Security Profiling After Bondi - Predictable Violence in an Age of Institutional Evasion

The Bondi massacre in December 2025 was not a failure of compassion. It was a failure of judgement. More precisely, it was a refusal to act on observable patterns because acting would have required uncomfortable decisions, clear standards, and accountability.

Free societies survive on the distinction between liberty and license. Liberty protects the innocent. License excuses negligence. When warning signs accumulate, like the public displays of extremist allegiance, unexplained travel to known training corridors, prior inclusion on monitoring lists, irregularities around weapons access, then prudence demands scrutiny. Justice does not require clairvoyance. It requires reason. And reason works with probabilities, patterns, and incentives, not slogans or crackdowns on discourse and speech.

Profiling, properly understood, is not prejudice. It is the disciplined assessment of behaviour against known risk indicators. Courts have long accepted that foresight grounded in evidence is not only permissible but obligatory where preventable harm is foreseeable. To pretend otherwise is to elevate process over outcomes and to confuse moral posturing with moral responsibility. This is why regardless of several state and Territory actions to remove it from police operational skill set. Security personnel are obligated to be trained in both Screening and Profiling.

Australia’s repeated experience over the last three decades reveals a consistent problem, that nationally response times lag, command decisions hesitate, and doctrine privileges “appropriate response” over decisive action. The result is predictable. When seconds matter, bureaucratic caution becomes a casualty multiplier. Last year it cost us 15 lives, and 42 hospitalised, and some still submit we got off lightly.

Major public events concentrate risk. They also demand layered defences. A small number of highly trained, properly vetted, and appropriately armed security professionals on the ground will shorten response times to seconds, not minutes. Their role is not to replace police but to bridge the gap between detection and intervention, where lives are actually saved. As part of the group that provided guidance, direction and training initially to the NT’s Public Order response Group (PORU), the result was clear, when NT Police took on average 77 Min to attend and only attended 23% of the time, PORU had a response time less than 4 min.

This will require reform. States may need a dedicated endorsement with higher thresholds, including advanced profiling, threat discrimination, legal use-of-force standards, and joint interoperability, to be honest, that is simpler than most think, we have already provided guidance in the NT on how. Speed matters, but professionalism matters more. Standards must be explicit, training rigorous, and oversight real.

The alternative is to keep relearning the same lesson at higher costs. Societies that refuse to judge patterns eventually pay for judging consequences. Security profiling is not a retreat from liberty; it is the price of preserving it. Post script : I have coordinated almost every major event at one time or another over the last three decades, I have the “runs on the board’. I’ve successfully kept over 43,000  people safe over 3 days events and over 7,000 people safe from over-zealous government tyranny at rally’s against liberty. I've also been part of singular and Multiple member teams all over the country protecting people of significant value. I’ve disarmed armed thugs in public and during assaults and effectively taken down large groups of mass rioters in teams as small as two.  It is challenging, it is not impossible, I am no superman. Far from it. There are plenty of people far more capable than I and as I approach 50 it has become abundantly clear to me that the next generation requires more leverage, skills and tools than I had to deal with, because Terrorism has and is evolving faster than the government can react to it. To save lives, we must! From the author.

The opinions and statements are those of Sam Wilks and do not necessarily represent whom Sam Consults or contracts to. Sam Wilks is a skilled and experienced Security and Risk Consultant with 3 decades of expertise in the fields of Real estate, Security, and the hospitality/gaming industry. Sam has trained over 1,000 entry level security personnel, taught defensive tactics, weapons training and handcuffs to policing personnel and the public. His knowledge and practical experience have made him a valuable asset to many organisations looking to enhance their security measures and provide a safe and secure environment for their clients and staff.