Bob Broadhurst, who served as a gold conductor for Prince William and Catherine’s wedding and the 2012 London Olympics, said authorities faced “headaches” ranging from terrorist threats to protests to crowd collapses. Around 750,000 people are expected to travel to the capital from Wednesday to pay their respects to the late monarch as she is in state for four days before her funeral on Monday. Around 200,000 visited Westminster Hall to pay their respects to the Queen Mother before her funeral in 2002. Around 10,000 officers will be assigned to the operation each day, Broadhurst estimated, some of whom will be drawn from forces across the country. Downing Street said 1,500 troops would be on standby to help in the capital. “This will be the biggest exodus of people onto the streets of London – and elsewhere for that matter – that the UK has ever seen,” said Broadhurst, who recently worked with the Royal Parks to draw up safety plans for the death. of the Queen. The scale “brings its own headaches,” he said. “It’s what the Met, it’s what London is good at. But they won’t have seen it on this scale. “Security and ceremony are not happy bedfellows. The trick we’ve done with the Olympics is that you have to manage security in a way that is commensurate with the dignity of the occasion, but without putting anyone at more risk than necessary.” He said the Queen’s funeral was complicated because “the royal family want to see her and they want to be close to their audience”, which was an “absolutely terrifying” prospect for security officials. “The American model is, you put them in a bubble, a secure bubble, that nobody can get to, you put them in armored vehicles. The royal family will be in open carriages, riding horses. And this crowd of many millions that will be in the streets has not been surveyed and cannot be searched. It’s absolutely terrifying. Everyone will be stuck.” Protest could be an issue, but so could counter-protest, Broadhurst added. “The big middle English people will turn on anyone, and that becomes a security risk in itself.” Terrorism by lone actors, fixers, petty crime and crowd collapse and crush are all risks, in addition to the security operation around many heads of state visiting the UK for the occasion. Former Met chief constable Parm Sandhu told BBC Radio 4’s World at One programme: “Crowds will be targeted by terrorists. The funeral itself will be a target for terrorists.” British Transport Police said the public will see a “significant increase” in the number of uniformed officers patrolling transport hubs in London. Archie Bland and Nimo Omer take you to the top stories and what they mean, free every weekday morning Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online advertising and content sponsored by external parties. For more information, see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and Google’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Ken Marsh, the chairman of the Metropolitan Police Federation, which represents officers, said there had been “no grumbling or whining” about the efforts expected of them as leave is expected to be canceled to facilitate the security response. Raffaello Pantucci, a counter-terrorism and counter-radicalisation expert and senior fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, the defense and security thinktank, said the Queen’s funeral would be an attractive target for someone to “make a political statement using violence”. “Attacking the British state in general is something that many different groups would like to achieve, so yes, I could see it being something of concern from a terrorism perspective. There is clearly a risk that exists,” he said. Paducci said the most obvious danger was from so-called lone actors – people acting alone inspired or directed by wider terror networks. “The plot we see is more of a lone actor model. For a person like that, that could be an attractive event.” He said mitigating that risk was a challenge. “The difficulty is that they don’t trigger the obvious triggers that the authorities are looking for. That said, what’s also true, research shows that lonely actors are in contact with other people and actually tend to broadcast their intent. There are signals out there that you can find. “The problem is to distinguish who is serious and who is not. And therein lies the difficulty.”
