Rare police shooting reveals how a US imported belief system is becoming more violent in Australia
By
Hilary Whiteman
Police board a helicopter at a command area at Feathertop Winery in Porepunkah in Victoria, Australia. Simon Dallinger/AAP Image/AP
The alleged killing of two police officers who attempted to serve a warrant on a self-proclaimed “sovereign citizen” in Australia shows how a movement that originated in the United States has taken root in the country and now carries the threat of violence, experts say.
Hundreds of police officers, dogs and helicopters in the southern state of Victoria have spent days scouring dense bush in freezing conditions for “Dezi” Freeman, who fled on foot after allegedly shooting dead two officers on Tuesday when they attempted to serve a search warrant on his property over alleged sex crimes.
Freeman, previously known as Desmond Filby, was known to authorities after years of railing against the police, who he’d previously called “Nazis” and “terrorist thugs” in evidence submitted to court when he tried to overturn a 2020 conviction for traffic offenses.
Sovereign citizens don’t believe the law applies to them and commonly deploy pseudo-law to challenge the authority of police, lawyers, judges, and other representatives of a system they say is illegitimate and corrupt.
Police wait near the scene of a shooting in the high country of Porepunkah in the state of Victoria, Australia, Tuesday, Aug. 26, 2025. Simon Dallinger/AAP Image/AP
For decades, sovereign citizens largely flew under the radar in Australia as relatively harmless eccentrics with a special interest in conspiracy theories. But this week’s shooting has focused national attention on a worrying trend highlighted earlier this year by the country’s spy chief.
“We are seeing an increase in issue-motivated extremism, fueled by personal grievance, conspiracy theories and anti-authority ideologies,” said Mike Burgess, Director-General of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), in February.
Terrorism experts say Australia’s strict Covid restrictions – which closed state and territory borders for months – amplified distrust among people already open to suggestions that the government was a malevolent force.
Freeman’s alleged killing of two police officers represents a tipping point for the movement in Australia, said Marilyn McMahon, Dean of Deakin Law School at Deakin University.
“In the United States, you’ve got a history … That’s very different to this country,” she said, putting a rough estimate of 2,000 on the country’s so-called “SovCits.”
“We had an attempted arson at the old Parliament House… We have had death threats made against politicians by sovereign citizens, and we’ve had assaults, but we haven’t had anything really close to this.”
Flowers laid in tribute to the two Victoria Police officers killed at a remote property on Tuesday, Aug. 26. Ye Myo Khant/SOPA Images/Sipa USA/AP
From ‘paper terrorism’ to force
One of Australia’s first sovereign citizens, Alan Skyring, made his presence known in the 1980s, when he started arguing in the country’s courts that only gold and silver coins were legal tender.
Decades later, he was declared a vexatious litigant by the High Court, Federal Court and Queensland Supreme Court, a label that barred him from filing any more claims.
Skyring died in 2017, but his struggle is well-known among observers of the country’s sovereign citizens – as is Prince Leonard, who presided over his own self-declared micro-nation in Western Australia for nearly 50 years.
Both waged their wars against officialdom in the court system, using “paper terrorism” – reams of complaints, court actions and arguments – to push specific causes. Prince Leonard, for example, challenged the state government’s wheat production quotas.
However, experts say Covid-19 restrictions and post-pandemic pressures – rising living costs, higher mortgage rates and a housing shortage – are creating the right conditions for the movement to spread with the enticing notion that mortgages, taxes and fines don’t need to be paid.
Keiran Hardy, an associate professor at Griffith University’s School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, said researchers tried to estimate the total number of sovereign citizens in Australia through a Facebook survey last year.
While the survey, which returned 1,600 responses, wasn’t representative of the general Australian public, over 40% of respondents agreed that “the Australian Government does not have the right to legal power over its citizens if they do not consent.”
“I’m not suggesting that all these people are likely to be violent at all, but we were shocked at the number of people who were agreeing at least somewhat with some very specific sovereign citizen questions in our survey,” said Hardy, a member of the Griffith Institute of Criminology.
“We actually had to stop the survey from going to so many older white males and try and get a better balance in the in the respondents,” he said. “That probably tells you a bit in itself, around who holds these views.”
