Lighter policing is earned through trust. Lederer’s letter to Wanderers fans erodes it

Opinion

November 6, 2026 — 5:00am

Last Monday, Western Sydney Wanderers chairman Paul Lederer published an open letter to the A-League club’s members, avowing that ENOUGH IS ENOUGH.

In it, he asserted the treatment of Wanderers supporters this season had been “totally unacceptable”; characterised the gung-ho policing of the club’s fixtures as “neither reasonable nor proportionate” and maintained there was “no justification” for the presence of the Public Order and Riot Squad at its matches.

Those each are robust propositions. Placed under a firm squeeze, they don’t maintain shape.

Lederer’s missive identified three grievances. That hundreds of supporters were held outside the recent Sydney derby at Allianz Stadium for half an hour; that rules governing what the club frames as “concession items” have shifted; and that at the match against Macarthur at Campbelltown on last weekend, up to 20 riot squad officers were positioned, at times, directly behind the supporter bays.

The letter infers a pattern of excessive policing that has left supporters feeling like “second-class citizens”. Which is a bit of a quantum leap, really. On the club’s own account, none of the three grievances concern an arrest, a charge or the use of force, whether excessive or not.

Cops don’t attend football matches because of a passing interest in the game. Rather, the Police Act 1990 (NSW) charges the NSW Police Force with the responsibility of protecting persons from injury and property from damage, and with preventing and detecting crime.

Lederer’s epistle proceeds as though police deployment decisions are made arbitrarily, in an information vacuum. The opposite is true. Police are in the intelligence business. Their response to the letter was short and pointed; resources are deployed on the basis of “intelligence-led risk assessments”. That describes the orthodox model of police resourcing, built on information the club neither holds nor sees.

Intelligence-led policing collects, grades and analyses information to produce an assessment of risk. Each item of intelligence is graded twice. The source is rated for reliability from A, completely reliable, to F, where reliability can’t be judged; the information is rated for credibility from 1, confirmed by other sources, to 6, where its truth can’t be judged.

A report from a proven informant, corroborated by CCTV, sits at A1. An anonymous online boast that red flares will be smuggled past security might sit at F6. But both are recorded, and become part of the overall picture.

It’s highly likely that NSW Police holds and grades intelligence of this kind about scores of football supporters and the active groups at every A-League club. That intelligence stew draws on incident reports, ejections and banning orders, social media, informants and liaison with venue security and supporter liaison officers.

It will also draw from what other intel is gathered about people, from the other aspects of their lives, including parts they think they’ve kept secret. Some of it identifies individuals; some, planned conduct. Much of it won’t ever become evidence, and it’s not held for evidentiary purposes.

That’s because intelligence and evidence answer different questions. Evidence must be admissible and its sources are exposed to cross-examination. Intelligence need only be reliable enough to inform a decision about risk, and its sources are protected – by public interest immunity, and by the informer privilege – precisely so that they continue to exist.

A hypothetical assessment, that a group intends to ignite 100 flares in a crowded bay, may never support a charge against anyone. It mightn’t need to. If 20 officers standing behind the bay mean the flares stay in the pocket, the intelligence has done its work and nobody is charged. The absence of arrests is then evidence of success, not of capricious overreach.

Frankly, the Wanderers wouldn’t have the foggiest idea what intelligence the NSWPF holds on individuals associated with the club, and the police would be legally constrained from disclosing it.

The NSWPF’s Use of Force Manual treats officer presence as the least intrusive option available, and insists that police de-escalate wherever possible. A knot of 20 cops standing behind a supporter bay is officer presence. It’s a trained reserve, there so that trouble is deterred rather than suppressed. The squad’s name describes what it’s trained to prevent, not what it expects.

Sadly, the history of football crowds, from Heysel and Hillsborough to the Melbourne derby of 17 December 2022, abandoned after goalkeeper Tom Glover was struck during a pitch invasion, is a history of risk underestimated. Football grounds also are workplaces, with corresponding safety requirements.

A commander who deploys conservatively and is proved wrong has spent some serious money on police overtime. A commander who deploys lightly and is proved wrong may end up explaining themselves to a coroner.

Lederer’s letter asks for “equal treatment and common sense”, and insists that the conduct of individuals shouldn’t define an entire fan base. On the second point, he’s dead right. But intelligence-led policing is the antithesis of collective treatment. Its whole purpose is to distinguish; to identify the handful of persons and moments carrying risk, so that the many can be left alone.

Equal treatment means deployments proportionate to assessed risk, not identical ones; and a derby with a well-documented and at times bleak history isn’t a fixture without one.

None of this places police beyond reproach. The Manual is emphatic, that officers are personally responsible for any force they use; that force must never be used to punish; that every use of force must be recorded on the COPS system; and that officers answer for it in the courts, before the Coroner, in complaint investigations.

The allegations of police assaults and antagonistic law enforcement made by Sydney FC’s active supporters after the derby on 16 October, if substantiated, describe conduct the Manual itself forbids. Proportionality is a legal standard applied to particular acts on particular evidence. It isn’t advanced by an open letter to the true believers.

That rhetoric carries a cost. Telling families in the bays that police are their adversary corrodes cooperation among supporter liaison, venue security and police. It is that cooperation, sustained over many seasons, which drives a risk grading down. Supporter groups that have earned a lighter footprint did so that way. Not by press release.

The police presence at Wanderers fixtures rests on statutory duty; it’s exercised through powers hedged by safeguards; and it’s calibrated by an intelligence process operating on information the club does not have and cannot be given.

To cast the NSWPF as arbitrary is to misunderstand both its law and its method. To cast the Wanderers as its target is to mistake being assessed for being singled out.

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