Policing UK 2013 - Police Federation

POLICING CHALLENGES
Counter terrorism –
the next decade
How has the UK’s counter terrorism infrastructure
developed over the last few decades and what
new threats does it now face? By Bob Quick
Bob Quick is Chief Executive
of BlueLight Global Solutions.
He is a former Assistant
Commissioner (Specialist
Operations) New Scotland Yard
and former Chief Constable
of Surrey Police
Over the past 12 years the UK has
experienced a mini-revolution
in how it counters terrorism
and the end of the London Olympic
and Paralympic Games in September
2012 marked the end of one dramatic
chapter and the beginning of a new one
where the greatest threat could now be
complacency.
A review of UK counter terrorism
since 2001 leaves, at first glance,
little to cheer. Our country faced an
unprecedented series of threats over
this period and lives were lost, most
poignantly in July 2005 when 52 innocent
people were cold bloodedly murdered
during four synchronised suicide bomb
attacks on the London transport system.
The UK and other Western nations had
been slow to read the signs throughout
the 1990s as radical Islamist-inspired
terrorism began to wreak havoc around
the world. The truck bomb attack on New
York’s World Trade Center in 1993, which
killed six people and an unborn child was
a seminal moment in the development of
a new and intense threat to the US and,
by implication, the UK.
The arrest and subsequent conviction,
the following year, of four radical
Islamists may have engendered a sense of
‘job done’. However, by then some in the
US intelligence community were warning
that the Western nations were seriously
underestimating the threat from al Qaeda
and other Islamist terrorist groups. While
the US continued to take episodic action
to address this emerging new threat, it fell
short of a coherent and sustained effort
for a range of complex reasons.
Another potential turning point was the
synchronised attacks on the US embassies
in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam,
Tanzania, in which approximately 223
people were murdered and thousands
injured. We know today that these and
other attacks were missed opportunities
where the dots were not being properly
joined up.
Major reinforcement
All this changed on 11 September 2001
when another series of synchronised
attacks were mounted and successfully
delivered onto the World Trade Center,
New York; and to the heart of US
defence at the Pentagon in Washington.
A potential third attack site was averted
when passengers on a hijacked United
Airlines flight 93 from New ork to San
Francisco bravely attempted to overpower
the hijackers in an action in which the
aircraft was lost over Pennsylvania, with
the death of all on board.
The implications of 9/11 were
immediately apparent in the UK and
the police were invited to submit an
urgent bid to government to fund a
major reinforcement of the police
counter terrorism capability. Within
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