A Sydney police officer confronted a mass murderer. Her backup was a carpenter and construction worker wielding bollards

Joel Cauchi, holding a knife, approaches police inspector Amy Scott in CCTV footage released as part of an inquest into the Bondi Junction stabbings. Photograph: Coroners court of New South Wales

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.