Police officer tasered care home resident then joked about it on Facebook hours later

A police officer who tasered a 92-year-old wheelchair user in a care home has admitted “it doesn’t look good” that she joked about the incident hours late on Facebook hours later, a misconduct hearing has heard.

Sussex Police officers Pc Stephen Smith and Pc Rachel Comotto are facing allegations of gross misconduct that they used inappropriate force against single-leg amputee Donald Burgess at Park Beck care home in St Leonards-on-Sea, East Sussex, in June 2022.

Pc Comotto is also facing an allegation of posting inappropriate comments over the incident on Facebook and told a misconduct hearing it was not intended to be disrespectful to Mr Burgess.

Proceedings at Sussex Police headquarters heard that Pc Comotto replied to a Facebook comment to someone else which read: “Happy birthday, the care home is getting closer and closer” with wink and laugh emojis.

Pc Comotto replied to them: “We all know what happens in care homes”, ending with a lightning bolt emoji.

The person then responded: “I think you’ll be banned from going to any care homes in future, all he wanted to do was butter his bread” followed by two laughing emojis.

Giving evidence at misconduct proceedings on Wednesday, Pc Comotto accepted writing the comment and that it was on the day of the care home incident.

She said this was after colleagues were joking at her expense for firing her taser in a care home, which had spread throughout the office about a couple of hours before she wrote the Facebook comment.

Her colleagues did not know any information about Mr Burgess, she added.

“I’d like to clarify no humour was directed at Mr Burgess, it was a continuation of the joke I was subject to or the butt of,” she said.

“With hindsight, without context it doesn’t look good, I appreciate that. I want to extend my apologies to the family.”

Both officers were cleared of assault of Mr Burgess following a trial at Southwark Crown Court last year.

Mr Burgess was taken to hospital after the incident and later contracted Covid.

He died 22 days later aged 93.

The misconduct hearing heard police were called to a dementia care home over reports a resident at the care home had a knife and was threatening to stab staff.

Bodyworn footage from Pc Comotto played at the hearing shows Mr Burgess sitting in his wheelchair in his bedroom with a knife in his right hand, and the officers asking him repeatedly to put it on the floor.

Pc Smith then sprays him with Pava and tries to flick away the knife with his baton which does not work, and Pc Comotto then tasers him.

Pc Comotto told the hearing that after Pc Smith’s strike with the baton towards the knife, she believed he was going to deploy a second strike and she believed “it was safer to use taser as lower level of risk”.

She told the hearing: “Baton strike is high level of force, for an older person to receive a strike from a baton it would have more impact than on a younger person.”

After Mr Burgess was tasered for five seconds, officers were able to remove the knife, the hearing heard.

In cross examination, Pc Comotto denied exaggerating the risk posed by Mr Burgess and the knife, which was described as a “table knife with a rounded top” by Sussex Police counsel Aaron Rathmell.

Put to her it was not a particularly sharp knife, she said: “I didn’t know that.”

Asked if she was “really suggesting” she deployed the taser as a “calculated decision to intervene” against Pc Smith carrying out a second strike, she replied: “It is not a reconstruction.”

Lawyer Denis Barry, representing Pc Smith, said it was Pc Smith’s case that he was never going to use a second strike, and he used his baton towards the knife and not Mr Burgess himself.

Mr Rathmell put to Pc Comotto that the best way to stop Pc Smith from what she believed was about to be a second strike was to shout ‘stop, no’ and that would be “far more proportionate than discharging a taser at a gentleman in a wheelchair”.

She replied: “It happened so quickly.”

“I still believe what I did in the moment, I did was the correct outcome of resolving that safely.”

But she added: “With all the information I know now, I would take a different approach.”

Pc Comotto, who had been a police officer for seven years at the time of the incident, denied discharging her taser in panic.

It was the first time she ever used it in a real incident, it was heard.