They keep telling us this is what safety looks like now: police officers stationed at shopping centres, on public transport, in public places, holding metal-detecting wands like they’re providing a community service. People trying to buy groceries, go to work, get on the bus, take their kids to the park, turned into suspects in the name of “prevention”.
And every time someone questions it, we get the same script, delivered with the same calm certainty.
It’s just a scan. If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear. We’re taking weapons off the streets. Every knife removed is a potential life saved.
But wanding laws and new knife laws aren’t neutral. They are not harmless. And they are not evidence-based violence prevention. They are police expansion and political theatre, a familiar cycle in this country, where governments respond to complex social harm by reaching for the bluntest instrument they have: more police powers, more policing, more punishment, more surveillance.
The politics of it are simple. Create fear. Name the fear. Attach it to a grieving family and a tragic story. Announce a crackdown. Then flood the media with numbers, often misleading, so the public mistakes activity for impact, and enforcement for safety.
In Queensland, we’re told that Jack’s Law is “real prevention”. Police have scanned more than eighty thousand people in six months and seized over six hundred weapons. Ministers proudly describe this as taking more than twenty weapons off the streets every day, every weapon a potential life saved, every seizure framed as a tragedy avoided.
But that claim rests on an unspoken assumption that is never interrogated: that anyone carrying a knife was on the verge of committing violence, and that police intervention prevented it. It turns “we found something” into “we stopped harm”, as though the act of searching is itself proof of a crime that never happened.
Finding a knife is not the same thing as proving intent. It does not tell us why someone had it. It does not tell us what would have happened next. It does not tell us whether violence was imminent, or whether a person was moving through the world with something they should not have had, in a society where fear, instability, inequality and trauma are growing, and where the government has proven far more willing to criminalise people than to support them.
What we are being given are outputs, not outcomes. Scans. Seizures. Arrests. Charges laid. Police activity metrics dressed up as public safety evidence. These numbers tell us how wide the net is being cast, not whether anyone is actually safer.
If wanding laws are truly about violence prevention, governments should be able to show a measurable reduction in serious harm. Fewer stabbings. Fewer hospital presentations. Fewer assaults involving knives. Fewer deaths. Those are outcomes. Those are the indicators that matter, not the number of people pulled aside in public and treated like suspects.
Yet again and again, governments avoid that standard. When they can’t prove harm reduction, they shift the goalposts and invoke vague language that cannot be tested: deterrence, disruption, early intervention, community confidence. Words that sound responsible but mean whatever police and politicians need them to mean.
In the Northern Territory, the reality is almost confessed outright. Police have conducted around twenty thousand scans under expanded wanding powers, seizing nearly three hundred “dangerous weapons”. And still, when asked whether knife crime has measurably fallen, the response is essentially: we don’t know. The data isn’t readily available. It would require a manual pull. It would take time. They don’t track the demographic details of who is being stopped. It’s “not operationally feasible”.
That should be the scandal. That should be the end of the argument.
Because if you cannot demonstrate that a policy reduces harm, then what you’re doing is not evidence-based prevention. It is a mass expansion of suspicionless searching, justified by press releases and fear, with no requirement to prove it works.
Even the numbers that are offered raise serious questions. If hundreds of “dangerous weapons” have been seized, why were only a small fraction followed by arrests? Why the gap between confiscation and prosecution? If the weapons were truly dangerous enough to justify the search powers, why were so many people simply cautioned, or told they “didn’t know they were breaking the law”? If people are being subjected to invasive searches and policing contact on the basis of laws they allegedly don’t understand, then this isn’t protection, it’s a trap.
South Australia is now selling the same story, dressed up with a spreadsheet and a victory lap. We’re told that new knife laws were “the right decision” because knife crimes fell by a small percentage in the first three months of the new financial year. The government frames this as proof of success, while also using the same data to claim the threat is serious enough to justify “the toughest knife laws in the nation”.
But the devil is in the details. First, the term ‘knife crimes’ appears to refer to knife crimes reported by police and not actual convictions for offences.
Second, while the government claimed knife crimes fell by a small percentage over the first three months of the 2025/26 period, examination of the first three months individually shows that knife crimes were higher in two of the three months compared to the previous year.
For instance, during July 2024, there were reportedly 445 knife crimes, while July 2025 reported 482 – an increase of 37 knife crimes. August 2024 reported 545, while August 2025 reported 415 – a decrease of 30. September 2024 reported 469, while September 2025 reported 496 – an increase of 30. So as you can see, when looking at individual months, new knife crime laws have shown to be ineffective.
The table below is provided by the South Australian government to support quotes by Attorney General, Kyam Maher. In one quote, Kyam Maher stated, ‘unlike the Opposition who ignored knife crime while in government, we have acted with laws that will prevent knife crime.’ The Opposition was removed from government in 2022. The table below shows knife crime actually raised significantly under Labor’s government between 2022 and 2025. It took the government around three years before they started addressing the issue occurring under their rule.