The pandemic creates new recruits
Unlike cults, whose followers tend to idolize a leader and cut themselves off from society, sovereign citizens operate independently and hold different views about which laws apply to them.
Some rebel at traffic stops – promoting their resistance on videos posted online – or defend themselves in court with pseudo-laws they’ve learned from self-styled sovereign coaches, sometimes through expensive courses.
“Prior to Covid-19, when sovereigns were meeting in person, it was for sovereign training, when an American sovereign salesman came over and taught them how to essentially get out of paying their mortgage,” said Kristy Campion, Senior Lecturer in Terrorism and Security Studies at Charles Sturt University.
“During Covid-19, we suddenly see them meeting in person. They’re dropping pamphlets, and they are connecting in new and different ways, but they’re also connecting with new and different people.”
McMahon, from Deakin Law School, says that while Australia’s early sovereign citizens relied on compatriots in the US for training, “there is no doubt that it is becoming more homegrown now.”
“I think that what’s happened is it’s taken root in Australia, and it’s adopted local conditions and issues,” said McMahon.
The closest previous instance of violence fueled by conspiracy theories in Australia occurred in December 2022, when two police officers and a neighbor were killed in an ambush at a rural property in Wieambilla, Queensland.
A coronial inquiry heard the three offenders adhered to a Christian fundamentalist belief system known as pre-millennialism, and believed there’d be a final battle before Christ’s return. When police showed up at their property to do a welfare check, they were ready for a fight.
The court heard the trio was influenced by a mix of conspiracy theories, including some espoused online by American sovereign citizen Donald Day Jr., who is facing separate charges in the US related to making threats and gun possession.
Countering ideas of sovereignty
The rejection of laws by Australia’s sovereign citizens means the country’s tough rules around gun ownership are often ignored.
Police searching for Freeman in northern Victoria say he’s “heavily armed,” knows the area well, and has the skills to survive in the bush for some time – though he’s not thought to have taken any supplies.
Residents of the small town of Porepunkah, where police attempted to carry out a search warrant on Freeman’s home, have been advised to stay indoors, where possible.
Police are searching for Desmond Filby, also known as “Dezi” Freeman, after the killing of two police officers on Tuesday, August 26. Victoria Police
Media have been advised of the risks of operating in the area, and tourists who had planned to visit the Alpine region, which is popular with skiers, have been urged to stay away.
Police say they won’t stop searching for Freeman until he’s found and have appealed to the fugitive to give himself up.
McMahon said this week’s events give authorities “a multiplicity of pauses for reflection,” and one outcome will inevitably be the closer scrutiny of Australia’s sovereign citizens by police.
Hardy from the Griffith Institute of Criminology says researchers are studying how police can deescalate interactions with sovereign citizens, who may view them as frontline enemies.
Preventing people from becoming vulnerable to sovereign citizen ideology in the first place poses more complex questions around disadvantage, isolation and trust, experts said.
Campion said once sovereign beliefs take hold, it’s all but impossible for authorities to combat them because the ideology maintains that the government is evil.
“Anything coming from the government is going to be viewed as a malevolent deception by sovereign citizens,” she said. “So, it is one of those situations where I believe the government is damned if they do, damned if they don’t.”
Why are police a target for sovereign citizen violence?
Published: August 27, 2025 5.25am BST
Authors
- Emma ShakespearePhD Candidate, Griffith University
- Keiran HardyAssociate Professor, Griffith Criminology Institute, Griffith University
- Kristina MurphyProfessor and former ARC Future Fellow, Griffith Criminology Institute, Griffith University
Disclosure statement
Keiran Hardy receives funding from the Australian Research Council for a Discovery Project on conspiracy-fuelled extremism.
Kristina Murphy receives funding from The Australian Research Council to study conspiracy-fuelled extremism.
Emma Shakespeare does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
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Griffith University provides funding as a member of The Conversation AU.
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As the tragic events evolve in Porepunkah, northeast Victoria, media outlets have reported the alleged shooter, Dezi Freeman, is known to be a “sovereign citizen”.
Sovereign citizens believe they are not subject to the law. This view stems from deeply held anti-government beliefs combined with conspiracy thinking that the government was replaced with a corporation that controls us through our birth certificates, licences, and other identification documents. We are only subject to the laws of this corporation, the theory goes, if we choose to enter into a contract with it.
