The NSW government is creating a heavily resourced policing unit of around 250 officers, prioritising hate crimes above other violence. Andrew Brown asks why.
Every four minutes in New South Wales, police respond to a domestic violence incident, a relentless cycle of harm that rarely makes front-page news.
Two women are killed every week in Australia, and hundreds more are assaulted, often behind closed doors, often without the attention or urgency that accompanies other forms of crime.
There is no 250 officer task force for that, no permanent, centralised unit standing ready to respond.
But there is one now for other hate crimes, as the NSW government confirmed the creation of a permanent, heavily resourced policing unit of around 250 officers. The “Rapid Response Unit”. A specialist, centralised force that will remain on call, equipped with long arm rifles and deployed where needed.
It is a standing response to what is being described as a surge in hate-related incidents, with officers positioned at places of worship, major events, and public spaces, visible, armed, and permanent, a continuation of operations that have expanded in recent months.
The language surrounding its creation is unmistakable, built on urgency, threat, and the framing of emergency.
What exactly is the emergency?
The incidents driving this response, while serious and at times deeply offensive, have been overwhelmingly non-lethal, consisting largely of graffiti, vandalism, threats, and acts of intimidation, even as police operations have carried out thousands of taskings and laid relatively limited numbers of charges.
They are offensive, and in many cases criminal, but they do not reflect a pattern of widespread lethal violence that would ordinarily justify such an extraordinary response. Policing, at its core, is supposed to be about harm, about preventing it, responding to it, and allocating resources where it is most acute.
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Yet here, the scale of the response appears to sit well beyond the scale of the threat it is intended to address. There is also the claim underpinning all of this, the idea of a surge, a wave, a crisis that demands immediate and visible action.
The Executive Council of Australian Jewry has reported more than 1,250 incidents of antisemitism, a number that has driven headlines and shaped public perception.
But that figure is self-reported, encompassing everything from online abuse and verbal confrontation to criminal damage, collapsing a wide spectrum of behaviour into a single, powerful statistic.
When those reports are filtered through the criminal system, however, the picture changes significantly.
Surge, what surge?
A parliamentary inquiry led by Stephen Lawrence MLC heard that just 14 matters were referred to police. Fourteen out of more than a thousand reported incidents is a gap that demands scrutiny rather than assumption.
This does not dismiss antisemitism, which clearly exists and should be investigated and prosecuted wherever it crosses the legal threshold. It also does not in any way ignore the tragedy of the Bondi massacre, but there is a Royal Commission to determine what could or should have prevented that.
But it does raise a fundamental question:
Are we responding to verified crime, or to perception shaped by aggregated reporting?
Because policy built on perception rather than substantiated offending risks losing its footing, and with it, public trust. And then there is the question of money, which often reveals priorities more clearly than words ever could.
In 2024, governments committed more than $150 million to security for Jewish organisations, funding guards, surveillance systems, and physical protection measures designed to reassure a community that felt under threat.
Every community deserves to feel safe, without exception, and governments have a responsibility to respond when people fear for their safety.
But spending, inevitably, reflects priorities, and priorities expose choices.
If governments can mobilise that level of funding and now establish a permanent armed unit in response to largely non-lethal incidents, then where is the equivalent response elsewhere?
Other violence ignored?
Where is it for domestic violence, which continues at a relentless pace, measured not in incidents but in lives lost and permanently altered?
Where is it for organised crime, which continues to play out across Western Sydney in ways that are anything but symbolic?
Across those suburbs, violence has not been abstract or rhetorical; it has been real, immediate, and dangerous, with homes shot at, businesses firebombed, and cars torched in residential streets.
This is not intimidation alone; this is violence, direct and life-threatening, so where is the 250 officer unit for that?
And again, back to the home, back to the quiet emergency that repeats every four minutes, back to the two women killed each week. Where is the emergency response for that?
Because policing is not simply about action, it is about allocation, about the decisions made behind closed doors that determine where resources go and where they do not.
Every officer represents a decision, every unit reflects a priority, and every deployment sends a signal about what matters most.
Bondi response?
This is where Bondi becomes relevant, not as a justification, but as a test of logic.
The attack unfolded over minutes, sudden and chaotic, and over before any specialised unit could realistically be deployed. So what, in practical terms, would this new task force have done?
The honest answer is, very little, because some acts of violence cannot be pre-deployed against, cannot be deterred by visibility, and cannot be intercepted by standing units waiting for a call.
They happen too fast, too unpredictably, for that kind of response to matter. So if this unit is not designed to stop events like that, then what exactly is it designed to do?
Is it there to reassure, to deter, or to send a signal that something is being done?
Because increasingly, this looks like signalling, a government under pressure responding to the loudest concerns by building something visible, something that can be pointed to, something that can be seen.
That is politics, not necessarily policing.
Government accountability
And there is another shift taking place, quieter but just as significant.
After Bondi, the questions were immediate and obvious, centred on what was known, what was missed, and what could have been done differently. Those are questions of accountability, and they are rarely comfortable for those in power.
Instead, the focus has moved, subtly but decisively, from what happened to what might happen, from scrutiny to action, from accountability to visibility.
A new unit changes the conversation, redirecting attention without necessarily providing answers.
It does not resolve the questions that were asked; it simply replaces them.
I have seen what that looks like on the ground. At Sydney Town Hall, a peaceful crowd was contained and pushed, and the tone shifted quickly from facilitation to control, from presence to pressure.
It felt less like policing and more like a show of force, an assertion rather than a response. My 83-year-old mother tried to leave early, caught in the movement of the crowd as it tightened, pushed forward without control or warning. She fell, her wrist fractured, a prolapsed disc in her back, injuries that will linger long after the moment has passed.
This is what happens when policing follows pressure rather than principle.
Premier Chris Minns says this is about safety, about cohesion, about preventing division before it takes hold. But cohesion is not built through force, and it is not maintained through visible displays of power; it is built through trust, and trust cannot be commanded; it must be earned.
It is not created at the end of a rifle, so the question remains: How does deploying armed officers into community spaces, in response to largely non lethal incidents, bring people together rather than push them further apart?
Or does it, in fact, do the opposite, deepening the very divisions it claims to prevent?
Because there is a line, often invisible until it has already been crossed. A line between reassurance and intimidation, between protection and overreach, between safety and control.
And once that line moves, it rarely moves back. This is not just a policing decision, and it cannot be treated as one. It is a statement of priority, a signal of intent, and ultimately, a choice.
A choice about what matters, and what does not.
And when visibility begins to outrank harm, when perception is prioritised over reality, then politics has already won.
Source: Michael West Read More