Four days, five unrelated stabbing attacks across Sydney. Seven people dead.
Six of those died at the hands of Joel Cauchi, the 40-year-old Queenslander who stormed a busy shopping centre in Bondi Junction on a Saturday afternoon and began indiscriminately stabbing shoppers, mostly women, before he was shot dead by a police officer.
This sort of thing didn't happen in Sydney, the shell-shocked people gathered outside the Westfield said on Sunday morning. But it had, and it would again, in very different circ*mstances two days later on the other side of the city.
This time the scene was a church in Wakeley, a suburb in Western Sydney. Only a small congregation was present at the time of the attack, in whichcontroversial Assyrian Orthodox preacherBishop Mar Mari Emmanuel suffered lacerations to his head, but the sermon was being live-streamed, sending hordes of people to the church in its wake. No one was killed.
Both attacks were the subject of rolling media coverage.
Elsewhere in Sydney another three stabbings passed with less attention yetwere more indicative of the knife crime that happens under the radar on any given week.
An attack on a woman, who escaped with injuries, near Bondi Beach the day before the Bondi Junction attack; the stabbing of two people in Doonside that same night, which left one person dead and the other hospitalised; and a day later, another stabbing at a house party in the city's south-west that landed two teenagers in hospital.
The culmination of the attacks over such a short period of time, while entirely unrelated, left the city reeling — and the impact was felt across the country.
For many, going to church or the local shopping centre suddenly became something to be feared. The sense of safety that many say they feel living in Australia was shattered.
In response, experts moved to reassure the public that the spate of incidents isn't indicative of a deadly crime wave — in fact, violent knife crime has been trending downwards for decades.
But look beneath the top-line statistics and a more complicated picture emerges.
"Certainly amongst some groups, especially young people, we're seeing the carrying and use of knives increasing," said University of Newcastle criminologist Dr Xanthé Mallett. "And that's particularly concerning because we're talking about people as young as 12 carrying weapons."
The group most likely to be charged with knife offences
After two high-profile attacks in the same city within days of each other, it was almost inevitable that people would start to ask: does Australia have a knife problem?
"People are saying to me 'I'm afraid to go out'," Mallett said. "That vicarious fear that's caused by multiple attacks, even with very different motivations, different offender profiles, victim profiles, it causes that underlying vicarious trauma through the population."
On Thursday, NSW Police Commissioner Karen Webb said that knife crime has long been a problem. "Knife crime is an issue that has been on the agenda across Australia and New Zealand for many months and years now," she told journalists. "It's not new."
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the use of knives in homicide and related crimes (including murder, attempted murder and manslaughter), sexual assault, kidnapping and abduction remained relatively steady across the country between 2010 and 2022. Robbery with a knife as a weapon was up slightly in 2022, compared to the previous year — from 2,089 to 2,232 — but it was still lower than in 2010.
In New South Wales, where the most recent data includes 2023, it's a similar picture: assaults and robberies where a knife was recorded by police are all at 20-year lows. The trend for murder and attempted murder with a knife is less clear given the small number of recorded offences, but rates have also remained relatively low.
"The number of murders involving knives appears to be stable when you take population growth into account, it's trending down," said Jackie Fitzgerald, the executive director of New South Wales' Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research (BOCSAR). "There's certainly no evidence that there's been an increase and the more high-volume offences using knives have absolutely declined over the longer term."
Within these statistics, however, is an alarming trend — young people are significantly over-represented when it comes to who is being charged with violent knife crimes. Robbery figures are particularly stark: according to Fitzgerald, taking into account the population, young people are about six times more likely than adults to be charged in NSW. For non-domestic assault, she said, the rates for young people are about 50 per cent higher.
"Robbery being a theft offence, has typically been associated with younger offenders and it looks like that is also true for robbery involving knives," Fitzgerald said. "Robbery is also an offence that has become much less common in NSW over the longer term … but we're still left with a situation that younger people do have a higher rate of participation relative to their proportion in the population."
Two of the recent attacks in Sydney also involved young people. A 16-year-old, who remains under guard in hospital, has been charged with a terrorism offence following the attack in Wakeley on Monday. Five teenagers, aged between 15 and 17, have also been charged in relation to the fatal stabbing in Doonside on Friday last week.
Just this week, a nurse in Darwin was allegedly robbed at knifepoint by a group of boys all under the age of 15 and two teens were arrested for a brawl involving a machete in Victoria. Last month a youth was stabbed in Port Adelaide and in Western Australia the attorney-general said the state government would consider strengthening police powers to search for knives.
As part of the Queensland government's recent inquiry into knife law reform, police advised that "knife crime and youth offending is a serious concern", with reported use of knives by minors in the commission of crimes having increased 22 per cent over the past five years.
"That's where the data becomes interesting, because we're looking and asking are there subsets within it that are problematic?" said Dr Terry Goldsworthy, a former detective inspector and current criminologist at Bond University.
"And yes, young people with knives is problematic, because they make poor decisions … and they take these things out and they don't think of the consequences, and the consequences can be deadly.
"Once you pull a knife out, the risk to you or the people around you rises astronomically — you may not mean to hurt somebody, but if the knife goes into the wrong spot in the body, it's all over red rover."
