New South Wales police wrongly categorised a “significant” number of incidents as antisemitic, including anti-Palestinian graffiti and verbal abuse of pro-Palestine protesters, a parliamentary inquiry has been told.
The state government had cited the figures to defend laws empowering restrictions on protests. Police blamed staff churn for the errors in a lengthy written response to the justice and communities committee this month after questioning at the NSW parliamentary inquiry into antisemitism.
Operation Shelter was formed to target antisemitism on 11 October 2023 in the wake of a pro-Palestine protest at the Sydney Opera House. As of August, police had laid 249 charges against 231 individuals, 44 of which related to offences involving physical violence.
Many of the incidents recorded in the Operation Shelter database met the police definition of antisemitism: “Prejudice or hatred directed at individuals based on their Jewish faith or cultural identity”. But a review of all the 367 incidents recorded as antisemitic showed many were not antisemitism, police told the parliamentary inquiry.
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“In some cases, incidents were incorrectly categorised as ‘antisemitic’ solely on the basis that the person reporting or the victim was Jewish,” the response read.
One incident involved a man allegedly insulting a Jewish community member with public pro-Palestine views and striking him on the shoulder. Another involved a man verbally abusing pro-Palestinian protesters sitting outside Anthony Albanese’s office and destroying their banners.
A person who displayed a Palestinian flag on their home reported receiving a handwritten letter with “inflammatory” language and a doll’s head taped to it, and another person reported anti-Palestinian graffiti targeting Muslims and Arabs written on toilet doors at Hornsby Westfield. Police mistakenly classified both incidents as antisemitic.
Anti-Israel posters and pro-Palestinian protests and graffiti were among the incidents recorded, as was a sighting of a Lime bike graffitied with the words “Free Gaza” outside a Jewish daycare.
A controversial alleged attempt by News Corp staff to provoke antisemitic comments from workers at a Middle Eastern restaurant was reported by those workers, but nonetheless recorded on the police spreadsheet as antisemitism.
The review also found 38 duplicate entries, with one protest at a dock in Port Botany in March 2024 entered 17 times, and another protest at Unanderra in April 2024 entered four times.
The varying levels of consistency and accuracy in the list – a manually recorded spreadsheet of “Shelter-related” incidents drawn from a police computer database – was the result of frequent rotation of officers managing Operation Shelter, police said.
The NSW police minister, Yasmin Catley, has previously defended controversial hate speech bills passed by state parliament in February by citing figures suggesting there had been more than 700 antisemitic incidents since October 2023.
The new laws, described by one Labor MP as “draconian”, gave police broad powers to restrict protests near places of worship and criminalised people making racist remarks in public, after a spate of antisemitic attacks over the summer.
Catley in September conceded she “may have had the figure wrong” after police clarified that just 367 of the 815 incidents recorded by Operation Shelter up to 26 March 2025 were antisemitic.
“If I did, I apologise to the committee, but quite frankly, there would be so many more incidents than have been reported,” she said at the time.
The written response provided by police to parliament this month show the true number of recorded antisemitic incidents to be even lower.
Police previously told the inquiry in July that incidents’ inclusion in hate crime databases were largely driven by individuals’ or communities’ feelings or decisions to make complaints.
“We’re not recording it to determine that it is a hate incident,” Jennifer Hastings, a policy officer, told the inquiry.
“If the community feels that it is an incident, then we will capture it.”
A spokesperson for the NSW government said: “Over the last two years there has been an outbreak of antisemitism. Official records are only tip of the iceberg with most instances of antisemitism and racism going unreported.”
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