What Jodi Knott's Family Wants Us to See

I didn’t want to write about this. I sat with it for a couple of days first, which is about as long as I can manage before the pressure of having thoughts about something forces me to put them somewhere.

Jodi Knott. A woman in mental health crisis, off her medication, trying to get help. What she got instead was an hour of sustained, deliberate cruelty from two NSW police officers who then sent the footage around to laugh about it. The family has now asked the public to see what happened. That takes a particular kind of courage. To take the worst thing that happened to your person and hand it to strangers, because you believe the truth of it matters more than protecting yourself from having to relive it.

The two officers were convicted and sentenced to around five years, with a non-parole period of just over three. They’ve left the force. They won’t work in policing or corrections again. Those are facts worth stating clearly, because a lot of the online discussion assumes Australian institutions are as broken as the American ones, and they’re not quite the same. We do have some safeguards. They exist. They worked, partially, here.

But “partially” is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

Three years. For an hour of deliberate, filmed, celebrated torture of a vulnerable woman who was begging them to stop. The family wants better police training in mental health response, which is generous of them, and probably true as a general policy need. But I keep coming back to what several people in the discussion pointed out: this wasn’t a training failure. You don’t need a seminar to know that pepper spraying someone’s genitals and dragging them by the hair is wrong. These were conscious choices, made repeatedly, over sixty minutes, with cameras rolling, because they believed the institution would absorb it.

That belief didn’t come from nowhere.

The footage was shared internally as entertainment. That detail is the one that stays with me. Not just two bad actors, but a culture that received that footage and didn’t immediately implode with horror. An institution where that behaviour was legible, where it circulated. The banality of it. That’s the part that’s genuinely hard to sit with.

There’s a tendency, when something like this surfaces, to reach for the “few bad apples” framing. It’s comfortable. It lets the institution off the hook while appearing to take the incident seriously. And there’s a corresponding tendency on the other end to declare the whole system irredeemable, which is satisfying but not especially useful. Both positions let you stop thinking.

The more uncomfortable place is this: institutions reflect and reproduce their cultures. Individual officers made individual choices here, and they should be held individually accountable. They were, to a degree. But the conditions that made those choices feel survivable, even shareable, those conditions are systemic. Fixing them requires more than convictions. It requires sustained pressure on police oversight, genuine independence in investigations, and body camera footage that is actually reviewed by someone outside the chain.

Police cannot investigate police. That’s not a radical position. It’s just obvious.

I don’t know what Jodi Knott’s life looked like before that night. I don’t need to. She was a person in crisis, trying to get her medication. That’s the full extent of what’s required to understand that she deserved better. The fact that her family is now channelling their grief into advocacy, rather than just outrage, is the most human thing in this whole story.

The least we can do is make sure the footage doesn’t just disappear into the news cycle by Thursday.