Watch the Cops Rallies at Downing Centre Court Over Police Violence and Increased Surveillance

Abolitionist collective Watch the Cops staged a protest on Gadigal land outside Sydney’s Downing Centre Court on Sunday, in respect of a range of aberrant ways in which the New South Wales Police Force has been enforcing the law. And as participants heard and conveyed during the 13 September 2026 rally, this list of grievances is dramatically mounting at present.

Sunday’s demonstration was spurred by body-worn footage leaked to Watch the Cops a fortnight ago, which involved a police officer at the 9 February 2026 protest against the official visit of Israeli president Isaac Herzog to this city, which revealed a cop at the rally bragging about having bashed a civilian to a colleague, during the police operation that amounted to mass brutalisation of the public.

The other key gripe motivating anticop demonstrators last weekend was the law before parliament that would expand the digital evidence access order regime, which allows police to download the entire content of mobile phones when executing a search warrant, so that this capability might be employed to rip device content at traffic stops and routine arrests, after securing an order. 

Watch the Cops appeared on the scene last December. The group established itself in the wake of the ferocious policing at the November 2025 Indo Pacific weapons festival that took place at Sydney’s Darling Harbour, which was something of a precursor to the Herzog rally, and it involved police rumbling participants and liberally applying pepper spray in a manner never seen before in this city.

Sunday’s rally was notable not just for the large number of disgruntled people who turned up to publicly acknowledge the overbearing manner in which law enforcement has increasingly been approaching the public, which was not only on display during the demonstrations against the weapons festival and Herzog, but this aggression also marked this year’s Mardi Gras parade.

“Watcha gonna do when they come for you?”

In addressing the crowd on the intersection of Elizabeth and Liverpool streets on Sunday, Watch the Cops spokesperson Charlotte said, in respect of the Israeli made Cellebrite device that allows NSW police to scan phones being made available on the beat, that she considers that if her phone content was downloaded and it included a sensitive image of herself, it might be stored away for some time.

“But I wouldn’t be surprised if they pull out that photo later… and use it to blackmail me. That is what makes me worried and it should really make all of you worried,” she continued, and added that NSW police “is a racist institution” that is more concerned with protecting “pretty buildings like the Downing Centre, and war criminals like Isaac Herzog”, than any protection of the public.

Charlotte clarified that she was basing her concerns on the 2019 case of former NSW police officer Vaughan Mark Hildebrand, who is now serving 20 years in prison, after being convicted on 44 criminal offences, which captured behaviour that included accessing the police database to gather information to blackmail fifteen women, and force four of them to have sex with him, which is rape.

On reporting this at the time, Sydney Criminal Lawyers further pointed out that Hildebrand was hardly alone in being on the force and acting in this manner, as over recent years, “dozens of NSW police officers have been charged with a range of serious criminal offences, including sexual assault, child sexual assault, physical assaults and perjury”.

The Watch the Cops spokesperson then led the crowd in calling out a number of dubious points about police, including charging the institution as further being sexist, homophobic, transphobic and classist, that it protects war criminals, the colony, the capitalists and the billionaires, whilst too instigating violence against the people and then dragging them before the court over assault police.

“Police state, pepper spray, beat and tase, escalate”

As he addressed the Sunday afternoon crowd, anticop founder Tom Raue raised another problematic police surveillance measure among the many that have been coming thick and fast ever since a large portion of the population made certain that it vehemently opposes the ongoing genocide the Israeli state is perpetrating against the Palestinians of Gaza, and it was not prepared to silently stand by.

“Chris Minns and Anthony Albanese have been steadily expanding the police state and invasions of our privacy ever since the genocide in Gaza began. This is a police state that might one day be in the hands of One Nation.” Raue warned. 

“The cops have started a drone surveillance program in Moree, to surveil the large Aboriginal community there.”

“They claim that they consulted the community,” he continued, “but the Aboriginal organisation there found out about it after the decision had already been made, on the same day as the media…. So, we are spending money so drones can fly about in the sky, and Aboriginal people are now saying they’re afraid to leave the house because they’re being followed around.”

Raue further outlined that despite the drone program having yet to have been officially accessed, the NSW government has decided to roll out it out elsewhere in the state. And the Aboriginal Legal Service has warned that this program will likely start appearing in other regional towns with large First Nations populations.

“They are making it easier to use Cellebrite to scan your phone, as Charlotte mentioned,” Raue added. “You don’t need to be convicted of a crime for them to do this. You don’t even need to have been suspected. They are doing it to victims of crimes as well. And once they have everything from your phone… there is no transparency around what they do with that data.”

“Got me a badge, got me a gun, someday I’m gonna shoot someone”

The rally was further proof that Greater Sydney has not forgotten the 9 February anti-Herzog rally, which involved around 20,000 pro-Palestinians seeking to conduct a protest march against the Israeli head of state’s presence in the city, which was then set upon by 3,000 NSW police officers, who kettled in the crowd then bashed and brutalised them.

In the wake of this, the NSW premier Chris Minns, the police minister Yasmine Catley and NSW police commissioner Mal Lanyon have all refused to issue an apology for the widespread use of excessive force, as they insist officers were just following orders. But this assertion has become more dubious since Watch the Cops posted the leaked body-worn camera footage that featured in a court case.

The recent footage validated the truth that the state has denied: that NSW police assaulted the general public en masse to injure and traumatise many of those protesting Herzog. The leaked clip features a senior constable bragging to a colleague that he had “fucking pumped that cunt”, as he referred to a civilian, whom he had further “punched… in the head when he was down”.

After performing Welcome to Country out the front of the Downing Centre, Bidjigal Gweagal man Jordan Ryan Hennessy went on to say that those gathered to protest the transgressions of state law enforcement should not apologise for taking such a stance against a state institution like the NSW Police Force.

“When it comes to this sort of stuff that we do,” Ryan Hennessy underscored, “We have to be unapologetic when we come here to stand up for deaths in custody. We have to be unapologetic about calling out war criminals here on Aboriginal land. We have to be unapologetic.”

Main image: Watch the Cops spokesperson Charlotte inspects NSW police officers. Photo credit: Paul Gregoire