Inspector Amy Scott is the cop you want in a crisis with the humanity you need in the police force.
In her testimony to the inquest into the Bondi Junction stabbing rampage she didn’t relay her heroic efforts in the coldly distant way of usual police evidence. She was professional yet humble, tearful at times but clear and direct as she put a human dimension to the police force and her actions to end Joel Cauchi’s murderous rampage.
Police feel fear. Just like other people, they feel burdens and pressures, she told the inquest as she paid tribute to her fellow officers who were there that day. Some had been unable to return to the job, she said, her voice breaking as she reached for tissues and apologised for becoming emotional.
Her tears were for her colleagues and first responders, her emotion for the injured and loved ones of the dead. “Please know you’re always in my thoughts,” she said, turning to friends and family in the courtroom. “I avail myself to you in … any way you need to move forward.”
Scott was composed when telling of her own thoughts and actions that day; in its most simple terms, her job was to stop the killer, no small feat when Cauchi was still hunting shoppers and workers inside the Westfield shopping centre. Despite her training and two decades of experience, Scott admitted she was frightened as she ran into the multi-storey building after responding to an emergency radio alert while on patrol in Bondi on the afternoon of April 13, 2024.
“Multiple people were screaming at me, ‘There’s … a man with a knife in there. He’s killing people, he’s hurting people, please help, people are dying’.” She couldn’t wait for back-up, she knew she had to go in alone. “I just had to go in,” she said. “It was my intention to try and find the threat.”
In her two hours of evidence, there were no claims to false bravery, no glossing over the fact that she was the lone cop hunting a knifeman who had already killed six people.
Dressed in civilian clothes, her blonde hair loose, she calmly recalled her thoughts when entering the shopping centre. “I felt nauseous … in my head I had resigned myself to the fact that I was probably going to die.’’
She knew what the active-armed-offender training said about the chance of survival: there’s a high chance of dying even with a security vest and a partner, she told the coroner.
Scott had neither of those back-ups as she ran through the shopping centre with a couple of French nationals, who’d already confronted the knifeman with bollards and were now urging her to shoot Cauchi before he did more damage.
Scott told the court how she chased after Cauchi, how she mouthed to a woman with a pram hiding behind a pot plant to get away, how she called out “mate” to distract him from the fleeing woman.
A 3D reconstruction of Cauchi’s final moments showed Scott facing the knifeman and gesturing to French construction workers Silas Desperaux and Damien Guerot and other shoppers to stay behind her.
When she briefly lowered her eyes to get her body-worn camera working, Cauchi ran towards her. “He was going to kill me,’’ she said.
As the distance closed to 6.5m she fired the first shot. “In my mind it was extremely slow,’’ she said. “I knew my first shot had hit him, that was because of the jolt of his body, but he continued to come towards me.”
She told him to “stop it, drop it’’, but when he continued to advance she fired another two shots, killing him on the spot.
Scott will always be known as the hero cop for her actions that day, but she was keen throughout her evidence to acknowledge the efforts of others.
Her colleagues who attended “were absolutely extraordinary – they saved lives that day”, she said.
Civilians and the brave Frenchmen who tried to tackle Cauchi with bollards and then accompanied Scott as she hunted him down also can’t be forgotten.
Despite the tragedies of that day, Scott said the action of civilians and first responders had “restored [my] faith in humanity and the goodness in people”.
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