On August 8, two former New South Wales (NSW) police officers were jailed for the violent assault of a 48-year-old mentally ill woman in Western Sydney.
In what Judge Graham Turnbull described as an attack “clearly calculated… to inflict the maximum pain and discomfort,” the woman was kicked twice in the head, dragged along the road by her hair, punched and pepper-sprayed six times by the two “gym-hardened officers in their 20s.”
Timothy Trautsch and Nathan Black admitted to assault and misuse of a prohibited weapon. Black also confessed to two counts of deliberately publishing protected information. The court sentenced Black to five years and nine months in prison, ordering a non-parole period of three years and three months. Trautsch was sentenced to five years and six months, with a minimum of three years to be served before eligibility for parole.
In January 2023, Trautsch and Black were sent to a cul-de-sac in Emu Plains, a working-class suburbs on the outskirts of Sydney, after police received calls that the woman was in distress.
When they arrived, she was naked and sitting on the ground. The woman suffered from schizophrenia, was unmedicated and was experiencing a psychotic episode. She had been released earlier that day from the nearby Amber Laurel women’s prison.
Body-worn camera and CCTV footage of the assault was initially concealed from the public, after NSW Police argued it was so confronting that it should be suppressed for 60 years, to protect the woman from further trauma. Yet when she died last year—in what were described as “unconnected” circumstances—police continued to suppress the footage.
The extent of the police brutality was revealed last month, when reporters were allowed to view the video, after the Sydney Morning Herald and other news outlets petitioned the court. Following the sentencing, Judge Turnbull publicly released the CCTV footage and still images, but not the body camera video.
The footage reportedly begins with the woman refusing to tell the officers her name. One of them tells her she will be taken to Nepean Hospital and “sectioned” (subjected to involuntary detention in a mental health facility). She responds, “I’m terrified of you people. You ain’t got the drugs to fix me, you ain’t got the drugs to put me out. You can’t beat me… that gun is not going to help you.”
The woman then tries to run away, but the two officers chase her and tackle her to the ground and pepper-spray her face and genitals. At one point during the assault, the cops pepper-spray the woman’s back, which is visibly grazed after she was dragged along the road by her hair. The officers are also shown repeatedly kicking and stomping the woman while she is on the ground.
The court heard that one of the paramedics who witnessed the attack asked Black if the woman had been sprayed in the genitals. He replied, “Yes, you have to do what you have to do.”
Following the incident, Black sent a colleague a 17-second video of the attack, writing “Both OC cans emptied on her. Was f***ed… She was f***ed the whole body-worn is so good shows her being f***ed.”
The police officers were initially suspended without pay and resigned in August 2023 before they could be fired.
In sentencing the officers, who pleaded guilty, Judge Turnbull noted that “aside from [the woman] being naked, there was no criminal offence potentially available.” The cops, he continued, made “no attempt to engage” with her and unleashed their assault despite not being “at risk of any harm, let alone serious harm.”
Trautsch and Black are not simply bad apples in an otherwise healthy police force. The brutality inflicted on the woman and the attempt by the police top brass to cover it up expresses the contempt of the state for the most vulnerable sections of society and the working class as a whole.
The incident is part of a broader pattern of police assaulting individuals with mental illness. For example:
In 2015, Courtney Topic, a 22-year-old woman with a “major depressive disorder of moderate severity,” and possible undiagnosed schizophrenia, was killed by police in Southwest Sydney. The police had been called by concerned bystanders, who had seen the clearly distressed young woman, pacing and mumbling to herself, holding a knife. But within 41 seconds of arriving on the scene, the cops had pepper-sprayed and then fatally shot her.
In July 2017, Danukul Mokmool, a 30-year-old man with a history of mental illness and drug addiction, was killed by police near Sydney’s Central Station. Although Mokmool was clearly distressed, and armed only with a pair of scissors, police responded with lethal force, shooting him four times in the head and chest.
In 2019, Todd McKenzie, a 40-year-old man diagnosed with schizophrenia, was shot by police after a nine-hour standoff at his own home in the mid-north coast of NSW. McKenzie posed no threat to anyone, but efforts to de-escalate the situation were not conducted.
A 2023 report by the NSW Law Enforcement Conduct Commission found that, of the 157 police incidents in that state that resulted in death or serious injury over the five years to June 2022, at least 68 (43 percent) “involved an interaction with a person in mental health crisis.”
With mental health issues on the rise, police are increasingly acting as frontline responders. In 2022, the NSW Police Force recorded 61,164 incidents in connection to people experiencing a mental health emergency or incident where there was not an associated criminal offence. This is an increase from around 43,000 incidents in 2018.
The use of the police force to respond to those facing mental health crises is not an accident, but a deliberate bipartisan policy of successive Australian governments. There has been a long-term attack on funding for mental health services, while money and resources have been poured into the police forces.
In its 2025–26 budget, the NSW Labor government has allocated an extra $125.8 million to the police force and just $15.4 million for mental health services. The state government is also seeking to impose further real wage cuts on public sector psychiatrists, despite warnings this will exacerbate already massive understaffing.
An investigation by the Australian National University and the Australian newspaper, found the country needs an additional 8,310 full time mental health professionals, including psychiatrists, nurses and support workers, and 838 addiction specialists across the public and private sectors.
The federal Labor government’s 2025–26 budget contains no significant new measures to address Australia’s worsening mental health crisis. This is despite mental health being the most common reason Australians visit their GP, and suicide remaining the leading cause of death for people aged 15 to 49.
Decades of bipartisan funding cuts have gutted Australia’s mental health system. The 1983 Richmond Report, commissioned by the NSW Labor government, recommended the closure of mental institutions across the state, pushing thousands of people with mental illnesses into homelessness, substandard boarding houses, or the prison system. Successive Labor and Liberal governments have failed to replace these institutions with adequate community-based services, leaving critical gaps in care.
The assault in Western Sydney, like so many similar cases, is not an aberration but the outcome of capitalist society, in which the most vulnerable are abandoned while the repressive apparatus of the state is expanded. Decades of cuts and neglect have degraded mental health and other social services to the point of collapse, leaving people in crisis with nowhere to turn.
The rapid build-up of police powers and funding, alongside the hollowing out of essential services, is a stark expression of Australia’s deepening social inequality. For the ruling class, the answer to poverty, mental illness, and social breakdown is not to address their root causes, but to strengthen the means of repression needed to contain the inevitable consequences.