Three additional shopping centres are subject to new powers allowing SA Police to search people and remove them from sites.

From today, Colonnades Shopping Centre, Tea Tree Plaza Shopping Centre, Modbury Triangle and part of Adelaide’s CBD have become Declared Public Precincts. 

SAPOL Assistant Commissioner Narelle Kameniar said the announcement brought the number of precincts in metropolitan Adelaide to 11, after eight metropolitan shopping centres were declared last week.

The declaration allows police to use metal detectors to wand shoppers at random for knives and order a person to leave the centre for 24 hours.  

An image of an outdoor mall.

Shoppers in Adelaide’s Rundle Mall can be searched for knives under new laws.  (ABC News: Lincoln Rothall)

“There are knives being brought into Rundle Mall as well as Rundle Street and into Hindley Street where there are a lot of retail precincts.” Assistant Commissioner Kameniar said.

“Anybody who is within the Declared Shopping Precinct can be wanded by police … we don’t require any suspicion.” 

In the first week of the wanding operation, police have seized three knives from shoppers at Burnside Village and one from Marion Shopping Centre. 

“It shows that there is a good uptake of this by police and it’s showing that people, unfortunately, are still continuing to take these dangerous weapons into our shopping centres.”

Assistant Commissioner Kameniar said police will look to declare more precincts in metropolitan and regional shopping centres as well as train and bus stations in the future. 

Narelle Kameniar

Assistant Commissioner Narelle Kameniar said police don’t require suspicion to search a shopper for knives under the new laws.  (ABC News)

Attorney-General Kyam Maher said the parliament had passed ‘Australia’s toughest knife laws’ earlier this year.

“We saw some of the really high-profile tragedies, at Bondi Junction Shopping Centre and so forth, and we didn’t want to see us getting to the stage that they have in the eastern states,” Mr Maher said.

The declared precincts are part of a suite of reforms introduced this year to crack down on knife crime. 

“Banning the sale of knives without any exceptions to children, we’ll have safe and secure storage of knives coming in next year,” Mr Maher said.

“We’ve seen machetes and swords declared prohibited weapons.”