A police official said the security establishment has no plans to release photos taken by a body camera of a police officer who used a stun gun on a 95-year-old woman with dementia. According to what was reported by “Agence France-Presse”.
Elderly woman Claire Noland is hospitalized in critical condition, 3 days after she was electrocuted during a police intervention at a nursing home, in an incident that shocked Australia and grabbed international headlines .
The agency said, citing an Australian police statement, that two officers were summoned to a nursing home in New South Wales on Wednesday to restrain a woman “armed with a knife”.
Officers confirm they urged Noland to leave the knife behind, but she walked towards them at a ‘slow pace’ relying on a walking aid, prompting one of the officers to use her pistol paralyzing against her.
Asked at a press conference about political calls for the release of the intervention footage, NSW Police Commissioner Karen Webb said: ‘I see no reason for them to demand to see’ the footage .
And Webb explained, based on the “legal obligations” associated with surveillance devices, that there is “no intention to release (the images) unless there is a way out at the end of (the investigation) which allows them to be revealed”.
She stressed that the investigation into the use of the stun gun “will take time”.
And Australian Senator David Shopridge called the police to release the images taken by the camera installed on the policeman’s body.
“The public has a right to know what the police have done, and that cannot be eclipsed by a special police investigation into themselves,” he said.
Webb promised that the investigation would follow an “appropriate course,” which would be conducted by the state Homicide Battalion, under the supervision of a Security Force Oversight Committee.
Nuland, grandmother of 24 grandchildren and 31 great-grandchildren, faces an uncertain fate, according to Webb, who spent time with the family at the hospital on Friday.
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