Not only does the above show how the government misrepresents data to suit its agenda, any person working with data knows that a small dip over one quarter does not prove causation. Quarter-to-quarter changes can be normal fluctuation. Seasonal effects. Changes in reporting behaviour. Changes in policing activity. Changes in categorisation. It becomes even less meaningful when governments expand the definition of what they’re counting: bundling knives with other bladed instruments, axes, tomahawks, and whatever else fits the narrative. A wider category produces a more flexible trend. It makes it easier to announce a “rise” when they need fear, and a “fall” when they need credit.
Then comes the part that reveals the purpose: police expansion.
In South Australia, knife laws are rolled out alongside declared shopping precinct powers, move-on orders, exclusion zones, and new offences. They are paired with announcements of record investment in police, accelerated recruitment, new infrastructure, and equipment upgrades. That is the actual through-line. Knife panic becomes the justification for a bigger police state.
And inevitably, we are asked to accept all of it because “isn’t it better than doing nothing?”
No. That question is the trap. It forces a false choice between police expansion and violence, as though the only options available to society are scanning people in public or accepting stabbings as inevitable.
The real choice is between policing and prevention. Between punishment and support. Between expanding the net and addressing the conditions that make violence more likely in the first place.
If you want fewer people carrying knives, you need fewer people living in fear, desperation and instability. People don’t start carrying blades because they are planning on stabbing people. If this was the case, we’d see hundreds of stabbings occur each month. They start carrying because their world is already unsafe. Because they expect violence. Because someone they love was attacked. Because they can’t get home safely. Because they have grown up in environments where harm is normalised and where the adults who could protect them are absent, exhausted, criminalised, incarcerated, or dead.
Policing does not fix that. Wanding does not heal that. Knife crackdowns do not resolve the underlying drivers of harm or motivations to carry knives. One of the most devastating incidents in South Australia involving a knife was the December 2023 killing of Julie Seed at a real-estate office. None of these new laws would have assisted in preventing that incident.
What they do instead is deepen the pipeline.
These laws create new offences and new enforcement opportunities. They increase police contact, and police contact is never neutral. More stops means more searches. More searches means more arrests. More arrests means more remand. More remand means more people stuck in cages while they wait for court, while their housing falls apart, their jobs disappear, their children are taken, their mental health deteriorates, and their lives become less stable. The state creates deprivation, then punishes the fallout.
And none of this lands evenly across the population.
Wanding powers are not distributed like a public health measure. They land where police discretion lands, and police discretion has always had a target. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Young people. Poor people. Homeless people. People with disability. People who are visibly distressed. People existing in public because they have nowhere safe to go. People in groups. People who “look like trouble” to an officer empowered to define trouble.
Even Queensland’s own publicly funded report warned about stereotypes, discrimination, surveillance and harassment, and noted that wanding could be driven by “non-offending behaviours”, like being in groups. That isn’t a minor flaw. That is the function of discretionary policing. It’s how social control operates: you don’t have to criminalise everyone, you only have to keep certain communities under constant threat of intervention.
And that is why we must refuse the comforting language about “just a scan”.
There is no such thing as “just” a scan. It is not a harmless beep. It is a stop. A search. A public humiliation. A physical assertion of state power over someone’s body. A reminder that you are being watched, assessed, and managed in public space. It trains the community to accept that police can put hands on people pre-emptively, without cause, and that the burden is on the person being searched to prove their innocence and deserve dignity.
That is not safety. That is compliance.
And once a society accepts that in shopping centres, it will accept it everywhere else. Transport hubs. Public events. Parks. Outside schools. Outside services. In “problem areas”. On “problem people”. The definition of “problem” will expand, because it always does.
If governments are serious, truly serious, about reducing violence, then they should meet the most basic standard: show evidence that these laws reduce harm, and publish the harm they cause. Publish what is being seized, not as a vague “weapons” total, but as clear categories. Publish the proportion that results in charges versus confiscation. Publish whether seizures are connected to violence or threats. Publish demographic impacts with privacy protections. Publish outcome measures that actually reflect safety: assaults, hospital admissions, deaths. Submit the policy to independent evaluation. Build sunset clauses into the law so it expires unless it is proven effective.
And if they refuse to collect that data, refuse to publish it, or refuse to be accountable to it, then we should say it plainly: they don’t want evidence. They want permission. Permission to widen the net, to grow the force, to police certain communities out of public space, and to call it protection.
Real prevention looks like making people’s lives more liveable. It looks like stable housing, youth supports that aren’t punitive, culturally safe community-led programs, disability services that can actually meet complexity, trauma-informed responses to conflict, domestic and family violence services that aren’t drowning, income support people can live on, and public spaces that are safe because they are resourced, not militarised.
But governments won’t do that, because it would require confronting inequality and the violence of the state itself.
It is easier to buy more wands.
It is easier to expand police powers.
It is easier to flood the media with numbers and demand the public mistake enforcement for safety.
Underneath every press conference is the real message: not that violence will end, but that the state will control who gets to belong in public without interference.
We shouldn’t accept that bargain.
Because you cannot police your way into safety.
You can only police your way into a bigger cage.
