In most jobs you wouldn’t take eagerly to the national press only to boldly predict your own failure, but Met chief Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe has been telling everyone this week that a terrorist atrocity ought to be expected every moment he remains in charge.
As the Metropolitan police commissioner, Hogan-Howe is the highest ranking police officer in the United Kingdom. And beyond the Met’s area of operation in Greater London, he is nationally responsible for leading the counter-terrorism activities of the police. But while he has been boasting about some of the supposed plots foiled recently – a threat against US soldiers based in East Anglia, and another against the police station in Shepherd’s Bush – Hogan-Howe says that an attack of ‘mindless mass murder’ is ‘a case of when, not if’.
Hogan-Howe was writing in The Mail on Sunday, a curious choice given that just a few months ago, the Mail was dubbing him ‘The man who shames the Met’, condemning what it portrayed as his botched handling of an investigation into an alleged establishment paedophile ring, his frivolous waste of taxpayer money, his own extravagant expenses, and his culpability in allowing murder, violent crime, and sexual offences in the capital to increase.
Lamenting Hogan-Howe’s ‘abject failure of leadership’, the Mail suggested that his future at the Met looked bleak, arguing that as Operation Midland hurried towards collapse, ‘Hogan-Howe has continued to devote himself to avoiding public scrutiny’. But however stern the critique, evidently the Mail remains the newspaper of choice if you want to emerge from hiding and start enunciating your point.
Hogan-Howe’s point – beyond bland reassurances and an ode to British values – is to suggest that we are increasingly unsafe, apparently as a rationale for tougher security measures. The number of armed officers in London is set to grow by 600 to 2,800, and a further 900 armed officers are to be put into action across the rest of England and Wales. Police Federation chairman Steve White says the 1,500 recruits could take up to two years to fully train, as he proposed ‘If there is an attack it is unlikely to be an isolated incident’.
Terrorism in the United Kingdom today is a relatively minor threat. Much less than in the 1970s and 1980s, it has killed between 57 and 60 people – depending on the definition of terrorism – in the 21st century, most of whom include the 52 killed and 4 responsible in the 7 July 2005 London bombings. On the other hand the United States well demonstrates the dangers of a militarised police force, with figures there variously indicating that you are between eight and fifty-eight times more likely to die at the hands of a police officer than a terrorist.
The conclusion of the authorities is that we should all naturally feel safer the more police with guns there are patrolling our streets. The murder of a Catholic priest in Normandy little over a month ago is even being cited to imply that no town or village can rest easy, at least until they find an officer ready to shoot to kill. And no doubt Theresa May won’t be far behind advocating more ‘investigatory powers’, as Hogan-Howe and others seek to praise the intelligence efforts of MI5 and GCHQ.
