Police have been urged to urgently crack down on “lawless” sovereign citizens after Australia’s second extremist attack in a growing pattern of violence.
Alleged sovereign citizen Dezi Freeman, 56, remains on the run after Victoria Police officers Neal Thompson and Vadim De Waart were shot dead, and a third officer seriously injured, when fired on while executing a search warrant in the rural Victorian town of Porepunkah on Tuesday.
The attack is eerily similar to the 2022 Wieambilla shootings in remote Queensland, when constables Matthew Arnold and Rachel McCrow and neighbour Alan Dare were ambushed on a rural driveway.
Brothers Nathaniel and Gareth Train, along with Gareth’s wife Stacey, opened fire and killed the two young officers and Dare, while two more officers fled for their lives.
All three Trains were shot dead by specialist police hours later, after refusing to negotiate or surrender.
University of South Australia Associate Professor Joe McIntyre said Tuesday’s incident should have come as no surprise and that Freeman should have been on authorities’ watch lists.
“The accused shooter has a really long history of pseudo-law litigation; he looks to be one of the original versions predating Covid, where most were radicalised,” McIntyre said.
“He should have been on a lot of lists. He needs to have been treated differently and that needs to be looked at going forward.”
Viral videos
Videos of sovereign citizens refusing to comply with police orders often go viral, and are commonly considered novelty or entertainment.
However, the killing of two police officers in Porepunkah and the ambush at Wieambilla show that some sovereign citizens can become radicalised and highly dangerous.
Researchers at Griffith University, who are studying bodycam footage of sovereign citizen interactions, say traffic stops or roadside breath tests can escalate quickly when sovereign citizens refuse to comply with police directions.
As many of the videos on social media show, these incidents might amount to a heated argument or scuffle over an arrest, but not a serious attack. Nonetheless, there is an underlying risk of harm, the Griffith researchers said.
They are trying to map how the interactions progress and how they can best be de-escalated to avoid harm.
“At the start of an interaction, there are typically warning signs that police are dealing with a sovereign citizen,” the researchers said.
“Sovereign citizens often use ‘private’ number plates, have symbols or writing on their vehicles and hand over large files of pseudo-law documents. There might also be a warrant out for their arrest.”
The coronial inquest into the Wieambilla attack heard the Trains were motivated by religious extremism, believing police were persecuting them amid a battle between God and Satan.
The Trains were not deemed sovereign citizens – people who believe state authority is illegitimate and individuals have residual sovereignty.
However, McIntyre said authorities had a narrow understanding of the term and he believed Christian extremists such as the Trains should have been considered sovereign citizens.
“There was a missed opportunity that has been replicated [in Victoria], and these instances are unfortunately inevitable in this type of behaviour,” he said.
“Once the law is optional, then lawfulness itself becomes an option.”
McIntyre said police must take a different approach to sovereign citizens and come down hard when they breach laws such as tax fraud “rather than waiting for them to do a violent crime”.
“We need to be looking at the conduct they’re already doing, which is unlawful,” he said.
The federal government said the rise in sovereign citizen radicalism was a major concern.
“A lot of people went down the rabbit hole during Covid, and they never came back up,” opposition home affairs spokesperson Andrew Hastie told ABC Radio.
Who are sovereign citizens?
A recent review of international evidence suggests sovereign citizens are more likely to be male, older, experiencing financial difficulties and relationship troubles, and have previous negative experiences with authority.
Sovereign citizens is a label imported from the United States during the 1970s.
The sovereign citizen “movement” reached Australia in the late 1990s.
For years, fringe tax protesters and anti-government groups quietly pushed psuedo-law ideas propagated by sovereign citizens.
Then, during Covid pandemic, lockdowns, mandates and rising distrust meant pseudo-law went more viral and social media lit up with people claiming they weren’t subject to Australian law.
What is pseudo-law?
Armed with obscure legal jargon and fringe interpretations of the law, “sovereign citizens” continue to test the limits of the Australian justice system’s patience and power.
Earlier this year, two Western Australians were jailed for 30 days after defying a Supreme Court order and refusing to acknowledge the court’s authority.
That came after former AFL footballer Warren Tredrea told the Federal Court he could not pay his legal costs to his former employer, Channel Nine, because he did not believe in Australian legal tender.
These views and others held by sovereign citizens rely on “pseudo-law”.
It describes the practice of constructing legal arguments that sound convincing but are fundamentally wrong. It often relies on real law or cases, twisting them through bizarre or inaccurate interpretations. Pseudo-law looks like law, but isn’t.
Common pseudo-legal arguments include:
- governments have no authority over “natural persons”;
- writing a legal name in all capital letters creates a separate legal entity (a “strawman”), which is not subject to state authority;
- money is not real and anything can be legal tender;
- tax laws apply only to federal entities, not individuals;
- “natural rights” override statutes and court-made rules.
Not one of these arguments has succeeded in an Australian court.
-with AAP
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