The New South Wales premier, Chris Minns, and the police commissioner, Mal Lanyon, have defended the force’s response to the Bondi beach terrorist attack, saying officers with handguns took out the two gunmen who were armed with high-powered weapons.
“I am incredibly proud of our police officers,” Lanyon said on Tuesday. “They were confronted by two men armed with long arms. Our police at the scene were armed with pistols.”
The premier intervened when Lanyon was repeatedly questioned during a robust press conference about the number of police at the Jewish festival ahead of Sunday’s attack and the response time during the mass shooting that killed 15 people.
“The NSW police acted with bravery and integrity,” Minns said.
“They engaged the gunmen on the footbridge with handguns. They didn’t take a backwards step. The offenders had long-range rifles and NSW police officers were responsible for killing one of them, and shooting the other one and, as a result, saving many, many people’s lives.”
Minns and Lanyon refused to answer questions about how many police were detailed to protect the Chanukah by the Sea event or when police at the scene returned fire.
“That is subject to investigation at the moment,” Lanyon said.
“We base our policing response on the threat that exists at the time. A lot of work is done between ourselves and the Jewish community. Bondi beach is a large and public area. We regularly patrol that area as we did on that day.”
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Lanyon said there had been “taskings” for the Jewish festival and “there were police moving through there at all times – we had police moving through the area regularly”.
“We had an appropriate policing response to ensure police were moving through there, working closely with the community. We take safety very seriously. Had there been intelligence that there was a particular threat at that location, or to that event, we may have had a different policing response,” he said.
Two officers were shot during the almost 10 minutes of shooting: a constable and a probationary constable.
It was unclear whether the two officers had been assigned to the Hanukah festival or were on a general patrol.
Minns took umbrage at the suggestion police had not responded when the shooting started.
“There are two officers in critical care in NSW hospitals at the moment. They weren’t shot in the back as they were running away. They were shot in the front,” he said on Tuesday.
“I’m sorry to be graphic about it, but if there is any suggestion that NSW police didn’t live up to their responsibilities to the people of this state, it should be rejected because it is not consistent with the facts.
“NSW police officers, some of whom had been in the job for a number of months, put their lives on the line to save people in this state, and I think this rush to conclusions before all the facts are known, in my view, is disrespectful to their actions on Sunday.”
Dr John Coyne, the director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s national security program, said in his view the police response at Bondi seemed quite swift.
“The area was crowded,” he said. “There were casualties everywhere. This is an incredibly difficult environment. They don’t want to shoot a member of the public.”
He stressed that Australian policing was based on the concept of community policing – working with the community – in contrast to the US, where police forces were militarised.
“We don’t have police walking the streets with assault weapons, and in a lot of ways that’s a good thing. Now and then police cars and equipment are stolen. We certainly don’t want assault weapons getting into the wrong hands,” he said.
Coyne, who formerly worked for the federal police on counter-terrorism, said Australian general duties police undergo firearms training and active shooter training in their initial course and are required to do a day or two of refresher training each year.
“But most police would rarely draw their weapon in a year,” he said, adding that, looking at the videos, the police at Bondi had been well trained.
He pointed out they were surrounded by casualties, were being fired on, two of their colleagues were hit, one in the face with a shotgun, and yet they still managed to disable two shooters and then disarm them on the bridge and perform CPR.
“It’s incredibly terrifying … but I think they did a tremendous job. Shooting more than 10 metres with a pistol is quite difficult.”
Dr Vince Hurley, a lecturer in criminology at Macquarie University and a former NSW police officer with 29 years of experience, said it would be almost impossible for police to train for an event like the Bondi beach terrorist attack.
“You can’t train for this type of scenario. Even the US doesn’t get it right, and they have mass shootings all the time.”
Hurley said the police would have faced a very chaotic scene, with hundreds of people running around, and many dead and injured.
“They would have faced a conflict of looking for offenders or treating the injured,” he said.
Hurley said that in the wake of the Westfield Bondi Junction stabbings in April 2024, NSW police had implemented new protocols to interact with ambulance crews so they could work in hot zones. These seemed to have worked well, he said.
But he stressed responders would have been acutely aware of the possibility of further offenders or a secondary event.
NSW police under Operation Shelter – established after the Hamas attacks in Israel in October 2023 – have deployed static patrols at all Jewish sites as well as roving patrols throughout the eastern suburbs of Sydney.
Insp Amy Scott shot and killed Joel Cauchi, who was schizophrenic, last year to end the Bondi Junction attack that killed six people.
Scott told a coronial inquest in April this year she felt nauseous as she ran into the Westfield shopping centre “because, in my head, I had resigned myself to the fact that I was probably going to die”.
In active armed offender training, officers were told they had a 60-70% chance of non-survival, “and that is if you are partnered up and vested up, and I was neither of those,” she told the court.
The inspector said that in her 2016 training, she had dealt with circumstances that forced officers to shift away from a “contain, negotiate” approach to “don’t wait, go”. Scott said she was trained to “stop the killing, stop the dying”.
Australia’s “Active armed offender guidelines for crowded places” states that “police first responders are trained to move toward the threat at a sustained pace to defeat or disarm the offender”.
“In doing so, they may initially need to keep moving past panicked and injured people. Their primary goal is to prevent the offender killing or causing serious injury to further victims.”
