[Infowarrior] - Security Forces Will Outnumber Athletes Nearly 4 to 1 at the 2012 London Olympics

[Richard Forno]

Security Forces Will Outnumber Athletes Nearly 4 to 1 at the 2012 London Olympics

March 5, 2012 in Featured

http://publicintelligence.net/security-forces-will-outnumber-athletes-nearly-4-to-1-at-the-2012-london-olympics/

Emergency vehicles gather for Exercise Forward Defensive on March 1, 2012 in preparation for the upcoming Olympic games in London this summer. Photo via Metropolitan Police.

Every movement of London’s Olympics will be monitored – including yours (guardian.co.uk):

The 10,500 athletes participating in the London Olympic and Paralympic Games, the world’s greatest celebration of human physical endeavour and progress, will be guarded by a security force of some 40,000. This beats the 3:1 ratio of guards to athletes at the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, as the London Games continues the Olympian trend for record-breaking security contingencies. Indeed the home secretary, Theresa May, only last month crowed that the Games’ security would constitute “the UK’s largest ever peacetime logistical operation”. Never mind the performance of athletes: the Olympics is about government and business delivering security solutions.And it’s a great show. Armed officers from the Metropolitan police and the Royal Marines hammering along the Thames in speedboats and helicopters, ground-to-air missiles scanning the skies, hovering spy drones scanning the land, security services scanning the internet for nascent plots or cyber attacks – it’s all being co-ordinated by a bevy of Olympic-themed security agencies.
The police-led multi-agency National Olympic Coordination Centre co-ordinates the forces to deal with the threats identified in the Olympic Intelligence Centre’s “national Olympic threat assessments, while the Olympic Clearing House is screening 380,000 people, from athletes to voluntary litter pickers, seeking accreditation for the Games. Meanwhile the UK Borders Agency boasts the UK is to be the first country to welcome arriving athletes by funnelling them up dedicated “Olympic lanes” at airports for fast-track fingerprinting.

Locals are also in the firing line, in subtle, privatised ways. Houseboaters on the River Lea have been priced out of a controlled mooring zone around the Games, while the £60m Prevent strategy has screened the five Olympic host boroughs for what threat they pose for brewing local extremism, with “engagement officers” dispatched to each  borough.

Random security screening has been carried out on cars parked at Stratford City’s Westfield shopping centre, by officers from the staggering 23,700-strong private security contingent of the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG) and G4S. Westfield isn’t even in the Olympic park, itself a hotbed of embedded biometric scanners and CCTV with automatic facial and behaviour recognition technologies, amid which LOCOG’s forces can search anyone and use “all available powers” to dispose of troublemakers, particularly anyone caught with anything that could be used … in a tent.

Who LOCOG’s bouncers are accountable to is not clear, but they are backed by 13,500 military reservists, apart from countless police deployments, and international contingents such as up to 1,000 US agents, possibly armed. The Games’ security costs exploded from £282m in 2010 to £553m by end-of 2011, with another £475m for policing. Under the host city contract, the chancellor of the exchequer signed a guarantee “bearing the costs of providing security” – a blank cheque signed by the taxpayer for Olympic security planning that industry lobby body the British Security Industry Association (BSIA) has proudly been involved with from the outset.

Olympic security is booming business. The $1.7bn security budget for the 2004 Athens Games was over four times that of the 2000 Sydney Games, while $6.5bn went on security at the 2008 Beijing Games, mostly going on security technologies supplied by firms like General Electric and Panasonic – two major sponsors of the London Games. Beijing also saw innovations like armed police zipping around on Segways, or tickets inserted with radio-frequency ID chips to enable the real-time tracking of ticket holders.

Olympic and Paralympic Games Blog: Exercise Forward Defensive (met.police.uk):

During last week I was one of the 2,500 people put through their paces as part of Exercise Forward Defensive. The exercise aimed to test, from constable through to COBR, how we all responded to a partially exploded bomb on the underground during Games time.Just as athletes prepare to be at the top of their game so must we. As the Met’s Gold Commander on the 7th July 2005 I am only too aware of the genuine value in exercising and testing our responses at every level to incidents such  as these. We must all understand how we work together and be reassured that the right people are in the right places.
I spent the two days of the exercise in the National Olympic Coordination Centre at New Scotland Yard, attending COBR meetings and meeting with my key people to keep an oversight of what we were all doing to keep London, the UK and Games safe and secure.

It was an excellent exercise and throughout the Met, and the other organisations who played, debriefs are taking place to make sure we get what learning we can.

This week I’ve been down to Eton Dorney with the Home Secretary and Thames Valley Police Gold John Turnbull to look at the venue and police security plans for the rowing, Paralympic rowing and the canoe sprint.

For the last two days I’ve been with police colleagues from across the country, being updated on Gold plans from across the 12 venue forces and briefing my national colleagues on where we are with Games safety and security planning.

With only 148 days until the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games we are in a good place to deliver what will be the Police Service’s biggest ever peacetime safety and security operation.


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