South Australia Police would like us to be concerned about e-bikes. We are told to worry about helmets, speed, illegal modifications, reckless riding and the risks riders might pose to themselves and others. Governments respond with reviews, regulations, enforcement campaigns and warnings about public safety. However, if we are going to have a serious conversation about danger on our streets, then surely we also have to talk about the danger introduced by policing itself.
That question becomes particularly difficult to avoid after an incident at Blakeview in Adelaide’s north, where police reportedly attempted to stop a 41-year-old e-bike rider who was not wearing a helmet. What began as an attempt to apprehend someone over an e-bike and helmet issue escalated into a pursuit, during which a police vehicle lost control and crashed into the retaining wall of a residential property. The rider was injured and taken to hospital. Police officers were reportedly uninjured, and an investigation was launched into the circumstances of the crash and how the rider sustained his injuries.
Whatever that investigation ultimately establishes, there is an obvious question that deserves far more attention than it is likely to receive: how did an alleged helmet offence become a situation in which a person ended up in hospital and a police vehicle ended up crashed into someone’s home?
This is where the language of policing so often protects police from the scrutiny applied to everybody else. We are encouraged to begin the story with the person who did not comply. He wasn’t wearing a helmet. Police attempted to stop him. He didn’t stop. A pursuit followed. From that framing, everything that happens afterwards becomes an unfortunate consequence of his original behaviour rather than a series of decisions made by police officers who possess enormous power and are supposed to exercise judgement about when and how that power should be used.
Police intervention is not a force of nature. A pursuit does not simply happen because somebody fails to stop. Police decide whether to pursue. Police decide whether immediate apprehension is necessary. Police decide what level of risk they are prepared to introduce into a situation. Those decisions matter, particularly when the original conduct being policed is relatively minor.
When enforcement creates more danger than the offence
This is not an argument against wearing helmets, nor is it necessary to pretend there are no legitimate concerns about increasingly powerful e-bikes. The question is proportionality. What danger existed before police intervened, and what danger existed after that intervention escalated?
If police are pursuing someone over an e-bike and helmet issue and the encounter ends with a police vehicle losing control, smashing into residential property and a person being hospitalised, then the public-safety conversation cannot remain exclusively focused on the behaviour of the rider. We also need to examine whether police themselves transformed a relatively minor matter into something substantially more dangerous.
Imagine an ordinary member of the public driving a vehicle through suburban streets in pursuit of another person and eventually losing control and crashing into the front of someone’s property. We would probably describe that behaviour in the language of recklessness and danger. We would talk about the risk to residents, pedestrians and other road users. Yet when police are involved, the language shifts. Suddenly we have an “incident”, a “pursuit” and an “internal investigation”. The violence and danger of the conduct itself disappears beneath the institutional language used to describe it.
This is one of the privileges the state grants itself: it gets to create danger in the name of responding to danger, while continuing to define itself as the party responsible for keeping everybody safe.
Why is the mirror never turned on the state?
Our criminal legal system is obsessed with scrutinising individual behaviour. Why did the person run? Why didn’t they comply? Why were they riding that bike? Why didn’t they follow the instruction? What should they have done differently?
The same intensity of questioning is rarely directed towards police. Why was immediate apprehension necessary? Why did police pursue? What alternatives existed? What level of risk was considered acceptable? At what point should officers have disengaged? What would actually have happened if police had decided that apprehending someone immediately for a helmet-related offence was less important than avoiding the possibility of a dangerous vehicle collision?
Those questions do not require us to declare the e-bike rider blameless or to know every detail of what happened. They simply require us to recognise that police are actors within these encounters, not neutral observers responding mechanically to somebody else’s decisions.
Yet the dominant narrative around policing repeatedly removes police agency. When somebody runs, whatever follows becomes the consequence of running. When somebody resists, whatever force follows becomes the consequence of resistance. When somebody is experiencing distress and does not follow directions, escalation becomes the consequence of non-compliance. The person subjected to state power is made responsible not only for their own actions, but frequently for the state’s response to them.
When police contact ends in death
That question becomes even more urgent when considered alongside another incident occurring around the same time, this time at Clayton railway station in Melbourne, where a 37-year-old man died shortly after being taken into police custody.
Police and Protective Service Officers had responded to reports of an agitated man armed with a knife. Police said the man was pacing the concourse and later moved onto the tracks. The area was cordoned off, trains were stopped and officers attempted to negotiate with him. According to the police account, the man later advanced towards officers with the knife and police attempted to use what were described as non-lethal tactical options before the Critical Incident Response Team became involved. He was ultimately taken into custody and became unresponsive shortly afterwards. Despite receiving medical assistance, he could not be revived.
