New South Wales police last week arrested 15 people as part of Strike Force Wessex – an investigation into alleged organised criminal networks operating “dial-a-dealer” schemes.
But what does Wessex, an Anglo-Saxon kingdom in Great Britain, have to do with drug dealing and mobile phones across Sydney?
And what does an international investigation into an alleged Lebanese criminal syndicate have to do with tromperie?
Well, not a lot.
In NSW, names for police investigations, taskforces and strike forces are generated randomly using a computer system and then selected by investigating officers and the state crime command coordination unit.
The system offers names from a pool of words and can be asked to regenerate them if the one selected is deemed inappropriate for any operation.
According to the force, operations are given names as a point of reference, to identify each investigation and link multiple related probes together.
Recent high-profile operations include Operation Shelter, the high-visibility policing operations launched in response to pro-Palestinian protests. Last year, Taskforce Magnus was established to investigate a spate of public shootings across Sydney.
NSW police try not to reuse names but sometimes they are recycled with the addition of a reference year – for example, Trident 2020 and Trident 2024.
This was an example provided by NSW police – but Strike Force Trident was also a real investigation (conducted alongside Trawler) which led to four men being charged with online grooming and child abuse material offences in 2023.
Other states and territories have different ways of naming operations. In the Northern Territory, names are obtained through Territory Intelligence – a branch of the NT Police – according to a spokesperson.
NT police revealed a list of possible operation names was created using “generic categories”.
These include rivers by continent, including African rivers such as the Nile and European rivers like the Danube, classes of ships including second world war battleships, and chemical elements that appear in the periodic table, including vanadium and tungsten.
Names are vetted before being added to the list “to ensure no adverse connotation may be made by using that name in any operation”.
“Once that filtering process is complete, those names are added to a list held within the NT police,” a spokesperson said.
“Members requesting operation names are then allocated a name from the list on a ‘next cab off the rank’ basis. Checks are also made that no operation name is duplicated.”
No ‘frivolous’ names
Geetanjali Saluja, a senior lecturer in marketing at the University of Technology Sydney, says naming operations is an important way to identify them – both internally and for the public.
“The most basic function is to identify the operation without giving any details,” she said.
Saluja said it was important for police forces to have the ability to override automatically generated names if they were not appropriate. “Say, for example, someone has lost their life. You do not want it to be named something frivolous,” she said.
In Victoria, taskforces and operations are named by investigators.
West Australian police operation names are randomly generated. “The relevant investigative unit has oversight of this name, and can change the operation name if required,” a spokesperson said.
South Australian operation names are chosen to fit the type of activity being undertaken.
An operation for traffic operations in the Adelaide Hills area was named Safe Hills and another aimed at preventing livestock theft was dubbed Operation Poach.
“Many operation names are continually used from year to year, such as Safe Holidays and Distraction, targeting mobile phone use,” a SA police spokesperson said.
If a complaint is made by an employee or member of the public, the force takes “immediate steps to rectify the issue”.
The Australian federal police and Australian Defence Force both use randomly generated naming systems – although requests for specific names can be made within the AFP.
“An application and approval process is undertaken to consider a number of factors prior to approval and allocation of a name,” a federal police spokesperson said.
“Operation names are generally not reused and they can be changed in the event that an unforeseen issue arises.”
The ADF uses a random naming method from a database of more than 100,000 words.
For public-facing tasks and activities – including humanitarian and disaster situations – operations are named “in accordance with the nature of the task”.
In Tasmania, operation names are selected at random, as they are in Queensland.
Earlier this year, 21 young people were arrested in Ipswich as part of Queensland police’s Taskforce Guardian aimed at dealing with youth crime.
