Amidst a growing controversy regarding the failing role of Met Police, a stoic Commissioner of Police, Dame Cressida Dick told the media, they are “open to criticism and must continue to improve”. In an interview with Asian Voice, organised through Foreign Press Association, she spoke candidly about the increasing risk of terrorism in the UK and what the police are doing to counter it, as possible Taliban victory in Afghanistan inspires home-grown extremists.
It has been well documented how many people from the West, especially youngsters, left for Syria and Iraq to fight for the Islamic State before it collapsed in 2019. Many Britons were radicalised by brainwashing through social media, especially the vulnerable ones and there are similar fears with the Taliban.
Isis bride Shamima Begum is living proof of how a bright yet vulnerable Asian youngster, was conditioned to leave the UK at the age of 15 to join the Caliphate. She is now 21 and pleading to the Home Office to be allowed back in the UK, a country she practically denounced in 2015.
Speaking about the growing terrorism threats at this point, Dame Dick told the Asian Voice, “The threat has always changed in counterterrorism. We have been dealing with terrorism in one form or another and continue to do so. So we are not in any way reducing our international work and improving our abilities of working with our trusted overseas partners.
“We are improving even further our integration and co-working with the local services. For example, many more young people are getting involved (in terrorism). So, this means that our family courts must understand about radicalisation. This means that our officers must be able to work with the local children's services and social services should be able to protect children. This also means that we must increase awareness in schools and that means much better working with local public services, through our counterterrorism operations centre along with intelligence and government colleagues.
“For example, my officers in Peckham in South London can find out a piece of information, perhaps from a contact in a school or from a family member and that information can come through to the Metropolitan Police, then go through to the agencies and out to, let's say, for example, Pakistan or Peshawar, or vice versa, just like that. We are pretty good at it but we're trying to do more and more.”
With the nature of contacts between the extremist groups and young people now, the police are required to be internet savvy and vigilant online. “We've been running a number of campaigns such as our Act Early campaign. We had the original counterterrorism internet referral unit in 2010, a model which many other countries have adopted, where we set out to try to tackle the online threat. We also work with internet companies to remove harmful contents.”
The Commissioner explained that since 2017, the Met has prevented 29 lethal attacks, 18 of those had “so-called Islam as motivation” and 10 were “what we call extreme right-wing.”
“Right now, the police and the security services, the intelligence agencies are working on a very high level of live investigations - more than 800, and of those, we're seeing an increasing proportion, being of what we call extreme right-wing terrorism,” said the Commissioner.
The current threat level, as it is described in this country by the independent Joint Terrorism Assessment Centre is substantial which means that an attack is still likely. In the year to March 2021, the police saw around 166 terrorism arrests, but that's down a third compared to the previous year, and the lowest annual total since 2011- an effect of the pandemic when travelling between countries were restricted.
Director-General of MI5, Ken McCallum in a recent report said that Britain was seeing 13-year-olds drawn into extremists, often online. Some were race-fuelled and mostly without the help of international criminals.
MI5 has concentrated on Islamist-linked terrorism since 9/11. At one point, the Taliban also threatened to destabilise Pakistan. One of the most renowned and internationally condemned attacks took place in 2012, when (now) activist Malala Yousafzai was shot on her way home from her exam in Pakistan’s Swat Valley.