This fundamental rejection of government authority means sovereign citizens refuse to comply with routine processes such as paying taxes and completing random breath tests. They use pseudo-law – legal-sounding but ultimately false arguments – to disobey police and disrupt the court system.
Videos of sovereign citizens refusing to comply with police orders have gone viral, and can be viewed as novelty or entertainment. However, the killing of two police officers in Porepunkah and a previous ambush of police in Wieambilla, Queensland, show that some sovereign citizens can become radicalised and highly dangerous.
So what makes police a possible target for sovereign citizen violence? And why do some sovereign citizens radicalise?
Why do sovereign citizens target police?
Police officers are the frontline representatives of government authority. They enforce the law in our communities, which means they come into frequent contact with sovereign citizens who reject their authority and defy their orders.
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This means police bear the brunt of sovereign citizen resistance. But other sources of authority — including judges, court clerks, tax officers and public servants — also face it.
Many encounters arise during routine policing duties. 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.
We are examining police body-worn camera footage to map how these 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. 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.
As the tragic events in Porepunkah and Wieambilla show, police attending a property to carry out an arrest warrant of a sovereign citizen can be a highly volatile situation. In Wieambilla, the attackers were driven primarily by extreme religious beliefs, but they had engaged with various anti-government conspiracy theories online and were heavily influenced by a sovereign citizen in the United States.
Research on sovereign citizen violence against police in the US describes two types of ambush: entrapment (planned) and spontaneous (unplanned). Most fatal ambushes involved entrapment. That study mapped 75 acts of sovereign citizen violence against law enforcement between 1983 and 2020, in which 27 officers were killed.
At this stage, we don’t know whether the Porepunkah shooting was a planned ambush or a spontaneous response to police arriving on the property. We do know the suspect was known to police from many prior interactions.
In all these encounters – from less to more serious, planned or unplanned – sovereign citizens view police as agents of an illegitimate, unlawful government.
When they resist police orders, sovereign citizens believe they are legitimately resisting the tyranny of state control, and defending their inherent rights and freedoms as a “living being”.
In Wieambilla, the attackers even viewed police as “demons and devils” in the second coming of Christ.
Why do some sovereign citizens radicalise to violence?
Radicalisation is a social-psychological process in which someone adopts and internalises extreme beliefs and progresses towards acts of violence.
Earlier radicalisation models focused on ideology as the most important factor and described “pathways”, “conveyor belts” and “staircases” to terrorism. Now, radicalisation is understood to involve diverse processes resulting from many different risk factors interacting.
Risk factors for radicalisation include social isolation, the lack of a clear sense of identity and purpose, strongly held grievances, negative childhood experiences (such as abuse or bullying), and trigger events (such as divorce or job loss).
Many of these are innocuous by themselves, and something most people experience at some time in their lives. However, if enough risk factors combine with extreme belief systems, this can lead to criminal acts, violence and terrorism.
There are not many studies on the radicalisation of sovereign citizens specifically, and much of what we know about radicalisation comes from studies of Islamist and far-right terrorists. Still, there is likely overlap between sovereign citizen and far-right radicalisation, given both can be driven by extreme anti-government views.
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.
We recently fielded a national Australian survey which confirms these findings. The average person agreeing with sovereign citizen beliefs in our sample was 52-years-old and experiencing financial troubles. They were more likely to have a criminal record and hold deep distrust towards government. They were more likely to believe in conspiracy theories, were highly cynical of the law, and showed high levels of trait reactance (in short, they don’t like being told what to do).
People with high trait reactance are more likely to resist directions they view as restricting their freedom or autonomy.
We also found people agreeing with sovereign citizen beliefs were more likely to support violence and have engaged in violence in the past.
This helps explain who is more likely to become a sovereign citizen, and it points to some links between sovereign citizen ideology and violence. But it doesn’t tell us why some sovereign citizens are more likely to be violent than others.
That question is likely to be answered in individual cases by the interplay of various risk factors for radicalisation. It is a question that researchers, police and intelligence agencies will continue to grapple with as sovereign citizen ideas pose ongoing threats to the community.
