What bystanders and venue staff can actually do when a mental health crisis unfolds in public

On a Western Sydney street in 2023, two police officers were the only people who showed up when Jodi Knott, a woman with schizophrenia, was in acute psychotic distress. There were no bystanders intervening. No venue staff. No trained de-escalation presence of any kind. The bodycam footage, released by ABC Four Corners on 30 May 2026, shows what happened next.

ABC's investigation named Senior Constable Nathan Black and Constable Timothy Trautsch as the officers involved. A District Court judge called their conduct "gratuitous cruelty." Knott died of cancer 18 months after the assault (https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-05-31/bodycam-video-police-beating-woman-sydney-family-jodi-knott/106740598). The case has rightly focused public attention on police training and the shortage of clinical co-responders in NSW. But there is a quieter question sitting alongside that debate: when ordinary people witness someone in crisis in a public place, what are they supposed to do?

Most have no idea. That gap is also worth fixing.

The moment before police arrive

Mental health crises in public spaces rarely start with sirens. They start with someone at a train station talking to no one, or a shopper sitting on a floor mid-aisle, or a person outside a pub who is visibly terrified and not making sense. That window — before any emergency service is on scene — is where bystanders and venue staff have the most influence over how things go.

The instinct for most people is to either crowd around or pull out a phone to film. Both responses tend to make things worse. A person in acute psychosis or dissociative distress already has a nervous system running at capacity. More faces, more noise, and more movement close to them raises that load further. The most useful thing a bystander can do in those first minutes is reduce the sensory input around the person, not add to it.

That means asking other onlookers to give space and step back. It means lowering your own voice and slowing down. It means not touching the person unless they are in immediate physical danger. None of this requires clinical training. It requires understanding one basic distinction.

Scared versus dangerous

Security staff, transport workers, retail employees, and event volunteers encounter people in mental health distress regularly. Very few of them receive structured guidance on how to respond. The single most useful frame is the one that trained responders use: is this person frightened, or are they a threat to someone else right now?

Those two situations can look the same from across a room. A person who is shouting, pacing, and refusing to make eye contact might be terrified and overwhelmed. They might also be escalating toward aggression. The body language overlaps. But the correct response to each is nearly opposite.

A frightened person needs the pressure reduced: fewer people nearby, a calm low voice, physical space, and time. Closing in fast, issuing commands, or physically blocking their movement tends to push a frightened person toward the second category. That is not speculation. It is the consistent finding from de-escalation research across emergency nursing, crisis counselling, and police reform literature.

A person who poses an active risk to someone else requires a different response, and that response should still start with verbal de-escalation where there is any window to do so. The point is that the first question matters. Skipping it and defaulting straight to control is where welfare checks turn into use-of-force incidents.

What venue staff and security guards can do right now

You do not need a policy overhaul to improve how your team handles these situations. A few practical changes make a real difference.

Brief your team on the scared-versus-dangerous question before each shift, especially for night operations or high-traffic weekend periods. Run it as a one-minute talking point, not a training module. The repetition matters more than the format.

When someone appears to be in crisis, the first staff member on scene should not be the only one making decisions. Send one person to create calm space near the individual. Send another to call triple zero and give a clear behavioural description — what the person is doing, not an amateur diagnosis of what they might have. Keep additional staff back unless there is an immediate safety need. A crowd of uniforms arriving at once is not reassuring to someone who is already overwhelmed.

If your venue or precinct has a relationship with a mental health co-response service, display that number somewhere accessible for your team. In parts of NSW, police mental health intervention teams can be requested directly. Knowing that option exists before an incident happens is the difference between using it and not.

XGuard builds this decision architecture into operator training, teaching guards to identify distress before it escalates and to match their response to the actual risk level rather than the apparent chaos of the situation. The principle holds whether you are a trained security professional or a retail supervisor who just found someone in distress in your car park.

Pro tip: Before you approach someone who appears to be in crisis, ask yourself one question out loud or in your head: "Is this person scared, or are they dangerous to someone right now?" If the answer is scared, create space, lower your voice, and call for help with a clear description. If you cannot answer the question, default to distance. Moving in fast is almost always the wrong first move.

What Jodi Knott's case asks of all of us

The policy failures in her case are real and documented. NSW needs faster investment in clinical co-response, better after-hours mental health coverage, and clearer protocols for when police respond alone. Her family has said they want structural change, not just accountability for two officers.

But structural change takes time, and crises happen today. The people closest to those moments — bystanders, security staff, transport workers, venue managers — are not going to have a clinician beside them every time. What they can have is a basic understanding of how fear works, what makes it worse, and when to stand back rather than step in.

That knowledge does not replace a co-responder. It does change what happens in the minutes before one arrives.

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Source: au-abc-news — 2026-05-30