Protesters from ‘Watch the Cops’ Demand Broad Policing Reforms

Watch the Cops spokesperson Charlotte Mac Sweeney told those gathered on Gadigal land before Sydney’s Downing Centre courthouse in support of broad law enforcement reform in New South Wales that the excessive force used by NSW police on protesters at the 4 November Indo Pacific International Maritime Exposition, a weapons fair, didn’t quite add up in terms of justice upheld.

The justice activist made the remarks at the top of the early morning rally staged prior to the Indo Pacific Twelve going before the courts. This was the group of protesters arrested on the day of the Indo Pacific weapons expo, which according to eyewitnesses, involved NSW police getting heavy on demonstrators opposing arms dealers trading in wares currently used in the Gaza genocide.

“No one should be gravely injured or held for hours in hostile gaols for opposing genocide,” Mac Sweeney continued. The police “show up at nonviolent protests with weapons illegal in warfare to use on their own people. The attendees of that genocidal arms fair are who police protect, not us. Albanese, Chris Minns, Penny Wong, and every other complicit politician, are who police protect”.

The weapon that Mac Sweeney mentions being illegal to use in war zones is OC or pepper spray, and it was liberally applied by NSW police on the day of the expo. Sydney Criminal Lawyers has viewed footage that showed a group of protesters writhing on the ground in Darling Harbour’s Tumbalong Park, after NSW police officers casually blasted them in the face with this ‘crowd control weapon’.

In MCing the rally, Mac Sweeney called on a number of police reform advocates to speak on the increasing understanding that antiquated law enforcement systems have been founded in prejudice against and the targeting of First Peoples, that police culture continues to harbour racist, misogynistic and homophobic attitudes, and that officers often harm civilians to protect corporate interests.

Not an immutable force

“The way things are now isn’t set in stone,” anticop spokesperson Tom Raue told the Thursday morning crowd last week. “The modern police forces that we see today are only 200 years old. So, by that I mean, uniformed professional law enforcement bodies with a monopoly on violence in an area.”

“The first institution like this was the Metropolitan Police in London in 1829. It was the height of the industrial revolution. It turned out that when you force peasants off the land and into slums and factories, some of them end up stealing bread and some wanted to form unions to improve their lot in life and UK parliament didn’t like this and formed the police to keep the workers in London down.”

Raue is the founder of anticop, an online police resource and social justice group that has recently been running a campaign to counter the NSW police You Should Be a Cop school program, which involves officers attending educational institutions as part of a recruitment drive.

The police reformist further put it to Watch the Cops demonstrators that police forces have generally opposed the majority of civil society social justice movements that have forged positive change for the people along the way, as law enforcement officers are rather employed to stamp out these causes by the powers that be.

Raue lists a sizable number of reform movements that police forces have cracked down on. These include “child labour laws, the eight hour day, fighting against conscription, women’s suffrage, the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the Afghanistan War, Iraq, queer rights, the genocide in Gaza, climate change.”

Going back a decade ago, Raue was assisting then Greens MLC and now Senator David Shoebridge with the Sniff Off campaign, which continues to chug along on Facebook. Sniff Off opposes the warrantless use of highly flawed drug dogs in public. This campaign also opposes now routine accompanying strip searches, which were not an issue when Sniff Off kicked off in 2011.

“The police will continue to defend the rich and powerful. They will make sure that arms deals are not disrupted, that climate change continues – unless there are no more police,” the anticop spokesperson suggested.

“There was a time before police, and there will be a time after police. Things could be so different, the cop approach to drugs is to strip search people and make sure that production is in the hands of bikies instead of regulating it. If we took money away from police and put it into a health approach, it would save lives.”

Not enough justice

The Indo Pacific Twelve were appearing before the Downing Centre Local Court for a first time and Mac Sweeney advised that the matter was expected to be drawn out. The twelve people arrested by NSW police on 4 November 2025 in relation to the protest at Darling Harbour were appearing in a court in the nearby John Maddison Tower, as the Downing Centre is currently undergoing upgrades after being flooded.

“NSW police, we are protesting here precisely because of you. Against you because of your violence, your racism, your misogyny, your queerphobia and your utter contempt for the public,” said Greens member and lawyer Hannah Thomas.

“We are standing in solidarity with the brave comrades arrested at Chris Minns’ weapons expo, an event where companies like Elbit Systems, Rafael, Lockheed Martin, companies drenched in the blood of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, show off their latest genocide tech,” the social justice activist made clear.

Thomas has been in the media of late in relation to NSW police senior constable Christopher Davis having allegedly punched her in the face so brutally she was nearly blinded in an eye, because she queried the legitimacy of a move on order he’d issued at a protest she’d attended in the capacity of a legal observer. Davis has been charged with one count of recklessly causing grievous bodily harm.

“At that expo, NSW police came in itching for a fight,” Thomas continued before the crowd. “They kettled the crowd from the get-go. They blasted people with OC spray and then left the crowd to treat each other’s wounds. They tried to trigger panic. They rode their horses into the crowd, and they violently arrested antigenocide activists. And like usual, they lied about it.”

Indeed, despite Davis having violently punched Thomas in the eye, NSW police originally charged her with failing to follow a direction, but under a special emergency law that framed her as a rioter.  NSW police assistant commissioner Brett McFadden was also found to have told the public there was no evidence of any police wrongdoing on body-worn video, when the footage told a different story.

An alternative response to mental health crises

“At this protest we remind ourselves that the people protesting against the mass murder market last month, were attempting to uphold the international law on prevention of genocide,” said UNSW anticolonial law academic Dr Ingrid Matthews. “The Commonwealth of Australia, the colonising power, uses the arms agents of the state to demonstrate its support for the genocidal state of Israel,”

In relation to state law enforcement operations, the academic added that “half of all so-called critical incidents – that’s when a NSW police officer seriously injures or kills a member of the public – half of those investigations are of people having an acute mental health episode.”

A civil society campaign calling for alternative first responders, or specialised experts to be sent out to deal with people having mental health crises instead of police, commenced when NSW police fatally tasered a 95-year-old great grandmother, who had dementia and was using a walking frame, in May 2023. In fact, by January 2024, five civilians in total had been killed in such circumstances.

The NSW Police Force released its own April 2024 report that stresses the need for alternative responders. A NSW parliamentary inquiry into mental health access also recommended this change that same year.

The Right Care, Right Person model that’s been operated by the London Metropolitan police since late 2023, involves an alternative Triple 1 emergency assistance number to avoid police involvement in responses to mental health crises, which is a model that multiple parties are advocating to see implemented in NSW, and it appears that the only thing lacking is the will of the NSW government.

“For this rally, we didn’t get a Form 1. We are assembling and we are exercising our right to protest,” Mac Sweeney added, in respect to the legislated process of lodging a form with NSW police to inform them of an upcoming demonstration and in turn, to obtain law enforcement authorisation.

“When we ask with a Form 1, we are handing over our power to the very thing we are fighting. Form 1s are an oxymoron, in the sense that, in asking for permission to protest the protest is made invalid.”

“Form 1s and by extension, antiprotest laws are completely undemocratic. If we are expected to ask police if our protests are okay with them, we continually run the risk of having our movement shuttled down the path of ineffective controlled opposition voices,” the Watch the Cops organiser said in ending.

“Today, we speak out and we didn’t ask for permission. Tomorrow, we may take the road.”

Main image: anticop founder Tom Raue speaks at the 11 December 2025 Watch the Cops rally