Big fall in reporting terror information

Police get half the number of tip-offs

CRIME: A counter-terror chief has warned of the dangers of public complacency after he revealed a “dramatic fall” in the number of instances of information passed to the police.

Neil Basu said the number of pieces of information given to police more than halved last year, from 31,000 in 2017, to 13,093 in 2018.

A COUNTER-TERROR chief has warned of the dangers of public complacency after he revealed a “dramatic fall” in the number of instances of information being passed on to the police.

Head of UK counter-terrorism policing Neil Basu said the number of pieces of information given to police more than halved last year, from 31,000 in 2017, to 13,093 in 2018 – and the dominance of Brexit in the news could have been blame, he suggested.

However, Mr Basu has stressed the importance of the information received by security services, with more than a fifth of information passed on the public to police helping to foil terrorist attacks, with 18 plots thwarted since March 2017. A record 700 terror investigations are currently ongoing, up from around 500 in 2017, Mr Basu said.

While he said he was “incredibly grateful” that 2018 was spared the level of carnage of the previous year, when dozens of people were killed in attacks in London and Manchester, he warned the “worst-case scenario” was public complacency.

In both 2017 and 2018, just over a fifth of the information passed on was “very significant”, meaning it directly led to the identification of a suspect or plot or was a small piece of the jigsaw that helped a plot be disrupted or criminal be prosecuted, Mr Basu said.

He added that part of the reason behind the fall could be the dominance of Brexit, which “undoubtedly” took up much attention last year, when there was very little terrorist activity compared with 2017.

Two continuing concerns were the potential of radicalised fighters returning from abroad and the spread of propaganda online, he said.

Drawn on the latter, Mr Basu said: “It’s not so much the volume of threat, but a shift in the threat to the young and the malleable, even the mentally ill who are being affected by what they are seeing, and they are taking that and then using very low-sophistication measures, things that everyone can get access to - a knife or a vehicle - and making an attack.

“And those are the kind of things that worry us most, they are the hardest to see and they are the hardest to stop.

“And that’s why we need communities to stand up and report changes in behaviour that they are seeing within their communities which might actually help us stop these things before they happen.”

He added: “If one in five times someone picks up a phone or emails us is a significant piece of intelligence, that is a major contribution from citizens and we want that to continue.”

Four far-right radical extremist plots and 14 Islamist terror plots were foiled within the last two years. This compares with 30 planned attacks that were successfully disrupted in the four years prior to March 2017.

Mr Basu was speaking at the launch of a major cinema advert campaign to increase people’s awareness of suspicious activity and encourage them to report it to police.

We need communities to stand up and report changes in behaviour. Head of counter terrorism in Britain, Neil Basu.