A leading security expert who spent 30 years in the Met Police’s Specialist Operations Unit has told how a second terror attack on an MP was thwarted in the wake of the murder of Jo Cox.
Now a security consultant, Philip Grindell also shared his advice on personal security and spoke about his new book called ‘Personal Threat Management: The practitioner’s guide to keeping clients safer’.
In an interview with Nana Akua on GB News, he said: “I was asked by the head of counter-terrorism the UK to go in [after Jo Cox was murdered] and set up a team that would look at all the threats and the abuse they were getting, develop all the intelligence, we didn’t really know what was happening at that time, and manage all the protective security, so all the security that all the MPs had.
“And then he threw in a nice one at the end, which was ‘and stop the next attack’, which thankfully we were able to do really.
Philip Grindell joined Nana in the studio
GB News
“So, the next attack was on Rosie Cooper. In that period, we increased reporting by about 400 per cent because what was happening is we weren’t getting reports.
“I was doing a dissertation for my master’s degree, and I changed that to look at how our high-profile targets targeted. And so within that, I came across some research in the US that the US Secret Service had implemented some years ago, and had the good fortune to go out and meet the guy that wrote the research, who pretty much trained me on it.
“And it was all around behavioural threat management. And the principle effectively is that somebody will say they’ve had a death threat. And we see this a lot with politicians, celebrities, all sorts.
“The kind of general rule is security and law enforcement become like five-year-olds playing football, chasing the ball around the pitch, when the reality is that a threat is actually a very poor indicator of someone about to attack.
“Arguably, the simple reason is, why would you warn someone? But actually, the research over 70 years now shows it’s a very poor indicator. But what we were aware of were other indicators, which is what the book is about.
“And I was able to then look at that and look at all the indicators we were now aware of, and say that is probably the next attack, and communicate that to our investigative team within the counterterrorism command, who then went off and arrested and arrested and prosecuted the individuals.
Jo Cox was murdered in 2016
PA
Asked what attack indicators could be, he said: “The first thing you have to recognise is even those that are not attack indicators cause harm, because many people who are subjected to those types of abuse, particularly when it’s repeated, suffer from psychological harm.
“They become anxious, they become hyper-vigilant. They sometimes opted to opt out of social media. So you you have to recognise there are different types of harm.
“Psychological harm is a very deeply personal one and one that we have to take notice of. But in terms of then identifying which ones are potentially going to go on to attack, there are about eight or nine different ones.
“But there are things such as leakage. So someone won’t directly communicate to you that they’re going to attack, but they’ll do it in other ways.
“They might put it on social media. They might leak it in a manifesto. They might tell somebody else. They might say something like, you know, we’ve seen this in some of the school attacks. For instance, don’t go to school tomorrow.
“If you think about the attack that we had actually in Parliament after where my colleague was then killed, the individual there had gone to see his mother, and on leaving, said ‘they’re going to say I’m a terrorist, but I’m not’.
“Now I’m pretty sure if you and I kind of walked out of our house and said that our loved ones would be saying what it was an indicator that he was going to do something. But what happens is people don’t recognise those indicators.
“There are other ones, like fixation, which is a subject which has been used quite a lot since Southport. But fixation is is more than just looking at something. It’s a real pathological obsession, which means that from the moment they wake up to the moment they go to bed, that’s what they’re thinking about.
“They will illustrate that by the fact that that’s all they talk about, that’s all that they’re searching about, that’s the books they’re reading, that’s the conversations that they’re having. So they can see a real obsession, in Southport, clearly, it was weapons and violence.
Philip’s new book, available on Amazon, is called ‘Personal Threat Management: The practitioner’s guide to keeping clients safer’
GB News
“And so, when we look at that one as an example, you know, it’s more about intent than ideology. The ideology is kind of less important than their intent.
“So those are eight or nine of them. They’re all obviously in the book. They’re sometimes counter-intuitive. The one about people who make threats and don’t really pose threats is counter-intuitive. But we waste so much energy and so much of our assets looking at all that sort of threat.
“Actually, what we should be looking at is the other aspects of it in the intent and their behaviour. And other is their behaviour changing.
“The book is really five years of experience of coming out of the police into the into the kind of private sector, engaging with lots of private clients, and also engaging with lots of security teams, many of whom seemed unaware of some of the real basics and principles of the difference between safety and security, what is a threat, what is a risk?
“How do you identify them? And also, as we just talked about identifying, how do you really identify a genuine threat, and how do you stop it?”
Asked to give his tips on personal security, he said: “One is trust your intuition. That’s almost always right.
“What we often do, and particularly ladies, is they ignore their intuition because they don’t want to be rude to somebody. So trust your intuition.
“A second one is to manage the data you’re allowing to be released. If you’re a fixated person, what you thrive on is data, information. Where do you live? Where do you go to the gym? What are you doing? So limit that data, and have a check every so often on Google, even if it’s just that, just to see what’s out there about you.
“Obviously, that’s only scratching the surface, but there’s so much data out there about us, and that’s where fixated people, lone actors, activists, all these type of people. That’s where they find the information, where they can then target you.”
Philip’s new book, available on Amazon, is called Personal Threat Management: The practitioner’s guide to keeping clients safer.
