera footage tells a different story.

No such assessment was conducted. There was no checking of airway, no monitoring of pulse, no meaningful attempt to assess consciousness. In court, Mr Timmins conceded as much, admitting that he did none of the basic checks required of him. He offered no explanation for this failure.

This is not a minor procedural oversight. These are the most fundamental responsibilities of emergency care.

South Australian Deputy State Coroner Kereru found that Mr Timmins failed to “conduct a proper assessment of Mr Shepley’s condition upon arrival, … failed to monitor Mr Shepley during his attendance, and … failed to take appropriate action in relation to Mr Shepley’s condition, as a result of his first two failings.”

The Coroner further noted that it was likely Mr Shepley’s deteriorating condition could have been recognised up to six minutes earlier had those basic duties been carried out.

Six minutes.

In emergency medicine, six minutes is the difference between life and death.

And yet, in this case, those six minutes passed without intervention.

The Coroner was ultimately unable to determine a definitive cause of death, noting the absence of clear post-mortem findings. Instead, her Honour drew on a consensus of expert opinion suggesting that a combination of drug toxicity, psychological stress, and physical exertion, compounded by restraint, likely contributed to the cardiac arrest.

But this framing risks obscuring something critical.

Because while these contributing factors are important, they are not what makes this death so confronting.

What makes this death confronting is that a man in obvious medical distress was left without even the most basic care, while under the direct control of the state.

This is not about one paramedic

It would be easy, and convenient, to isolate this case as the failure of one individual.

To frame it as a lapse in judgement, a deviation from standard practice, or a rare breakdown in an otherwise functional system.

But the existence of the body-worn camera footage complicates that narrative.

Because what it captures is not a moment of chaos or confusion. It captures inaction, and indifference. It captures a professional who does not respond with urgency, curiosity, or care, even when presented with a person whose life is clearly at risk.

And that raises a harder question:

What conditions make that kind of indifference possible?

Deaths in custody rarely occur in a vacuum. They happen within systems where criminalised people are routinely treated as less credible, less deserving, and ultimately less human.

By the time paramedics arrived, Mr Shepley was no longer just a patient.

He was a person who had been arrested, restrained, therefore categorised.

And that categorisation matters.

Because once someone is positioned as a “criminal”, the threshold for care shifts, the urgency dulls, and the obligation softens. The person in front of you becomes, in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, disposable.

When footage doesn’t protect, but exposes

Body-worn cameras are often introduced as tools of accountability, technologies that will protect both professionals and the public by providing an objective record of events.

In this case, the footage did not prevent harm.

Mr Shepley still died.

What it did do, however, was make visible something that would otherwise have remained hidden: the gap between what is said in official reports and what actually happens on the ground.

Without that footage, the affidavit may have stood uncontested. The assessment may have been accepted as fact. The narrative of appropriate care may never have been challenged.

Instead, the footage reveals a system that is capable not only of failing, but of reconstructing those failures after the fact.

The disposable line

There is a line that runs through deaths in custody across this country, whether in police cells, prisons, or during interactions with emergency services.

It is the line between those whose lives are treated as urgent, and those whose lives are treated as conditional.

Adam Shepley died on the wrong side of that line.

Not because help was unavailable, but because help was not enacted.

Not because his condition was unknowable, but because it was not attended to.

And not because the system lacked the tools to save him, but because, in that moment, it failed to recognise him as someone worth saving.