Sydney's new armed police unit debuts with 200 rifle-trained officers

The Armed Response Command is now on Sydney’s streets. The New South Wales police launched the permanent special unit on Sunday, deploying 200 specialist trained officers armed with military rifles across tourist areas, crowded public spaces, major events, sporting matches and places of worship. It is an Australian first. Its rollout has immediately raised questions about how, and where, the new capability will actually be used.

The unit’s commander, Det Supt Andrew Evans, has framed the operational model around visibility and readiness. Officers will drive specialist cars and be “highly visible” across the city, he said, with the unit built on the principle of “preserving life”. “Operational readiness is about ensuring that if the community needs us on its worst day, we can perform at our best,” Evans said in a media statement last week.

The capability gap the unit is meant to close was laid out in May by the deputy commissioner David Hudson, who told the royal commission into antisemitism that police were outgunned at the 14 December Bondi massacre. Officers on the scene carried 9mm Glock pistols while the alleged shooters, one of whom was shot dead by police, were armed with rifles with greater range. The Jewish community had asked for a dedicated police presence at the Hanukah event in the days before the tragedy because of the high threat level, but only junior roaming patrol officers were in the area when the shooting began. In the aftermath, the Police Association of NSW began arguing for officers to be issued with long-armed weapons more consistently.

The new unit was promised in the wake of the Bondi attack, and police say its purpose is to deter threats and better position officers to respond to armed offender attacks. The force is not starting from zero. NSW riot police have had access to long-arm rifles since at least 2017, and as of 2019 the force had issued 1,500 long-arm firearms, according to information provided to parliament.

Deployment is where the operational questions sharpen. Asked at a press conference in October whether the unit would be used at protests, the NSW police commissioner, Mal Lanyon, said: “No, I don’t see that they will be deployed at protests. We have a public order and riot squad who are well and truly established to do that.” But on Sunday, the police minister, Yasmin Catley, said the government would “absolutely not” introduce regulation to define when and where Armed Response Command officers could be deployed, and she could not rule out their use at protests. “If they’re required to be there because of the heightened risk, they will be, but police will make those decisions. They are the experts,” she said. Evans, for his part, said on Sunday that the riot squad, not his unit, were “the experts when it comes to public order management”, but added: “I’m not in a position to say that we will never be there [at protests]. We will probably be some blocks away. If there’s information that a particular group might be the target of an active armed offender incident, we will have rifles around the corner.”

Timothy Roberts, president of the NSW Council for Civil Liberties, says a verbal assurance is not enough. He warns the state is “witnessing an American-style militarisation of our police force” that moves away from community-led policing and “increases the risk of state violence”, and he is calling for clear regulation, in policy and legislation rather than public comment, making explicit that officers carrying combat assault rifles will not be deployed at protests.

Expert views on the capability itself are mixed. Julian Droogan, a counter-terrorism expert at Macquarie University, says hardening security around locations such as the Opera House and Bondi beach makes sense, but risks pushing attacks towards “softer targets”. “You cannot police your way out of the challenge of terrorism, you have to be able to address it also at the root cause,” he says, adding that it remains to be seen whether visibly armed officers will make the community feel safer, and that a political response wanting to look tough must be distinguished from one that actually addresses the problem.

By contrast, New Zealand offers a different operating model. After the 2019 Christchurch terror attack, in which a lone shooter killed 51 people across two mosques, NZ police carried long-arm rifles for six weeks before the trial armed unit was scrapped. The then commissioner, Andrew Coster, said the decision to remain unarmed followed community consultation: armed patrol teams “do not align with the style of policing that New Zealanders expect”. John Battersby, a former NZ police officer now a security expert at Massey University, notes that Australian officers already carry handguns and Tasers, so community response may differ, but he warns of “mission creep” and a change in police attitudes. “We’ve got to respond to the risks that are emerging, but when we respond to those risks, we have to be conscious that we may be bringing others,” he says, adding that making it work will require “a huge amount of police discipline”.

Vincent Hurley, a former NSW police officer and lecturer in modern policing at Macquarie University, believes fewer people would have died at Bondi had an armed response command been present, but he also raises concerns about community responses to a heavily armed unit, suggesting an option like New Zealand’s approach of keeping units strategically placed rather than out on patrol.

Within the Jewish community, reactions differ. The Executive Council of Australian Jewry has welcomed the unit, with co-chief executive Alex Ryvchin saying the Bondi massacre “was always going to result in an increased police capability to deal with such horrors”, and that while “no Australian wants to see officers with military weapons on our streets, the sight of body bags is far worse”. Bart Shteinman, executive officer of the Jewish Council of Australia, says the community remains hesitant to gather in large open spaces and has called for a more holistic approach. “Bigger guns and harsher laws will not tackle the root causes of violence and hatred, nor can they eliminate the chance of another fatal mass casualty attack,” he says.

The unit is now operational. Whether its deployment rules stay as flexible as the minister indicated, or are later constrained, remains the open question.