Policing UK 2013 - Police Federation
Policing UK 2013 - Police Federation
Policing UK 2013 - Police Federation
You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles
YUMPU automatically turns print PDFs into web optimized ePapers that Google loves.
POLICING CHALLENGES<br />
Counter terrorism –<br />
the next decade<br />
How has the <strong>UK</strong>’s counter terrorism infrastructure<br />
developed over the last few decades and what<br />
new threats does it now face? By Bob Quick<br />
Bob Quick is Chief Executive<br />
of BlueLight Global Solutions.<br />
He is a former Assistant<br />
Commissioner (Specialist<br />
Operations) New Scotland Yard<br />
and former Chief Constable<br />
of Surrey <strong>Police</strong><br />
Over the past 12 years the <strong>UK</strong> has<br />
experienced a mini-revolution<br />
in how it counters terrorism<br />
and the end of the London Olympic<br />
and Paralympic Games in September<br />
2012 marked the end of one dramatic<br />
chapter and the beginning of a new one<br />
where the greatest threat could now be<br />
complacency.<br />
A review of <strong>UK</strong> counter terrorism<br />
since 2001 leaves, at first glance,<br />
little to cheer. Our country faced an<br />
unprecedented series of threats over<br />
this period and lives were lost, most<br />
poignantly in July 2005 when 52 innocent<br />
people were cold bloodedly murdered<br />
during four synchronised suicide bomb<br />
attacks on the London transport system.<br />
The <strong>UK</strong> and other Western nations had<br />
been slow to read the signs throughout<br />
the 1990s as radical Islamist-inspired<br />
terrorism began to wreak havoc around<br />
the world. The truck bomb attack on New<br />
York’s World Trade Center in 1993, which<br />
killed six people and an unborn child was<br />
a seminal moment in the development of<br />
a new and intense threat to the US and,<br />
by implication, the <strong>UK</strong>.<br />
The arrest and subsequent conviction,<br />
the following year, of four radical<br />
Islamists may have engendered a sense of<br />
‘job done’. However, by then some in the<br />
US intelligence community were warning<br />
that the Western nations were seriously<br />
underestimating the threat from al Qaeda<br />
and other Islamist terrorist groups. While<br />
the US continued to take episodic action<br />
to address this emerging new threat, it fell<br />
short of a coherent and sustained effort<br />
for a range of complex reasons.<br />
Another potential turning point was the<br />
synchronised attacks on the US embassies<br />
in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam,<br />
Tanzania, in which approximately 223<br />
people were murdered and thousands<br />
injured. We know today that these and<br />
other attacks were missed opportunities<br />
where the dots were not being properly<br />
joined up.<br />
Major reinforcement<br />
All this changed on 11 September 2001<br />
when another series of synchronised<br />
attacks were mounted and successfully<br />
delivered onto the World Trade Center,<br />
New York; and to the heart of US<br />
defence at the Pentagon in Washington.<br />
A potential third attack site was averted<br />
when passengers on a hijacked United<br />
Airlines flight 93 from New ork to San<br />
Francisco bravely attempted to overpower<br />
the hijackers in an action in which the<br />
aircraft was lost over Pennsylvania, with<br />
the death of all on board.<br />
The implications of 9/11 were<br />
immediately apparent in the <strong>UK</strong> and<br />
the police were invited to submit an<br />
urgent bid to government to fund a<br />
major reinforcement of the police<br />
counter terrorism capability. Within<br />
88 | POLICING <strong>UK</strong>