New South Wales Police have seized 90 weapons over 3 months in metal detecting wand searches aimed at tackling knife crime. Premier Chris Minns has addressed concerns about granting police random search powers.
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00:00This is just some of the insight into how these new police powers work.
00:07They were granted to the force late last year by NSW Parliament and initiated by the State
00:12Labor Government.
00:13They see a police, assistant commissioner or of higher rank able to declare a so-called
00:18designated zone.
00:20That means police can then stop and search people at random with wanding materials to
00:24see if they can detect a metal object.
00:27After more than 4,100 searches, 90 weapons were seized and about 60 odd people were charged.
00:33One and a half percent of the people searched were found to be carrying a weapon.
00:38Some of those weapons were displayed to the public today, including tasers, an axe, machetes
00:43as well as knuckle dusters.
00:45While police record the age of people they're stopping, particularly if they're charged,
00:50they don't record the ethnicity of a person, meaning there's no way to know for sure how
00:55police approach these random searches.
00:58Police were quick to say that they were deployed randomly and indiscriminately.
01:03If you've watched one of the operations at any of the public places, whether it be the
01:06railway station or the shopping centres, they're very random in nature and that's deliberate.
01:12The Premier says any concerns raised by civil liberties groups or those sceptical that random
01:16search powers should not be allowed anywhere in the state or under any designation have
01:22to be countenanced against public safety, citing that knives were the most common weapon
01:27used in murders across the state, which new data reveals is at its highest point since
01:322014.
01:33If we were going to roll out what would be an intrusive police operation on average citizens
01:41then it needed to be based on intelligence and that's why we've got the Jack's Law can
01:45only be switched on if there's been an incident or a knife-related crime backed by police
01:51intelligence within the previous 12 months.
01:54We believe that's a reasonable trade-off.
01:56While most major offences were either increasing or remained steady, the only one that dropped
02:01was steel motor car.
02:03That dropped by about 8%.