Police commissioner Cressida Dick has confirmed that officials “believe” they know the identities of the three attackers, and said the police service needed to “step up a gear” following the London Bridge attack on Saturday night, which left at least seven people dead.
Dick, speaking on Sky News on Monday morning, appeared to echo prime minister Theresa May’s comments on Sunday morning in which she called for change and said that “enough was enough”. May has come in for political criticism for her remarks outside Number 10 in the wake of the attack.
“Any police leader would always want more resources,” Dick said, adding that since 2013 police officials had foiled 18 terror-related plots, and “have been arresting about one person a day for terror offenses”, she said.
“We need to look right across the strategy and resourcing of the police and beyond,” Dick said. “These are all things we need to think about as we change going forward.”
“We need to step up a gear, and look at what we now need to do differently in the face of what does appear to be again a changing threat.”
Shortly afterwards, speaking on the BBC Radio 4 Today Programme, Dick said she was highly skeptical of the idea that an officer armed with a “side arm” was a more effective unit on the street.
“I simply don’t think that is a sensible response,” she said.
Dick continued that the Met had been investing in “highly trained, highly equipped, highly mobile officers,” who are “much better” in quickly responding to the kind of threat that erupted on Saturday night.
The commissioner continued that forces “have been recruiting to the levels that we expected”.
However, Dick declined to comment on precise numbers, following Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn calls for 10,000 more officers three days ago. “You wouldn’t expect me to comment on that sort of thing right now, as we are in purdah. As I said we would always want more resources and we need to use those resources more effectively,” she said.
Asked about the identities of the three men who carried out the attack, Dick confirmed on both Sky News and the BBC that police officials “do believe we know who they are”.
“We have made a number of arrests, we are trying to find out whether anyone was helping them and to understand the background to this attack as best we possibly can,” she said. 12 people were arrested in Barking, Essex, yesterday and several more were detained in east London early on Monday morning. 11 people remain in custody.
Dick continued: “There will no doubt be questions to ask ourselves about whether we knew anything about the individuals who committed this attack, what we knew, and what it meant.
“We do have literally thousands, tens of thousands, of people who we would regard as persons of interest. We have fantastically powerful intelligence powers, we will know something about these people.
“Our challenge is to find out about people we don’t know about and secondly to find out what risk those we do know about pose at any one time. It is a challenging task because we are dealing with very high volumes.”
–Rose Troup Buchanan
