There is a ganglands war in Sydney’s West. Yet Premier Chris Minns sends NSW Police to Dover Heights in the East. By Andrew Brown.

On Monday morning a 15 year old boy was stabbed repeatedly in the stomach outside Casula High School as children arrived for class. In Western Sydney that is not a headline. It is a Monday.

How the West was lost. Ganglands war out West but Minns sends troops to leafy East

by Andrew Brown

The west is in the grip of a gang war. Since Bondi it has buried an 85 year old pensioner kidnapped by mistake, a tradie stabbed to death by children, and two men shot dead in one week because the gunmen got the wrong target.

Chris Minns answered with 150 police. In the same months he poured 4,000 police taskings a week, 250 officers with assault rifles and $94.3 million into a few eastern suburbs where the worst incident to reach a courtroom was a fake pistol. 

On Saturday the police guarding a Dover Heights synagogue said they were from Fairfield, then moved me on for asking what it costs.

The Alameddine crime network, fractured and run from overseas, against a “crime for hire” outfit calling itself the Coconut Cartel, which declared war in January and posts its shootings online. Both hire children. Taskforce Falcon has charged two 15 year old boys over contract shootings in Merrylands and Guildford West. Its commander Jason Box calls them “cheap and expendable”.

The west’s eleven months. February: Chris Baghsarian, 85, kidnapped and murdered because the gang wanted the man next door. April: three shootings and a firebombing in six hours. May: five men shot inside a Canley Heights home, one dead. 

June: a gunman tries to shoot a 15 year old girl and her father in a ute outside her school. The pistol jams. September: Joshua Macdonald and Marco Tapia shot dead in one week, both mistaken for somebody else. October: Joshua Smith, 33, stabbed to death in Mount Druitt. A 13 year old is charged with his murder. This week, Casula High.

The money is illicit tobacco. Synagogues set alight in Australia since 2023: two, both in Melbourne, nobody killed. Tobacconists firebombed in the same period: more than 230, and NSW Police will not say how many here. One woman dead, Katie Tangey, 27, burned alive at the wrong address. Two synagogues bought an army. Two hundred and thirty firebombed shops and a dead woman bought NSW a licensing scheme.

For all of that, Minns and Police Minister Yasmin Catley gave the west Taskforce Falcon. One hundred and fifty officers. 

The east did not have to ask.

Operation Shelter runs more than 4,060 taskings a week by Commissioner Mal Lanyon’s own figures. The Armed Response Command adds 250 officers with military rifles around the clock. And the Community Security Group (CSG), a private Jewish security outfit the parliamentary record shows is consulted on police taskings, which Minns wants also to be armed at public events.

Bondi was an atrocity. Fifteen murdered. But AFP Commissioner Krissy Barrett said on December 30 that Sajid and Naveed Akram acted alone. No cell. Two men. 

Since then, eleven months and 4,000 taskings a week have produced one case: two men charged in July with pointing an imitation pistol at Chabad Double Bay. Nobody hurt.

Minns called the recruitment of children by crime gangs “appalling”. 

Then he sent Fairfield’s police to Dover Heights.

Sydney has about 35 synagogues and six Jewish day schools. Add childcare centres and aged care homes: perhaps 60 sites. Four thousand and sixty taskings a week is 580 a day, a police visit to every site roughly every two and a half hours, on top of CSG guards and the rifle squad, against two men, one dead and one in custody. 

That is not protection. It is theatre, paid for in Fairfield.

So who is it for? The people Minns answers to. CSG sits at the tasking table. Deputy Commissioner David Hudson warned that arming its guards at public events would look like favouritism, and Minns disagreed. Western Sydney has no lobby inside police headquarters. It has Labor seats that vote Labor whatever happens, and a Premier who knows it.

Why does Minns believe the west needs no additional taskings? If the answer is that its dead are gangsters, say it to Chris Baghsarian’s family, or Joshua Smith’s, or the girl in the ute, or the boy outside Casula High.

Catley and Minns owe the west a number. Are 250 rifles enough, or will it be 500? At what point does the Premier say: protected, Fairfield can have its police back? Asked who pays for ARC, Catley said: “We will absorb the cost.” Her own government admits ARC exists to end the rotation of officers out of local commands. Nobody will publish that ledger. On Saturday I saw two entries in it.

Here is part of what she is absorbing. Several senior police from Western Sydney commands have told me that Shelter taskings are largely filled by officers on their rest days, paid at double and triple time, and that they put their hands up whenever the roster allows because the money is there. 

So the 4,000 taskings a week are not only a transfer of police from west to east. They are a transfer of overtime, out of a budget that is supposed to fund Fairfield and Mount Druitt, into penalty rates for standing outside a synagogue in Dover Heights.

About 1 pm on Saturday I stopped my scooter outside a Dover Heights synagogue and asked a guard what all this cost. I did not say I was a journalist. Two police arrived. Where are you from? Fairfield, on secondment. Who decided? No answer. 

Then I was causing fear, and I was issued a move on direction. 

I spoke quietly throughout. They photographed my number plate and said a body camera was recording. Release it. One middle aged man in shorts and a plain t shirt, on his way to the beach, bringing fear to five CSG guards, at several of whom were visibly armed, and two fully armed police. Which question did it: what this costs, where you came from, or who sent you? If those are grounds to be moved on, the power protects the government from questions, not anybody from harm.

I rode back past that Dover Heights Synagogue that evening. The worshippers had been gone for hours. The police car was still there, outside three metre walls, and I assume it stayed all night. 

Fairfield’s officers, guarding an empty fortress.

Jewish worshippers deserve protection. So does a 15 year old walking into Casula High. One has an army of police and armed guards.

Publish the taskings and borrowed shifts by local command, starting with Fairfield. Release the footage. Then stand outside Casula High and answer the question. How much is enough?

https://michaelwest.com.au/how-the-west-was-lost-ganglands-war-of-the-poor-but-minns-sends-troops-to-guard-the-rich/

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