Routine firearm carriage by the New South Wales Police Force is commonly understood to derive from longstanding common law authority. This belief has been reinforced through police education and institutional narratives, yet is rarely interrogated. This article questions how arming became normalised in New South Wales despite the absence of clear statutory or common law authorisation. The article traces how Parliamentary decision-making, operational custom and institutional repetition displaced explicit legal scrutiny. The article advances a provocation: what does it mean for accountability when one of the state’s most coercive powers rests on assumption and belief rather than transparent legal authority?
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Brown et al. (2026) studied this question.
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