New South Wales police have used capsicum spray to subdue an 87-year-old man in a Sydney nursing home who was suffering from dementia.
Police said the incident occurred at an aged care home in south-western Sydney on Wednesday at about 8pm.
The assistant police commissioner Brett McFadden said on Thursday that police were keeping the location and details of the victim vague because the man’s family “did not want this story coming to the media”.
“They don’t want this story being spoken about because it doesn’t reflect the individual that they know,” he told reporters.
McFadden said police responded to a welfare call out at the aged care home after reports that the man had threatened to harm residents and himself.
Sign up: AU Breaking News email
McFadden alleged the man had found a metal ornament with a sharp edge that would not usually be considered a dangerous object. He was also swinging it at staff who locked themselves in a room, the assistant commissioner alleged.
The two responding police officers found the man in the foyer still armed with the object. After he refused a direction to put down the object, police deployed capsicum spray, McFadden said.
Police then “managed to wrestle the bar” from the man. McFadden said he was “exercising a level of strength”. He said that although the 87-year-old may not have intended to harm anyone, he still posed a risk.
“We don’t have the luxury of what could have been done … we can hypothesise until the cows come home,” McFadden said on Thursday.
“He was in an awful state of consciousness, so he wasn’t the person that maybe his family knew him to be. This is, again, the challenge.”
Camden police area command was reviewing the incident.
“The review process is critically important to us to ensure that we ask, what, if anything, would have been done differently,” McFadden said.
A NSW police officer fatally shot a 95-year-old great-grandmother with a Taser in a Cooma nursing home in May 2023.
Sen Const Kristian James Samuel White was subsequently found guilty of manslaughter in the NSW supreme court in November 2024.
The police faced scrutiny over a delay to inform the public after White Tasered Nowland. The first media release did not mention that a Taser had been deployed, only that an elderly woman in an aged care facility had “sustained injuries during an interaction” with officers.
McFadden said on Thursday he recognised the public interest in such matters, adding that supporting people with dementia in aged care facilities was a “challenge for the whole community”.
