I used to think of crime in New South Wales as something contained. Serious, yes, but largely confined to those who chose to be part of it. Organised crime felt distant, almost transactional. People in that world dealing with other people in that world. For most of us, the assumption held firm. If you stayed out of trouble, trouble stayed away from you.
That assumption is starting to crack.
Across Sydney, the escalation of gang and drug-related violence has become harder to ignore. What was once a shadow conflict, largely invisible to the public, is now spilling into suburbs, streets and homes. This is not organised crime operating quietly in the background. It is a sprawling, high-stakes drug war, driven by billions of dollars, often orchestrated offshore, and increasingly executed by young, inexperienced contractors on the ground.
Historically, organised crime in Australia, while violent, tended to be targeted. There was intelligence. There were clear targets. There were, in a sense, rules.
What we are seeing now feels different. Less controlled. Less precise. And far more reckless.
Police are facing a new frontier in gangland violence.
The use of hired, often amateur operators, sometimes recruited through social media or loose networks, has lowered the barrier to violence. It has also lowered the standard of execution. Poor intelligence, rushed decisions and a lack of accountability are creating conditions where mistakes are not just possible, but inevitable.
And when mistakes happen in this kind of ecosystem, the consequences are catastrophic. I kept coming back to one case as I tried to understand what is changing.
A new frontier for gangland wars
Chris Baghsarian was 85 years old. He had spent much of his life in the Armenian Quarter of Jerusalem, part of a close-knit diaspora community shaped by survival and shared history. His family's story traced back to the Armenian Genocide, a legacy of displacement that ultimately brought him to Australia in search of safety.
Murder victim Chris Baghsarian was the wrong target. Picture: NSW Police (supplied)
That promise, that Australia is a safe harbour, is not abstract. It's the reason many migrants come here. And yet, Baghsarian was kidnapped from his home in suburban Sydney and murdered.
From what has been reported, the intended target and Baghsarian shared an ethnic background and had lived on the same street. For contracted criminals operating with limited or flawed information, a surname, an address, a rough assumption was enough.
When violence is outsourced, when intelligence is shallow, and when urgency overrides verification, the risk of misidentification increases. That introduces a new kind of threat.
For multicultural communities across Sydney – Armenian, Lebanese, Vietnamese, Pacific Islander and others – this lands heavily. These are communities that are often geographically clustered, where surnames repeat, where social networks overlap. In a more disciplined criminal environment, that would not matter.
In this one, it might.
The idea that you could be targeted not for who you are, but for who someone thinks you are, is a fundamentally different kind of fear. It is diffuse. It is unpredictable. And it is almost impossible to protect against.
The age factor
Baghsarian was elderly. He was at home and he was asleep. There was no risky decision, no moment of exposure. Just the assumption that your home is the safest place you can be.
Gangs in Sydney appear to have fewer 'rules'.
For older Australians, particularly those living alone, that assumption is everything. For older migrants, many of whom already carry a cautious relationship with authority due to past experiences and trauma, the impact is even sharper.
Layered on top of fear is silence.
Gangland violence has always struggled with a lack of community cooperation. In migrant communities, that silence can be deeper, shaped by history, by distrust, by a belief that staying out of sight is the safest option.
The current wave of drug-related violence does not ease that tension. If anything, it reinforces it. When innocence itself is no longer a guarantee of safety, the incentive to engage diminishes further.
Migrant communities feel the impact
At the same time, the geography of this violence matters.
Many of the incidents linked to Sydney's drug war are concentrated in western and south-western suburbs, areas with high concentrations of multicultural communities. For residents in places like Auburn, Bankstown, Guildford and Greenacre, this is not a distant issue. It is part of the daily backdrop.
The long-standing belief that it only happens to criminals is becoming harder to sustain. It was always an oversimplification, but it provided a sense of distance.
Cases like Baghsarian's remove that distance entirely.
Dr Vince Hurley.
When a man with no criminal connections can be killed due to mistaken identity in the context of a broader drug war, the system is not as contained as we thought.
Not just the violence itself, but the erosion of trust. Trust in the idea that crime has boundaries, that it follows rules, that it stays in its lane.
Police have expressed outrage, and rightly so. But outrage does not address the underlying shift. This is not just a law enforcement challenge. It is a structural one.
How do you police a decentralised, outsourced model of violence? How do you rebuild trust in communities that already feel vulnerable? How do you reassure the public when the risk itself has become less predictable?
These are harder questions.
Sydney's drug war is no longer something happening in the background. It is reshaping how people think about safety, identity and belonging, especially in communities that immigrated to Australia believing those things were guaranteed.
And once that belief is shaken, it is not easily restored.
Dr Vince Hurley is one of Australia leading policing and criminological academics specialising on the contemporary role of the police and policing at Macquarie University.
