A senior officer has stated that Firearm officers can get to a terrorist attack in the Bullring or New Street Station within two minutes.<\/p>\n
Chief Inspector Daniel Delaney, Head of the Firearms Unit said: \u201cThey\u2019ll be a vehicle within a quarter of a mile, they\u2019ll be a vehicle within a couple of minutes of response. So I can confidently say that we constantly move our vehicles around, we change our intelligence every day. We deploy them as effectively as possible to the threat at the time, but our key places, crowded places where there are a lot of people around, you\u2019re talking minutes, at any time 24\/7.\u201d<\/p>\n
After the massacre in Paris and Brussels, West Midlands Police has publicized that officers want to retrain and join the firearms unit.<\/p>\n
The Paris and Brussels attacks stimulated a reconsideration of police urgencies, many officers volunteering for training.<\/p>\n
In April, it was revealed that the Paris attacks suspect Mohamed Abrini had photographs of the recently refurbished Birmingham New Street Station alongside photos of Bullring and Aston Villa\u2019s football ground stored in his mobile phone.<\/p>\n
These images together with stored contacts were recuperated after a forensic investigation of the suspect\u2019s phone.<\/p>\n
Senior officers have doubled the amount of firearm officers they have available to make sure that shoppers and travellers can be reached in case of an attack.<\/p>\n
West Midlands Police Chief Constable Dave Thompson said: \u201cI am very committed that British policing has to and will remain a non-armed service. It\u2019s very important because it\u2019s the style of policing we\u2019ve got. Terrorism shouldn\u2019t interfere with that, it\u2019s vital we build good links with the community. I think we\u2019ve still got a relatively modest amount of armed officers, I don\u2019t think it will change what\u2019s taking place either in terms of criminals or terrorists and it does improve our ability to respond.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A senior officer has stated that Firearm officers can get to a terrorist attack in the Bullring or New Street Station within two minutes. Chief Inspector Daniel Delaney, Head of the Firearms Unit said: \u201cThey\u2019ll be a vehicle within a quarter of a mile, they\u2019ll be a vehicle within a couple of minutes of response. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":13995,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37,3,112],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13993","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local-news","category-news","category-top-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13993","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13993"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13993\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13995"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13993"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13993"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13993"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}