09-Feb-15: In UK, counter-terror police are refining their plans because terrorism like today's was not anticipated

Counter-terror police patrol London's St Pancras
Station, 2015 [Image Source]

If it was not always true, it's getting truer by the day: the war against the terrorists is going to get worse in every way before it gets better.

Mark Rowley, the Assistant Commissioner for Specialist Crime and Operations in the Metropolitan Police Service (the media refer to the organization as Scotland Yard) of Great Britain, has provided some insights today into how the UK war against its terrorists is going. The direct quotes below are all from today's Daily Mail UK.

• "Around 600 people are believed to have travelled to Syria and Iraq from the UK since the conflict began and around half have returned home..."
• "Young men suspected of falling for the warped ideology of ISIS are being arrested at a rate of almost one a day..."
• "ISIS is unlike any other threat Britain has faced before in its bid to recruit and corrupt people... We're not just dealing with a classic terrorist organisation organising plots across the world. We're dealing with a group that's trying to create what you might call a corrupt cult of people, of followers who will act in their name. They're trying to attract misfits, criminals and the vulnerable; and it's those people, not part of a bigger organisation, who may act of their own volition."
• "He confirmed that emergency plans to cope with a terror attack in the UK have been changed in the wake of the Paris shootings because it was 'not everything we anticipated'... "[Y]ou look at an event like Paris and you think not everything in that we anticipated, so we're going to have to make some refinements to our plans to improve."

As we have noted here before, the future is not what it used to be.