A disciplinary panel at Sussex Police headquarters in Lewes has dismissed two officers — PC Stephen Smith and PC Rachel Comotto — after finding they subjected a 92-year-old single-leg amputee with dementia to unjustified and excessive force while he sat in a wheelchair in his care home bedroom. The case, which drew on bodyworn camera footage and testimony spanning a week-long misconduct hearing, exposes a systematic failure to apply the most elementary standards of proportionality and vulnerability assessment when policing some of society’s most defenceless individuals.
The incident occurred in June 2022 at Park Beck care home in St Leonards-on-Sea, where Donald Burgess had been reported by carers as threatening them with a dinner knife. Both officers, who were acquitted of assault occasioning actual bodily harm at a criminal trial in May 2025, have now been placed on the College of Policing’s barred list, permanently excluding them from serving as police officers in England and Wales. The disciplinary outcome, though it arrived three years after the incident itself, represents the most consequential accountability measure available short of criminal conviction.
The panel’s findings, taken together, document a sequence of failures that was neither accidental nor isolated to a single moment of poor judgment.
The bodyworn camera footage, which formed a central pillar of the misconduct case, is particularly damning in what it reveals about institutional culture as much as individual behaviour. Comotto herself disclosed during the hearing that colleagues at Hastings police station had been “laughing and joking” at her expense for deploying a Taser in a care home — a detail that raises questions extending well beyond the conduct of these two officers, pointing instead toward an environment in which the use of force against elderly and disabled individuals could become, even briefly, a source of workplace humour rather than institutional alarm.
Deputy Chief Constable Paul Court stated after the hearing that he was “appalled” by the officers’ actions and offered an apology to the Burgess family, insisting the conduct did not reflect the standards of Sussex Police. Such declarations carry weight only insofar as they are accompanied by structural change — in training, supervision, and the protocols governing police responses to mental health and dementia-related incidents in care settings. Burgess’s great nephew, Jason Pye, described him as “a much loved family man” and said dismissal had been “the only outcome there could have been,” expressing the hope that the case would serve as a warning to officers inclined toward similar behaviour. That hope, however measured, depends on whether institutions treat this case as a symptom requiring systemic remedy, or merely as an aberration to be excised and forgotten.