Applying Force After Restraint Is the NSW Policing Way, Despite Potential Fatalities

New South Wales Greens MLC Sue Higginson recently posted footage of a police officer senselessly punching a civilian. She describes the victim as being “face down on the ground already restrained and unarmed”, yet an officer is seen to repeatedly punch him in the back of the head, so his face smashes into the hard surface. Indeed, force applied after restraint is a NSW policing norm.

The authors of the 3 July 2026 released Legal Observers NSW report into the use of excessive force by the NSW police at the 9 February 2026 rally against the official state visit of Israeli president Isaac Herzog outlined in their opening paragraph that “unjustified” force was applied to individuals posing no threat, whilst they “were already restrained and subdued by police officers”.

Section 230 of the Law Enforcement (Powers and Responsibilities) Act 2002 (NSW), or the LEPRA, provides NSW police officers with the power “to use such force as reasonably necessary to exercise the function”. So, the use of force that is permissible for police officers to apply depends on the particular circumstances, and the excessive use of force is illegal and can amount to assault charges.

This law requires NSW police officers to exercise a level of restraint in the field, which is likely what occurs most of the time, but there is so much documented evidence of NSW police officers unreasonably applying force available on the internet that the suggestion there is no crisis in state police using excessive force automatically falls over.

The truth of the matter is that NSW police officers regularly use as much force as they please and this is often after point of restraint, it can also be excessive in nature, and in its most severe forms, the restraining of civilians can be lethal. Yet, any idea of limiting police use of force sends state governments into paroxysms, and this is especially so for the current Minns ministry.

Excessive use of force

“Look at this police violence,” wrote Higginson beside the footage of a NSW police officer repeatedly punching a civilian in the back of the head. “It’s got to stop. This is not policing. This is violence with impunity. This is not making our communities safer. This person was face down on the ground already restrained and unarmed. This incident apparently took place at Cabramatta Train Station.”

NSW police excessive use of force has been particularly significant issue over the Minns government’s time in office. There was a spate of police killings involving both the use of guns and tasers during welfare checks over 2023-24. The May 2023 incident that began this involved a senior constable tasering 95-year-old Clare Nowland, which led to her death in hospital days later.

This initial welfare check death and the four others following, led to the creation of the Alternative First Responders campaign, which calls for a different approach to law enforcement when dealing with people having mental health crises in the community. However, the broader issue is that the excessive force police turn to during welfare checks is their go-to response for every occasion.

Not only has there been a focus on police as first responders killing civilians, which is an issue that periodically arises every time there is a spate, but the Minns government’s term has also been marred by random acts of police violence against civilians, with the most prominent being last year’s police assault upon legal observer Hannah Thomas.

In both these cases, it was police applying force when it served no policing purpose. Senior constable Christopher Davis is alleged to have punched Thomas after she’d been restrained by a fellow officer, whilst senior constable Kristian White applied force, in the form of a taser, in circumstances where Nowland was too frail for any need to apply restraint, so he instead applied the device.

The prone position

The most detrimental cases of NSW police applying force after restraining a suspect are those that end in deaths in custody. A case in point was the 15 July 2026 death in custody of Colin Burling, who was a 45-year-old man restrained to death by NSW police officers on Gadigal land at his apartment in Waterloo, after some firefighters called the police as they’d considered him in crisis.

Four police officers restrained Burling until he stopped breathing and other officers held a white sheet up to conceal the killing, while the civilian’s partner filmed the incident from the floor above. Burling’s death obviously shows restraint having been applied to the point that the Sydney man could no longer struggle against his assailants, and the force was then continued on until he died.

The prone position involves a person lying flat upon the ground face down. This is a common position that law enforcement officers place civilians in when restraining them. Officers often pile themselves on the back of a suspect being held down in the prone position to ensure they’ve been restrained. However, this process is extremely dangerous and can lead to death.

There are numerous incidents of First Nations individuals dying in the custody of both Australian police and corrective services officers who’ve held them down in the prone position. Yet, despite the dangers surrounding this approach being readily known, officers continue to apply it in situations where the apprehension of a person has already been achieved.

Delivered in November 2024, the coronial findings into the inquest of Gomeroi man Michael Peachy found that NSW police officers had held the 27-year-old man face down in the prone position for 24 minutes on 20 May 2021, and the coroner found the restraining of the civilian continued on after he’d stopped breathing, yet attending police officers and paramedics failed to ascertain this.

State-sanctioned violence

“Under no circumstances should the NSW community have to accept police use of excessive force or police violence. There are an alarming number of reports of police causing harm. We need to accept that we actually have a police problem in NSW,” Higginson told Sydney Criminal Lawyers in the wake of the fatal tasering of Clare Nowland in May 2023.

“This is a systemic issue, as has been shown by the revelations of other incidents of police using excessive and lethal force on vulnerable people,” the Greens MLC continued at the time, as she was calling on the Minns government to launch a parliamentary committee inquiry into the excessive use of force by NSW police.

This inquiry was not forthcoming, however, and its lack was no surprise either, due to the symbiotic relationship that NSW major parties have with the Police Association of NSW, when in office. Instead, the Minns government had a NSW parliamentary committee inquiry into mental health access also focus on NSW police as first responders.

And in the aftermath of 9 February 2026 anti-Herzog rally on Gadigal land in the Sydney CBD, which saw 3,000 NSW police officers set upon 20,000 unarmed civilian protesters to use the brute force that injured many, the idea that the NSW Labor government might rein in state police use of force or attempt to limit any of its powers is now an absurdity.

As the recent Legal Observers NSW report on the anti-Herzog rally has clearly detailed, NSW police officers kettled in, or entrapped, civilian protesters into confined spaces and then unleashed excessive force upon them, along with the liberal use of pepper spray. And in the wake of this unprecedented example of police using force without restraint, there has been no official apology.

Indeed, despite the reels of footage revealing that NSW police officers openly brutalised the civilian protesters, senior NSW ministers and police officers have justified the lack of restraint that was displayed by law enforcement on the night, which suggests that the type of scene that Higginson highlighted from the camera reel at Cabramatta a fortnight ago, is likely to become more common.

Main image: Images of Sue Higginson and Hannah Thomas supplied. Screenshot of police officer with suspect taken from civilian footage supplied to Higginson.