There is much about that death that remains unknown, and those facts matter. But uncertainty should produce greater scrutiny of state power, not less. A person was alive when police encountered him. Police subsequently exercised physical control over him. He became unresponsive after being taken into custody and then died. There should be rigorous questions about what occurred during that period, including what force was used, what “non-lethal tactical options” involved, how he was physically restrained, what happened during his apprehension and what role, if any, police actions played in his death.
Instead, public discussion of incidents like this frequently begins and ends with the behaviour of the person who died. He had a knife. He was agitated. He advanced towards police. These details may be relevant to understanding the encounter, but they cannot be allowed to function as an automatic justification for everything that followed.
Too often, a person’s alleged dangerousness becomes permission not to examine the state’s dangerousness.
The language that hides police violence
Part of the problem is that we have developed an entirely different vocabulary for violence depending on who is responsible for it. Police “respond”, “restrain”, “apprehend”, “deploy tactical options” and “use force”. The people they encounter are described as aggressive, threatening, non-compliant, offenders or suspects.
That distinction matters because institutional language sanitises what happens to people’s bodies. Being chased can be terrifying and dangerous. Being tackled, restrained, pinned down, sprayed or tasered involves violence against the body. Having armed agents of the state descend on someone experiencing extreme distress can intensify an already volatile situation. A police pursuit introduces risks not only to the person being pursued but to everybody sharing the street around them.
Calling these things “law enforcement” does not make those physical realities disappear.
Nor does describing a weapon as “non-lethal” mean it cannot cause serious injury or contribute to death. The terminology itself encourages us to think about police force as controlled and inherently legitimate, while violence committed outside the state is understood as disorderly, dangerous and deserving of punishment.
Who investigates the people doing the investigating?
There is another uncomfortable feature of these incidents. Police institutions demand accountability from everybody else while retaining extraordinary authority to define and investigate their own conduct.
When an individual creates danger, the question quickly becomes whether they have committed an offence and should be punished. When police create danger, we are usually told an internal investigation will establish whether procedures were followed. When an individual injures somebody, their conduct is treated as potential evidence of criminality. When police injure somebody, the event becomes a critical incident requiring review.
Even when deaths involving police are investigated by specialist units or subjected to additional oversight, police remain deeply embedded within the machinery that determines what happened. The public is then instructed to wait patiently for the investigation before drawing conclusions about institutions that are simultaneously granted the benefit of the doubt.
None of this means we should decide what happened at Clayton before the evidence is known, or determine responsibility for the Blakeview crash without the facts. It means the state’s actions deserve at least the same scepticism and scrutiny routinely directed at the people subjected to its power.
Safety cannot simply mean more enforcement
There is a bigger question underneath both incidents about what we actually mean when we talk about safety. Increasingly, governments treat safety and enforcement as interchangeable concepts. If e-bikes concern us, regulate them more heavily and increase enforcement. If young people are behaving in ways that make adults uncomfortable, call police. If someone is experiencing profound distress in public, send police. If they refuse to comply, escalate. If they run, chase them.
Then, when the intervention itself produces injury, trauma or death, the premise of that intervention remains largely untouched. We debate whether police followed the rules rather than asking why police were required in the first place, whether the situation genuinely required immediate apprehension, or whether other responses might have produced less harm.
Sometimes the safest intervention may be not to pursue. Sometimes catching someone immediately may be less important than preventing a collision. Sometimes a regulatory infringement should remain exactly that rather than becoming an encounter involving vehicles, pursuit and physical apprehension. And sometimes people experiencing acute distress need support that is not organised around armed officers, coercion and the threat of force.
If our response to danger repeatedly creates new forms of danger, then we have every right to question whether that response can meaningfully be called safety.
SAPOL can be concerned about e-bike riders. The public can simultaneously be concerned about police vehicles crashing into residential properties during pursuits. We can be concerned about the escalation of relatively minor matters into encounters capable of causing serious injury. We can be concerned when people enter police custody alive and die shortly afterwards. And we can be concerned about an institution granted enormous power to use force while continually presenting its own violence as merely the unfortunate but necessary consequence of somebody else’s behaviour.
Perhaps that is the mirror that needs turning around.
Because the state spends an extraordinary amount of time asking us why people run, resist, disobey and refuse to comply. It is long past time we became equally relentless in asking why police chase, escalate, restrain and injure, and why, when the state’s pursuit of “safety” leaves people hospitalised or dead, it is almost always somebody else’s behaviour we are asked to examine first.
