By Ronan Kelly
Say armed police are called to a house and a man there rushes at them holding a weapon - are they justified in shooting him?
It's a hypothetical question for most of us but, for Katrina Osborn, it’s very real.
In May 2019, armed police were called to her son’s house in Hamburg, Germany.
They had been told that he was armed with a knife. His wife, Nikol, said that he was having a mental breakdown and that she was in the bedroom with their new baby.
When the police got there, they found Oisín, in his underpants, with a saucepan on his head. He was, indeed, having a psychotic episode.
He believed 'bad spirits’ were trying to invade the house. He had turned off the electricity and put his phone into a cooking-pot because the spirits were "listening".
He had covered up the mirrors and removed plastic items from the house and brought metal objects upstairs - screwdrivers, hammers, coins, cookware, cooking utensils including knives. The metal, he told his wife, provided ‘protection’ - like in the novels of fantasy writer, Terry Pratchett.
When the police came, the front door was barricaded shut. When they called his wife, Oisín grabbed her phone and put it in a saucepan.
Then, the police broke into the house, and shouted at Oisín to come downstairs and ‘put down the knife!’
The police were dressed in black, armed with semi-automatic pistols and holding a bullet-proof shield.
For Oisín, in his agitated state, he must have thought the ‘bad spirits’ had arrived.
"They must have looked like something out of ‘Star Wars’", says Oisín’s Dad, David.
David says, by now, Oisín looked like his namesake from the Irish legends, "He was dressed for battle, like an ancient hero." A saucepan on his head, clothes tied around his waist like a kilt. And, in the waistband, a spatula.
Oisín’s wife, Nikol, says she felt under no threat from her husband, she had called the emergency services asking for medical help but instead, when they heard that there were knives among the metal objects Oisín had brought upstairs, they sent the police.
When Oisín didn’t come downstairs, the police went upstairs, calling on him to come out of the bedroom. When they got to the stairs, he went out to confront them. His wife’s last words to him were, "I love you."
On the landing, he rushed at the police, they pepper-sprayed him, to no avail. The two police at the top of the stairs couldn’t back away from him because their colleagues, behind them, were blocking the way. So, they opened fire and killed him.
What else could they have done?
Well, according to the people who train the German police, they could have approached the situation a whole lot differently.
The documentary features two men who work in psychiatry and who train the Hamburg police in how to deal with someone in a mental health crisis.
One of those trainers, ‘Walter’, was in Oisín’s position. He had a psychotic episode. But, he wasn’t arrested, instead he got treatment. Now, he helps other patients in recovery and explains to police trainees what the person in front of them is experiencing.
He describes how, if the person is hearing voices in their head, they can’t really hear you shouting at them to put down a knife. And those voices in their head are very specific - they push the person’s emotional buttons.
"My voices were very negative", he says, "They said, ‘You are bad; you are very bad!"
Walter’s colleague, Robert Dorner, a psychiatric nurse, who runs the course for police trainees explains why mentally-ill people often pick up weapons.
"They are scared. Their hallucinations are making them very frightened. If you tell them to put down the knife, that terrifies them."
He says pepper spray and tasers are often useless - they don’t have the same effect on mentally-ill people as someone who is not.
Shouting and more than one voice are very confusing for the person in psychosis.
"Only one police officer should talk at a time. Stand at a distance. Speak softly."
None of which the Hamburg police did when they went to Oisín Osborn’s home in 2019.
However, his wife and parents don’t focus on the two police officers who shot him. Instead they blame their preparation, the fact that they went to the scene without a mental health professional and "the system".
The German legal system produced two reports into Oisín Osborn’s killing. Both were based on the testimonies of the police at the scene. Those police wore no bodycams; there was no CCTV. The only other two witnesses were his wife, Nikol, who was in the bedroom at the time and Oisín, who, tragically, is dead.
The two investigations cleared the police and said they acted "in self-defence".
Oisín’s Osborn’s parents don’t accept that and have taken the case to the European Court of Human Rights.
The court has accepted their case and has given it the title: "Osborn v. Germany"
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