There are few scenes more shocking than random acts of maximum violence against people simply going about their day by day lives. Yet that is what Australians are coming to terms with after a person went on a rampage through a Bondi shopping centre on Saturday afternoon, killing six people and injuring at the least 12 others, including a baby. The attacker was also killed on the scene.
Police have named the attacker as 40-year-old Joel Cauchi, who was originally from Queensland and had a history of mental health issues.
There are many questions yet to be answered in regards to the attack. But cases of mass murder are so shocking partially because they’re relatively rare in Australia.
How common are such events in Australia?
To answer this, we first need to take a look at what we mean by the term “mass murder”, of which there are various definitions world wide. The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), as an example, describes mass murder as an incident during which 4 or more individuals are murdered, inside one event, and in a number of locations in close geographical proximity.
While unusual, there have been mass killings before in Australiaeach of them shocking the country.
These include the Bourke Street incident in Melbourne in 2017, when the motive force of a stolen automobile drove into pedestrians, killing six people and injuring many others. Another occurred in 2019, when a gunman shot and killed 4 people during a rampage across the Darwin CBD.
Perhaps probably the most notorious, though, was the Port Arthur massacre in 1996, when Martin Bryant shot and killed 35 people and injured many others within the Tasmanian town. A 2017 study identified that Australia had 14 mass shootings incidents between 1964 and 2014.
Homicide and knives
In mass murders, most focus is on using firearms. However, using knives in homicide is critical. The latest national homicide report from the Austalian Institute of Criminology shows that in 2020-21, knives and other sharp instruments were utilized in 38% of murders, followed by firearms (11%) and hands and feet (9%).
The report notes that:
Knives and other sharp instruments have consistently been the first homicide
weapon in Australia between 1989‒90 and 2020‒21, with 35 percent […] of all homicide incidents committed with this weapon type.
The 2023 United Nations Global Study on Homicide showed that world wide, sharp objects accounted for 22% of homicides, while firearms were probably the most commonly used murder weapon at 40%. Australia’s tight guns laws, introduced within the wake of the Port Arthur massacre, would almost certainly explain the prevalence of knives as weapons in Australia.
How big an issue is knife crime in Australia?
In recent years, we now have seen increased efforts to fight knife crime. In Queensland, latest laws and a media campaign were rolled out in 2023 to try to scale back the variety of young people carrying knives.
In Victoria, gang members using knives as weapons has turn out to be increasingly problematic with the chief commissioner giving evidence to a parliamentary committee and describing knife crime as being a big issue for police.
In New South Wales, laws was passed to double the penalties for people carrying knives in public, despite the manager director of the states Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research (Bocsar) stating that use of knives in crime was at historically low levels.
Active armed offender responses
The events that unfolded at Bondi yesterday are what police call an energetic armed offender incident. The Australia-New Zealand Counter Terrorism Committee defines such events as:
An Active Armed Offender is defined as an armed offender who’s actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people, and who demonstrated their intention to proceed to accomplish that while gaining access to additional potential victims.
In 2014, NSW Police, in collaboration with academics, adopted latest policy responses to energetic armed offenders, with greater than 10,000 officers trained within the latest procedures.
The characteristics of such attacks can involve groups or lone offenders, who could also be armed with firearms, knives or other weapons.
The collection of a significant shopping centre on a weekend is in keeping with the methodology of energetic armed offenders in that they may selected a crowded environment that offers them freedom of movement and prepared access to victims with the intention to achieve maximum harm.
The heroic actions of shopkeepers taking people into their shops, shoppers confronting the offender and the lone police officer who confronted and shot the offender would all have contributed to reducing the power of the offender to kill or harm more victims.
As the terrorism committee noted of their guidelines, time plus freedom of movement equals increased casualties. The offender was denied this at Bondi.
What happens now?
The tragic events at Bondi will now be subject of a coronial inquest. The entire shopping centre has been declared a criminal offense scene, which can likely take days to process. The investigation will probably be ongoing for months as police interview lots of of witnesses and collate CCTV and personal video footage of the incident.
Most crucially, police will now need to take a look at the history of the deceased offender, to try to find out his motivation in carrying out such an attack.
At a while in the longer term the bravery of the civilians and first responders will even need to be acknowledged and celebrated for the various lives that were saved.