Critical Incident: Australian crime drama shines a light on the inequity of law and order

Writer and filmmaker Sarah Bassiuoni liked to joke that Barack and Michelle Obama copied her.

The former lawyer made the dramatic move to switch careers from law to entertainment just before the Obamas shifted from politics to producing films and documentaries.

“That’s how you affect real change,” she told The Nightly. “Expert reports and commentary sometimes don’t have the same effect of changing hearts and minds as entertainment does.

“Stories are empathy machines.”

They can also live in the grey area — a space that politics and law notoriously find difficult to be.

“We should always be looking for ways to create empathy, and that’s part of why I changed careers. I think it’s not always helpful to think in adversarial, binary mindsets. I can understand why people would want that when they’ve had horrific experiences or traumas.

“But most of us are just going about our lives, especially in Australia. A lot of us could probably be more empathetic creatures.”

Bassiuoni’s legal experience spanned working for Amnesty International, UNICEF and for Aboriginal legal aid in Alice Springs. She was also on the team at the Public Interest Advocacy Centre where a lot of her work looked into police misconduct matters, often in Western Sydney.

After years in the profession, she found herself feeling cynical about the law. “It played on me that you were always helping people after a horrific thing had been done,” she said. “There was nothing or very little you could do to make a difference so it wouldn’t happen again. And things would never change.”

Years earlier, Bassiuoni had brokered a deal with herself if she ever felt that way, it was time to get out. And so, she did, and after studying and working in the entertainment industry on the likes of The Heights and House of Gods, the filmmaker is debuting her own series today.

Critical Incident is drawn from her time in law and seeing first-hand, the inequity in how marginalised communities are policed.

The story takes place in Blacktown in Western Sydney, 50 kilometres and an hour’s drive from the glistening waves of Bondi Beach.

With an ensemble cast of Australian and international talent, the story is focused on three core characters, two police officers, Zil (Akshay Khanna) and Sandra (Roxie Mohebbi), and a young woman named Dalia (Zoe Boe).

Following a violent riot the previous evening, the decorated and well-liked Zil mistakes Dalia for a suspect, pursuing her through the streets of Blacktown because she fits the description of someone else.

In the ensuing chase, a bystander is critically injured, and everyone has to confront all the factors of how this happened, the assumptions and mistakes that were made. And the consequences of choices made according to police procedures.

Bassiuoni emphasised Critical Incident is not anti-policing. It’s looking at the wider context of institutional and structural discrimination.

“A large segment of my family has experienced that they are policed in a different way,’ she said.

The disparity between how police interact with communities in Western Sydney versus the more affluent areas of Sydney became a flashpoint during NSW’s Covid lockdowns. Many local government areas with greater multicultural populations experienced harsher conditions and more scrutiny and enforcement.

According to a 2022 report from the Australian Catholic University and the United Workers Union, Western Sydney communities felt the government’s role during this period was to punish them, rather than to help them. That perception exposed fractures in the city and remains a sore point.

For Bassiuoni, it had an implication for her series. “In the original pitch, we were playing more overtly into race issues,” she said.

“Whereas what’s evolved is that there is a larger segment of the population who now understand, even if they haven’t experienced it, that ethnicity, the colour of your skin, changes how you are policed, how you experience the police.

“So, we didn’t have to carry the responsibility of having to explain that. Even people who don’t necessarily agree with that perspective, at least it’s a baseline that is out there now.”

But Critical Incident is not homework or a lecture, and it doesn’t give any answers, it’s only asking the questions.

“I want it to be a TV show that’s ripping and enthralling, first and foremost,” she said.

And the series consulted with former and current cops who read scripts gave notes and worked with the cast.

Mohebbie said a detective came in and gave them a few sessions in which he talked about the force. “There was a lot to take on as well because you want to portray that culture authentically, and also the holes where things do go wrong,” the actor explained.

But Mohebbie had grown up in communities that she said were over-policed, so even though she is playing a cop in the show, her experiences put her closer to the perspective of the character of Dalia.

“But what I think this (show) has done for me is it’s helped me look at the system through a lens of, ‘OK, but how can we make it better?’. That’s the next step, to implement things that will be genuinely effective.

“The show starts the conversation really well and shows how the system is actually the problem. Of course, people can be the problem but it’s the system that needs to be overhauled.

“My perspective stays solidly the same but my empathy for people has expanded throughout the whole process.”

Hunter Page-Lochard, who plays against type as the villainous Ty, said Critical Incident isn’t some crime procedural that follows the formula of finding the bad guy and taking him down. It’s much more interested in how the bad guy becomes the bag guy.

“This is creating a criminal and it’s all our fault, we’re all complicit in this, we’re all complicit in the system,” he said.

And that’s one of the questions Bassiuoni posed with Critical Incident – how much of this is the responsibility of the individuals caught within these systems, how much is it the responsibility of law enforcement institutions and how much is it the responsibility of everyone?

“We vote for law and order,” she said. “If we stop voting for law and order and start voting for justice, maybe things would change.”

Critical Incident is streaming on Stan