London police commissioner describes department’s work to disrupt Iran-backed retaliation plots

 The war with Iran has raised concerns about possible retaliatory terrorist attacks in major cities such as London, where the police commissioner says they have intensified focus on possible threats.

But unlike in the US, where government officials have raised alarm of possible so-called Iranian sleeper cells, UK counterparts describe a more diffuse threat that could come from lone-wolf attacks.

Sir Mark Rowley, London’s police commissioner, told CNN in a recent interview that police had disrupted 20 plots in the last two years. Most have involved Iranian operatives seeking to hire attackers, some through the dark web, to target Iranian diaspora members who oppose the Tehran government and against Jewish institutions, he said

The threat of terrorist attacks and related threats was central part of the police commissioner’s discussions with top officials and key partners in the US during his trip to the United States, including the FBI, New York Police Department and beyond, he said.

deploy identifiable police vans equipped with cameras and facial recognition software in high traffic, high crime areas in the city. The recognition software uses datasets of people wanted by the police or who may be in violation of constrictions imposed by the court.

“It is a very narrow set of criminals who we are targeting through their images — dangerous wanted offenders and registered sex offenders,” Rowley said while adding that once a person is captured on camera who is not wanted by the police, their image is deleted.

The failure rate for such technology — identifying the wrong person — is exceptionally low, according to Rowley. Only 10 people were misidentified as being wanted by the police out of 3 million people whose images were captured, an MPD report published last fall found.

To operate such a program in a democratic society, Rowley said, “You have to keep coming back to, how do you nurture the trust?”

“The whole Western world, we’re all seeing, all this misinformation out there,” Rowley said. “Polarized politics, bot farms in Russia, all of this is attacking trust in the state and in the state’s institutions.”

“Ours is going up,” Rowley said of trust in the police in London.