‘They were shot in the front’: premier and top cop defend police response to Bondi terror attack | New South Wales

The New South Wales premier, Chris Minns, and the commissioner, Mal Lanyon, have defended the police response to the Bondi beach terrorist attack, saying officers with handguns took out the two gunmen who were armed with high-powered weapons.

“I am incredibly proud of our police officers,” Lanyon said on Tuesday. “They were confronted by two men armed with long arms. Our police at the scene were armed with pistols.”

The premier intervened when Lanyon was repeatedly questioned during a robust press conference about the number of police at the Jewish festival ahead of Sunday’s attack and the response time during the mass shooting that killed 15 people.

“The NSW police acted with bravery and integrity,” Minns said.

“They engaged the gunmen on the footbridge with handguns. They didn’t take a backwards step. The offenders had long-range rifles and NSW police officers were responsible for killing one of them, and shooting the other one and, as a result, saving many, many people’s lives.”

Minns and Lanyon refused to answer questions about how many police were detailed to protect the Chanukah by the Sea event or when police at the scene returned fire.

“That is subject to investigation at the moment,” Lanyon said.

“We base our policing response on the threat that exists at the time. A lot of work is done between ourselves and the Jewish community. Bondi beach is a large and public area. We regularly patrol that area as we did on that day.”

Lanyon said there had been “taskings” for the Jewish festival and “there were police moving through there at all times – we had police moving through the area regularly”.

“We had an appropriate policing response to ensure police were moving through there, working closely with the community. We take safety very seriously. Had there been intelligence that there was a particular threat at that location, or to that event, we may have had a different policing response,” he said.

Two officers were shot during the almost 10 minutes of shooting – a constable and a probationary constable – whom Minns said had been in the job for just months.

It was unclear whether the two officers had been assigned to the Hanukah festival or were on a general patrol.

But Minns took umbrage at the suggestion police had not responded when the shooting started.

“There are two officers in critical care in NSW hospitals at the moment. They weren’t shot in the back as they were running away. They were shot in the front,” he said on Tuesday.

“I’m sorry to be graphic about it, but if there is any suggestion that NSW police didn’t live up to their responsibilities to the people of this state, it should be rejected because it is not consistent with the facts.

“NSW police officers, some of whom had been in the job for a number of months, put their lives on the line to save people in this state, and I think this rush to conclusions before all the facts are known, in my view, is disrespectful to their actions on Sunday.”

NSW police under Operation Shelter – established after the Hamas attacks in Israel in October 2023 – have deployed static patrols at all Jewish sites as well as roving patrols throughout the eastern suburbs of Sydney.

Insp Amy Scott shot and killed Joel Cauchi, who was schizophrenic, in April 2024 to end the Bondi Junction stabbing attack that killed six people.

Scott told a coronial inquest in April this year she felt nauseous as she ran into the Westfield shopping centre “because, in my head, I had resigned myself to the fact that I was probably going to die”.

In active armed offender training, officers were told they had a 60-70% chance of non-survival, “and that is if you are partnered up and vested up, and I was neither of those,” she told the court.

The inspector said that in her 2016 training, she had dealt with circumstances that forced officers to shift away from a “contain, negotiate” approach to “don’t wait, go”. Scott said she was trained to “stop the killing, stop the dying”.

Australia’s “Active armed offender guidelines for crowded places” states that “police first responders are trained to move toward the threat at a sustained pace to defeat or disarm the offender”.

“In doing so, they may initially need to keep moving past panicked and injured people. Their primary goal is to prevent the offender killing or causing serious injury to further victims.”