Policing by Panic: How “Safety” Became the Cover Story for a Long-Planned Power Grab

Over the New Year period, the South Australian Government quietly transformed Adelaide’s entire public transport network into a permanent police search zone.

Every bus, train and tram. Every station, interchange and Park ’n’ Ride. All declared “public transport hubs or public transport services.”

This declaration gives police extraordinary powers: the ability to stop and search people without reasonable cause, to scan bodies with handheld metal detector wands, to enter bags and backpacks, and to order people they deem a “risk” to leave an area for up to 24 hours.

These are not temporary emergency measures. The legislation allows these powers to operate indefinitely, as per s.66ZG & 66ZH of the Summary Offences Act 1953 (SA).

This expansion does not exist in isolation. It stacks on top of powers police already had under declared public precinct, section 66N of the Summary Offences Act, laws that have already normalised suspicionless general drug and metal detection searches, mass police presence, and sweeping discretion in public space.

The overlapping declarations lead to confusion with respect to rights and obligations; at certain times police in certain declared areas may conduct general drug and metal detection searches, at other times in the same places police may only conduct metal detection searches and not general drug detection. It all depends on the time of day.

There is no intelligence or actual evidence to suggest these laws are necessary. It is an unjustified escalation. And it arrives at a very particular moment.

Let’s stop pretending this expansion of police powers is a reluctant response to risk.

Police have been gagging for these powers for years.

What we are seeing in South Australia is not a measured reaction to public safety concerns, it is the opportunistic deployment of excessive power through fear to push through a long-standing policing wish list that governments have previously struggled to justify.

“Safety” is the marketing slogan. Panic is the strategy.

In the wake of the Bondi attack, grief and fear have been deliberately weaponised. The public is still raw, still searching for certainty, still desperate for reassurance. And into that moment steps the state, offering the same tired solution it always does: more police, more powers, fewer rights, and the erosion of our alleged democracy.

This is policing by panic.

Police and government have been careful about how they sell these new powers. The public-facing justification is narrow and deliberate: knives.

It sounds reasonable. Responsible. Necessary.

But it is deeply misleading.

When police stop and search someone “for knives,” they are not limited to knives. Once a search begins, police can, and do, find everything. Drugs. Prescription medication. Personal items. Private belongings. Things unrelated to violence. Things that suddenly become grounds for arrest, fines, charges, or further surveillance.

A search justified by “knife safety” quickly becomes a fishing expedition.

This is how everyday life is criminalised. This is how people are pulled deeper into the system for conduct that has nothing to do with public safety. And it is precisely why police have wanted suspicionless search powers for so long: not because knives are rampant, but because these powers grant access, to bodies, to belongings, to lives.

And even if we accept the knife framing on its own terms, the logic collapses almost immediately.

Because underpinning all of this is a lazy, dangerous assumption that is never properly interrogated: that if a person carries a knife, they intend to use it as a weapon.

That assumption is doing an enormous amount of political work.

For decades, people routinely carried ‘pocketknives’. Farmers. Fishers. Tradespeople. Older men who kept them on keyrings. Young people who used them as tools. These were not acts of menace. They were ordinary, unremarkable features of daily life.

Are we seriously being asked to believe that all of those people were carrying knives because they were violent?

Of course not.

The shift from tool to threat is not about evidence, it is about narrative. It collapses context, intent, and reality into a single justification for police intrusion: possession equals danger.

But violence is an action. It is not an object.

Carrying a knife does not mean someone will use it to harm another person, just as being in control of a car does not mean someone intends to run someone down, or carrying a bottle or hammer means an assault is imminent. Policing policy increasingly refuses to make this distinction because doing so would require nuance, prevention, and investment beyond enforcement.

It is far easier to criminalise presence than to address harm.

And once again, we know exactly who this assumption will fall hardest on.

Young people. Aboriginal people. Racialised communities. People experiencing homelessness. People whose everyday lives already require them to carry items police deem suspicious. People who are forced to justify themselves on the spot, in a language and manner the state finds acceptable, or be treated as non-compliant.  People whose bodies are read as dangerous before they ever open a bag.

This is how whole communities become pre-criminal.

This is how being in public space becomes conditional.

This is how “safety” discourse is twisted into justification for routine violation.

And when we look at the numbers, the hollowness of this justification becomes impossible to ignore.

Assistant Commissioner Narelle Kameniar reported that more than 4,000 searches were conducted under these powers. Eighteen weapons were found.

Eighteen.

That is not evidence of a public safety emergency. It is evidence of mass intrusion producing negligible results: thousands of bodily violations to justify a handful of seizures, and with no public accounting of whether those seizures were even warranted.

What it does produce is something else entirely: the normalisation of suspicionless searches, the expansion of police discretion, and the quiet erosion of the expectation that you can move through public space without being scanned, stopped, or searched.

And still we are told this makes people feel safe.

Which people?

Because for many communities, police do not represent safety at all. They represent coercion, trauma, violence, and loss. For Aboriginal people, police are bound up with deaths in custody, child removal, and generations of state terror. For people who have experienced police brutality or harassment, an armed officer scanning bodies in confined public spaces does not create calm, it creates fear. It is not rare for police to abuse their power against vulnerable people.

We should be asking a far more uncomfortable question: if weapons in public spaces are the concern, why is the presence of armed police never interrogated?

Why is it assumed that police holding weapons creates safety, while civilians carrying everyday items creates danger? History tells us police are under-trained, tasers and batons are misused, police lie to courts to avoid accountability.

This contradiction sits at the heart of carceral logic: state violence is rendered invisible, while civilian presence is treated as inherently suspicious.

And then there is the most dangerous element of all, indefiniteness.

These powers are not time limited. They are not emergency-bound. They are open-ended. Permanent, unless someone, someday, decides otherwise.

We are told there will be a review, as if history hasn’t shown us exactly how these reviews go. Police powers expand. They entrench. They do not meaningfully retreat.

This expansion was not inevitable. It was not demanded by the public. It was seized.

Fear was the lever. “Safety” was the script.

And now we are entering a new year with a public transport system turned into a permanent search zone, our rights quietly traded away while we are told this is what we wanted.

It isn’t.

This is not safety. It is submission.

And if we don’t name it now, it will only grow.