The NSW Police Force is the largest and best-equipped police force in Australia. Like the others, including the Australian Federal Police, which has general policing functions only in the ACT, it has invested heavily in jobs, functions and fancy gear to cope with the threat of terrorism in recent decades. The findings of the Lindt cafe inquest suggest it's still not up to the task.
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If a force with its size and resources, and driving desire to be at centre stage of any crisis is not the best solution for a terror incident in Martin Place, it is unlikely that smaller, less-professional and lower-budgeted sister forces will do any better in Garema Place, Rundle Mall or Federation Plaza.
Saying the NSW Police did a less than optimal job is a judgment that needs some qualification. Everyone involved did their best, and some were very brave, not least in entering a room where the man with the shotgun might have also been wearing explosives.
It was a novel situation, and there was no body of experience, here or abroad, which could have guided those in command about what to do. For once in NSW, the problem was not of gung-ho cops rushing in when they ought to have held back and focused on containment and negotiation. They did wait. They did try to negotiate. They were patient and deliberate, according to the coroner, Michael Barnes, but for too long.
There was a moment – indeed, several moments – when they should have acted, and decisively, but didn't. The failure involved failures of judgment, misunderstandings of the evidence, and misunderstandings of the importance of agreed protocols and procedures. It was also a familiar story of bad administration: poor communications and lines of control, misinterpreted information, inter-agency jealousies and, probably, a ratio of chiefs too high for the number of Indians deployed.
Apart from all that, this serious experience with what was judged to be a terrorist siege incident showed significant flaws in Australia's counter-terrorism arrangements. The NSW Police had, readily to hand, the proffered aid of ASIO and the Defence Force, including better trained and better equipped special forces, as well as the experience, records and (most significantly, as it turned out) better surveillance gear of the AFP.
ASIO and the AFP, like the NSW Police, each had extensive experience with the hostage-taker, Man Haron Monis. But arrangements for sharing and pooling information – or of sharing fresh information that came in – were haphazard and uncontrolled, with the result that senior police supposedly in control of the situation lacked important or timely information, and were sometimes relying on instincts or appreciations at odds with the known facts.
Well-trained NSW Police snipers were doubly frustrated. They had doubts about whether they had the legal power to fire at any time they could see Monis, because he was not actually hurting anyone at that particular moment. But they were also worried about whether any shot they fired could be accurate, given there were two intervening and, as it turned out, fairly thick glass windows, both on the buildings where they were crouched and into the cafe.
A few members of the army's special forces, including people with experience of forced entry into buildings in Iraq and Afghanistan, had invited themselves into police command posts. They were tolerated, but it would be hard to say they were advising, liaising or being consulted. Since they weren't, the Commonwealth has drawn a veil over what they could have done, or what they thought about what was done. There are extensive written protocols about when or if a terrorism incident invites the participation of Australia's armed forces, but, as the police saw it, those circumstances hadn't arisen, because the cops had the matter under control and didn't want or need help.
No one has quite said so, but the presence of outsiders, while "useful", was not regarded as essential, and there was no moment in which the advice of outsiders figured in command decisions.
Most of the NSW police involved were among the officers regarded as the best and the brightest, with extensive experience in dealing with hostile and dangerous men, including armed men and professional criminals. There has always been a status, glamour and swagger – and extra pay – associated with being a member of the police's armed-response units (which, these days, also get glamorous names). But over recent decades, there has also been extensive training and frequent exercises, and most of the paunchy guts have disappeared.
But though the coroner did not mention it as such, it seems that a good deal of the experience and instinct held by these officers, particularly those in command, was gained from dealing with domestic siege situations, where an angry, perhaps drunk or mentally disturbed, armed man is holding off police and others from his own house. Containment and negotiation tactics adapted for that experience are not necessarily applicable when a determined and armed person has decided to take hostages for some political purpose, in the process manifesting some hope or expectation of being killed, if not without taking the lives of some or all of his hostages.
Halfway through the siege, there was evidence that neither patience nor containment was working. Nor was an only half-understood injunction in the terrorism hostage protocols that there were to be no concessions made to terrorists. Police commanders took this literally, and refused even requests that might have made the hostage-taker less erratic and hostages slightly safer. The no-concessions rule is about political demands – for example, Monis's demand to speak to Tony Abbott on the phone – not about whether, say, vehicles in the street be moved away.
More dangerously, police and their consultants, including a psychiatrist, failed to recognise clear signs that Monis was getting more agitated; instead, they thought he was seeming more relaxed. They had thought their negotiation strategy was succeeding when, in fact, no police officer had had direct conversations with him, and police were ignoring messages coming either from escaping hostages, or from text or oral messages from hostages still inside the cafe.
And they had no strategy for an assault on the cafe, nor agreement about what would trigger it. The final assault was 10 minutes after Monis had shot a hostage and executed clumsily, and with a police bullet killing another hostage.
One might say there was both timidity and rigidity in most of the decision-making processes. Flexibility and boldness were missing at critical moments. There was almost no continuous process of reviewing the evidence, or adapting to changing circumstance.
The coroner believed that one reason police seemed paralysed into inaction flowed from their experience of being criticised in the past for having been aggressive in siege situations. They were thus predisposed for patience, and waiting.
That this is the police predisposition might surprise those (such as myself) who have criticised how police have rushed, crowded and shot mentally disturbed people in recent times. But these are not siege situations.
