Cops bashed Brad, broke his ribs, then charged him with assault

Brad Kellson is pinned to the ground when a police officer twice his size knees him five times.

As officers drag him to a cell, he is wheezing and in clear and serious pain. Half of his ribs are fractured and he has a punctured lung.

They charge Brad — whose most aggressive actions were to drunkenly, lamely grab at a body-worn camera and hold onto an officer's leg — with assaulting police and resisting arrest.

The paperwork is completed about the time Brad is put in an ambulance and taken to hospital. He spends four days in intensive care.

Brad is no stranger to police violence and was first bashed by a cop when he was 12, but the assault at Blacktown Police Station is by far the worst of his 43 years.

"Couldn't work, lost my job; you can't work with 12 broken ribs, can you?" Brad tells Four Corners, sitting next to an empty playing field in his home town of Casino, in northern New South Wales.

Brad Kellson was kneed repeatedly by an officer while in police custody. (Four Corners: Rob Hill)

Brad, who was taken from his mother aged two, has bounced in and out of state care and has served time in jail, sometimes for violence. He says the incident pushed him into a deep depression.

He takes off his baseball cap and wipes his forehead as he remembers that night. "I felt like … I got put in a box and the walls were just going to squash me, so I just wanted to end myself, really."

Brad is one of the thousands of people a year who make allegations of police misconduct.

These allegations range from minor matters all the way through to brutal assault — like in Brad's case.

What makes his case unusual is that he is one of the few people who has managed to prove what happened to him in court.

"They're lying under oath in front of a judge and the judge worked it out."

Brad spent much of his life in northern NSW, but in the months before the assault, he and his girlfriend move to the outskirts of Sydney for work.

On November 13, 2021, the pair go to a Blacktown pub for dinner.

They have been drinking all day so they are very drunk. They are turned away from a hotel near the train station.

It is unclear what happens next, but the result is that police are called to a report of a man pushing a woman outside the pub. By the time they arrive, Brad has taken his shirt off and is involved in an argument with some men across the street.

Neither Brad nor his partner are physically aggressive to police. Brad says he just wants to go home.

He is from a country town where you rarely see more than two officers at a time.

Police are confused but appear to belie