This is Mal Lanyon’s first real test and the ‘communication error’ excuse just won’t do

There’s been no honeymoon for newly appointed NSW Police Commissioner Mal Lanyon, just six weeks into the job yet already confronting his first full-blown crisis.

The incomprehensible decision by someone in the force to greenlight a highly staged neo-Nazi rally outside the state parliament last weekend without Lanyon even knowing about it has left senior police red-faced, politicians fuming and Sydney’s Jewish community facing fresh trauma, given the rally’s explicit anti-Jewish messaging.

Lanyon has attributed the failure to a “communication error”, an “honest mistake”, as he put it on the ABC’s flagship current affairs program 7.30 on Monday night.

He’s also suggested that even had he known beforehand, police may not have had the legal power to block it, adding that though the movement had exhibited concerning “actions” in Victoria, “we have not seen that violence up here. They have been compliant with us in a previous protest and our dealings with them have not shown that violence”.

That doesn’t wash with Josh Roose, associate professor of politics at Deakin University. He says the black-clad group that assembled in Sydney on Saturday is effectively a branch of the National Socialist Network, a national network that espouses a hate-filled ideology and was behind the violent assault on an Indigenous encampment in Melbourne several weeks ago.

He wants to know if NSW Police bothered to pick up the phone to their Victorian counterparts. “This all comes back to basic intelligence on how this group works,” he says. “It’s a national group that exploits jurisdictional faultlines, and they exploit grey areas in the law – that’s what they do.”

He also points out that NSW Police successfully dispersed a similar gathering and prevented it from moving into central Sydney on Australia Day last year on the grounds of a threat to public safety.

Regardless of the state of the law, Lanyon should have had this shameful piece of political theatre brought to his attention before it happened. He acknowledges this.

But the “failure of communication” excuse is a movie we’ve seen before. Most notably, it came to the fore in the aftermath of the Lindt Cafe siege, when a litany of communication errors was exposed in the course of a coronial hearing into the deaths of Tori Johnson and Katrina Dawson, two of the 18 hostages taken by gunman Man Haron Monis just before Christmas in 2014.

The existence of two overlapping and at times non-intersecting chains of communication and command within the NSW Police that night was starkly documented in the subsequent coroner’s report.

Police had set up a “forward command post” a short distance from the cafe, at the old leagues club on Phillip Street, where the officer in charge was taking minute-by-minute decisions in conjunction with hostage negotiators, while a purpose-built Police Operations Centre (or POC) several kilometres away was meant to have overall co-ordination and oversight.

Yet the forward commanders, it emerged during the inquest, never had access to any of the logging systems which were available at the POC, and vice versa: the POC commander had little visibility in real time of the decisions being taken at the forward command post.

As the coroner noted in his report, “The lack of a system for recording Forward Command decisions had an … acute impact in that it impeded the Police Commander from staying abreast of what was occurring at the [forward command post] … These deficiencies hindered aspects of the siege response.”

Unsurprisingly, the coroner recommended that police urgently upgrade their internal communication and data management systems.

The coroner also found that at the time of the siege, there was “no police protocol or policy” to clearly delineate how lines of communication should operate, where a separate POC and PFCP [police forward command post] are established.

There were other communications blockages. The tactical officers, charged with storming the cafe, were operating under one set of guidelines, dubbed the management operational guidelines [MOGs], while the forward and operational command posts were under their own set of protocols, dubbed the Pioneer protocols.

These two sets of documents were not only inconsistent but, in some places, contradicted each other.

Perhaps the most tragic communication failure of all was when police snipers stationed across from the cafe saw Tori forced to his knees by Monis just after 2am – the prelude to the cafe manager’s execution just minutes later. Snipers were adamant that a message went to police commanders, but if sent, that call never got through. Lawyers for Tori’s family later labelled this failure “catastrophic”.

A Nazi rally, of course, is a very different beast from a terrorist siege. But the lessons are similar. Yes, hierarchy and process are necessary in an organisation as large and complex as the NSW Police Force. But the culture of timely responsiveness and nimble thinking has to be fostered as well.

It’s to be hoped that Lanyon recognises it’s long past the time when police missteps can be excused on the basis of “process” errors or lapses of communication.

Deborah Snow is the author of Siege: Inside the Lindt Cafe.

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