The NSW Police, one sometimes suspects, learnt their basic siege tactics with Wally Mellish and the famous Glenfield siege of 1968. That reached the high farce of then police commissioner Norm Allen taking charge of negotiations, and arranging that Mellish (armed with an Armalite rifle) would surrender provided that Allen organise first a marriage to his girlfriend Beryl. Allen was a man of his word: he organised a $20 ring and reportedly "hosted a wedding dinner of braised steak and mushrooms for Beryl, curry and rice for Wally, and rice pudding for both for dessert". He also lent Mellish another Armalite and 200 rounds of ammunition, and agreed to have the police warrant, which had precipitated the siege, dropped. Mellish, too, was a man of his word, and surrendered; he was sent to a psychiatric hospital. Allen never was.
Nor was this the first occasion in which bullets fired by armed NSW police, forcing an entrance into a building, have ended up ricocheting and rebounding around a room to kill innocent people, including other police. It is not something that happens in SAS training for siege conditions in aircraft cabins.
Being critical, with all of the benefits of hindsight, of how the NSW Police managed the siege does not in any way exculpate Monis from complete responsibility. It may still be moot whether Monis is properly to be regarded as a terrorist, on a mission for Islamic State, or merely a very dangerous and narcissistic nutter. But one can have a terrorist incident without a terrorist, and there can be no doubt that it was a terrorist incident, and a very successful one, which paralysed central Sydney for 18 hours, and which attracted the world's attention.
No one really knows what motivated Monis, or even what his hopes and expectations were when he entered the Martin Place cafe with a shortened shotgun and began the siege. But as the NSW Police began responding fairly coolly and professionally, it was able fairly soon to identify Monis and to recognise he was a person whom it they knew quite well. The NSW Police had him on charges of being an accessory to murder and of numerous sexual assaults, and had also coped with his grandstanding, attention-seeking and claims to represent significant Muslim opinion, as well as offers to provide information. ASIO had conducted numerous interviews with him, had repeatedly made careful assessments of his propensity for political violence and whether he represented a threat. He had frequently offered ASIO information, or his services as some sort of go-between; ASIO had enough experience of his information and his personality to listen, but to decline with thanks. The AFP had similar experiences. So had any number of members of the public, or others, such as lawyers who had acted for Monis in the past, who volunteered information during the day. As it happened, the NSW police officer coordinating incoming intelligence (until she was unaccountably detached to set up a one-way long-range megaphone device) had been on the detective squad that had investigated and charged Monis with his sexual assaults on women.
The coroner says – and on this I think he is legally and constitutionally wrong – that there was no occasion for the Commonwealth (in the form of the ADF) to intervene, both because NSW Police were always in control of the situation and because the state government had not asked for a military call-out or for help. That's rot. Even before the 2006 amendments to the 1903 Defence Act, the Commonwealth had executive power to intervene in Commonwealth interests; after the 2006 amendments, there was clear authority, whether the state agreed or not. Barnes has called for better protocols to determine whether and when the Commonwealth should intervene. He's right, but he should he gone on to say that, once it is clear that terrorism is involved, the lead role should pass to the Commonwealth. Local skills, particularly from police, will still be critical. But it's a war, after all.
This does not mean that police should not have a central role in hostage and siege situations, whether of a "domestic" or terrorist sort. But it is safe to say that Australian special forces are better trained and equipped to force buildings, rescue hostage and neutralise terrorists. And to be able to make the judgments about waiting it out, or acting quickly and forcibly.
However much cops want the action and the glory, and whatever their own experiences of dealing with angry and irrational men, they are second best when the men are bent on inflicting terror on the population at large.
Pretending otherwise, and allowing cops, on that account, to engage in a more and more expensive arms races with each other, in the process becoming more militarised and more remote from the ordinary population, is a recipe for further, perhaps worse, disasters. The sight, for example, of AFP officers carrying submachine guns while patrolling outside Parliament House ought to be regarded as more comical than comforting, were it not for the obvious risk that they might shoot themselves, if not tourists. They do not even display the equanimity to mockery or teasing demonstrated outside Buckingham Palace by Her Majesty's Brigade of Guards, folk who actually know what they are doing.
But one can be sure that it will not be police, whether in Sydney, Brisbane or Canberra, who will call in the ADF and implicitly admit that a situation is beyond their skills. And local politicians will usually be scared, for political reasons, to override them. Putting in the pros calls for some political leadership, which may involve some courage.
Barnes' most interesting suggestion was that there ought to be both national and state and territorial bodies set up, in effect, to note, register, monitor and "manage" nutters, or what the coroner calls "fixated loners" – the sort of people, like Monis, from whom confrontations with authority can be expected. There are many in Canberra who know the type – once described by Ian Freckleton, QC (who appeared for the NSW Police at the inquest), and by ombudsmen as "querulous paranoids".
Queensland provides the model, with a taskforce consisting of police and mental-health workers. The "typical" fixated person is described as male, aged in his mid-50s, in pursuit of some idiosyncratic cause and engaged in some inappropriate correspondence, telephone calls or direct approaches to a public office holder. He is likely to be known to police, more likely than not to have a mental disorder, but to be not receiving treatment. In about 9 per cent of cases, he will have (as Monis did) as a primary diagnosis a personality disorder of a paranoid, anti-social and/or narcissistic sort. Such folk wage dogged and single-minded campaigns against perceived injustices, have highly unreasonable expectations, present as rigid and ruminative individuals resistant to criticism, or, sometimes, alternately obsequious and condescending behaviour.
It could describe a host of people who have terrorised and made nuisances of themselves around Australia over many decades. It could, on the other hand, describe a few police commissioners or ministers of the crown.
Australia has not suffered the extent of terrorism as Europe, the Middle East, Africa, North or South America, or Britain. But we will have more incidents. We should not let federal niceties, or concern for the political power of cops, override the need for calm command, patience but, at times, decisive, effective and possibly brutal action.
Jack Waterford is a former Canberra Times editor. jwaterfordcanberra@gmail.com
