A coroner delivering findings into the police shooting death of Indigenous man Stanley Russell said officers seriously breached their own policies on body-worn cameras during the incident.
The New South Wales deputy state coroner Carmel Forbes also recommended policy changes on how police handle people with intellectual disabilities, and urged them to clarify rules on when officers need to wear body cameras.
The Gomeroi man was shot dead by police in his aunt’s home in western Sydney on 9 November 2021 after officers had come to arrest him on an outstanding warrant.
Police shot Russell at least five times after he allegedly threatened them with a hatchet and knife.
As she handed down her findings on Friday, Forbes said Russell, 45, was unable to read and write and lived with a number of complex mental health illnesses and substance abuse issues exacerbated by the death of his brother in prison custody.
“Mr Russell had an intellectual disability,” she she told the NSW coroner’s court on Friday. “He suffered the childhood trauma of sexual abuse, he suffered the loss of his brother in custody.”
Forbes said police officers had breached their own policies on body-worn cameras during the shooting. Of the four officers who attended the scene, only one had turned on their body-worn camera. One officer was not wearing a body-worn camera at all, and two others failed to record the shooting or did not turn their cameras on prior to the incident.
“Body-worn video is an important safeguard for police and for the community, and the failure to wear and activate the cameras was a serious breach of police policy,” she said. “They all should have been wearing body-worn cameras and they all should have turned them on prior to approaching the property or at least when they entered the dwelling.”
The deputy coroner described one officer as having a “remarkable misunderstanding” of the policy, adding that more clarity was needed so that officers understand their obligations.
The coroner said that police failed to properly plan the arrest and consider the risks of the operation, although she acknowledged that there was no way of knowing if proper planning could have prevented Russell’s death.
The coroner also recommended changes in police protocols when dealing with people who may have an intellectual disability, including that officers note suspected disabilities in an individual’s police record. She said this change could be referred to as “Stanley’s protocol”.
She recommended a policy be implemented with NSW police and the Aboriginal Legal Service to allow First Nations people to hand themselves in to a police station rather than an issuing a bench arrest warrant and attending their home.
Russell’s parents, family and friends attended the inquest findings via a livestream from their home in Walgett as well as in the courtroom, and Forbes said their daily attendance during the inquest was a “testament of their love”.
Elizabeth Jarrett, who spoke on behalf of the family, thanked the coroner for her findings and called for Stanley’s protocol to be urgently implemented.
“Our family calls on NSW police to make Stanley’s protocol happen. We want them to take the coroner’s recommendations seriously and take real action,” Jarrett said.
The family also said it wanted the outstanding recommendations made three decades ago by the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody to be implemented.
“Aboriginal people are still dying.” Jarrett said. “We want those recommendations … to be taken seriously too,” she said.
Aboriginal Legal Service’s coronial advocate, Hannah Donaldson, told reporters outside the coroner’s court that reforms could prevent further people dying in custody or during police operations.
“If properly followed, this procedure [to allow Indigenous people to surrender themselves to a police station] would reduce the number of occasions where police show up without warning to arrest an Aboriginal person,” she said. “Too often, this ends in additional charges, injury or even death, as we saw in Stanley’s tragic case.”