Knives: Australia's weapon of choice
Not all knife crime is actively violent — across the country, it's illegal to carry or wield a knife in a public place or school without a valid reason, even if it's in a bag or otherwise hidden from view. "That I think is the issue, people having possession, because of the potential of what can happen in relation to that," Goldsworthy said. "I think that's where the concern comes from."
In NSW last year there were 3,301 proven charges for carrying offences in public places excluding schools, according to BOCSAR data, down slightly from 3,352 in 2022.
These numbers may reflect policing priorities, with NSW Police undertaking regular operations to target knife crime. In their 2022 annual report, NSW Police said a state-wide Operation Foil had resulted in 966 charges and 97 knives seized. A similar operation in May last year led to 172 people being charged with 565 offences and 294 knives seized. Another Operation Foil took place in the week before the Bondi Junction attack, in which 51 knives were seized, Commissioner Webb told journalists this week.
But while increased policing of knife crime may uncover more of it, Goldsworthy said that doesn't take away from the "concern that so many people could be getting around with a weapon without police knowing".
An obvious challenge in all this is the fact we have potentially lethal weapons sitting in our kitchens and on sale in most supermarkets. "It's problematic when people start taking everyday items and using them for criminal offences," Goldsworthy said. "Because it's very difficult to police."
After automatic and semi-automatic weapons were banned in Australiaand gun ownership made illegal without a license in the wake of the 1996 Port Arthur massacre, the proportion of homicides committed with knives increased. The laws have likely saved lives but it's also posed a challenge for law enforcement: you can restrict the sale of guns, but it's harder to crack down on lethal weapons that exist in every home.
Nationally, knives are the most common weapon used in violent crimes and the number of homicides involving a knife is about double that of firearms. In 2023, about a third of murders in NSW involved a knife, according to Fitzgerald. "Our murder figures would undoubtedly be higher if we had access to guns, but we are left with a situation with knives being readily available," she said.
But even so, Fitzgeraldsaid, the murder rate remains relatively low. "These incidents that we've seen this week are absolutely unusual, but murder itself being an infrequent crime, does show patterns that are unpredictable."
Mallett echoed a similar sentiment: "While Sydney feels under siege from knife crime, it's an unfortunate set of circ*mstances where there isn't actually a serious increase in crime, it's just that we've had a couple of very serious, awful events close together that have really raised the fear level in this country at the moment — not just in Sydney or NSW."
Calls for tougher measures
In the wake of Sydney's horror few days, there have been repeated calls for tougher measures and more proactive solutions to combat violent knife crime.
Federal government minister Bill Shorten has called for "nationally consistent laws" and "tougher penalties", while federal Labor frontbencher Jason Clare suggested parents should be penalised if they allow their children to leave the house with a knife.
NSW Premier Chris Minns told reporters on Thursday that the state's Sentencing Council was reviewing penalties for knife-related crime and would report back to the government. "Given these very serious criminal attacks in the past week, of course, a responsible government would look at existing legislation and see if potential changes could help prevent a similar attack," he said.
"I don't want to pre-judge it, to ensure that whatever legislative and policy changes we make, that they make a difference and that will take a little bit of time."
One option before the government is so-called "wanding" laws, which would allow police officers to use hand-held metal detectors to search people without a warrant in designated areas. Similar laws passed the Queensland parliament last year, following the murder of 17-year-old Jack Beasley, who was stabbed outside a Surfers Paradise convenience store in 2019.
Jack's father, Brett Beasley, told ABC Radio Sydney that prior to this week's attacks he had spoken to NSW Police Minister Yasmin Catley about bringing the so-called "Jack's Law" to the state. "I can guarantee you that in the first six months, the police find hundreds and hundreds of weapons," he said.
Asked about "wanding" laws on Thursday, the police minister said that hand-held metal detectors were already available for use in NSW and echoed the premier that every option would be considered. "We will not close the door on anything," Catley said.
If any reforms are implemented, it would be the second time the government has made changes to knife crime laws since being elected in March last year. In June, it passed legislation doubling the maximum penalties for the separate offences of carrying and wielding a knife in a public place or school from two years' imprisonment to four years.
The catalyst was the fatal stabbing of paramedic Steven Tougher outside a McDonalds in Western Sydney. Speaking about the proposed amendment in parliament on June 20, NSW Attorney-General Michael Daley said, "While the numbers [of knife crime] are not going up, they're not going down — that is what worries me".
"Too many people, almost exclusively young men, think that it is okay to carry a knife. In the same way as we would pick up a pen and put it into our pocket when we go to work, there are young men who think it is okay to put a knife into their pocket to carry out their daily business."
At the time the amendments were criticised by experts and Greens MPs, with the NSW advocate for children and young people, Zoe Robinson, arguing that the changes were not supported by crime data.
In a statement to ABC News this week, a NSW government spokesperson said: "The recent incidents in Bondi Junction and Wakeley are under police investigation and the former will be the subject of an independent coronial inquest."
"The NSW Sentencing Council has been conducting a review of sentencing for firearms, knives and other weapons offences, with a focus on offences involving the use or carrying of firearms, knives and other weapons, and will make any recommendations for reform."
