Less than three months after a fatal mass shooting at a Hanukkah gathering in Sydney left 15 people dead and three officers injured, a senior Australian law enforcement official has confirmed that state police are moving quickly to establish a specialized heavily armed rapid response unit, after an official inquiry exposed a critical gap in first responder firepower.
New South Wales Police Deputy Commissioner David Hudson laid out the timeline of policy and operational changes during testimony Wednesday before the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, a government panel tasked with investigating rising antisemitic sentiment across Australia. The inquiry was called in response to the December 14 attack at Bondi Beach, where father-son pair Sajid and Naveed Akram allegedly opened fire on hundreds of holiday revelers gathered in a coastal park using two shotguns and a hunting rifle.
Hudson told the commission that responding officers faced a dangerous and lopsided firepower mismatch on the day of the attack. Just four initial officers arrived at the scene first, and all were armed only with short-range 9mm Glock pistols, a weapon ill-suited to counter an active shooter carrying high-power long guns. “On Dec. 14, our police officers were placed at significant risk being in a gunfight armed with 9 mm Glocks against long arms,” Hudson said in his testimony.
Emergency response records show that 11 additional officers reached the scene within five minutes of the first shots being fired. Three of those responding officers were among the dozens wounded in the massacre. Officers killed Sajid Akram and took his wounded son Naveed into custody less than eight minutes after the attack began, the commission heard during earlier testimony Monday.
To address the firepower gap exposed by the attack, Hudson confirmed that police have moved forward with plans to launch a new Armed Response Command, a dedicated team that will be equipped with semiautomatic rifles to respond to active shooter and mass casualty events. Previously, access to rifles within the New South Wales Police was almost entirely limited to two specialized paramilitary units, leaving frontline first responders without the firepower needed to stop long-gun attacks quickly.
In addition to the new rapid response unit, law enforcement has also revived a priority resourced security operation focused on countering antisemitic violence and preventing retaliatory attacks against Muslim community targets. The program, called Operation Shelter, was first launched shortly after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel to de-escalate rising intercommunal tensions across Sydney. At its peak, the operation assigned 200 officers daily to proactive high-visibility patrols, and it had authority to reallocate staff from other units as needed to respond to emerging threats.
Hudson told the commission that Operation Shelter had been reduced to a nominal “name only” program by the time the Bondi Beach attack occurred. But in the immediate aftermath of the massacre, the program was quickly reactivated and elevated to a fully resourced active policing operation. It will remain in place as a protective security measure until the new Armed Response Command is fully operational, a rollout that is expected to take between 18 months and two years to complete.