Great Western Coffee Shop

Surprised nobody has mention this...going up to Exeter this morning on various trains the TM's made security announcements, anything suspicious etc etc please notify staff OR THE POLICE !

Get home to find a stupid girly from Padstow has rung in a bomb threat for 'a train' heading to Wales.

 

This is now a standard announment on HST's. Operational traincrew receive when booking on a Late Notice which sometimes has a security notice on it. Currently it is Severe. This is obtained via the security services and not just a pie in the sky thought of someone in Swindon.

And she wasn't frisked by the BTP?

Rail magazine reports that Norman Baker, the Lib Dem transport spokesman, has been given figures showing that they stopped and questioned 160,000 passengers on railway property in the year to last September, half of them using counter-terrorism powers! In 2006-7 they stopped just 30,000.

The security announcement is standard practice, regardless of the alert state.  On West, it is supposed to be made every 30 mins or so and/or whenever leaving a principal station.

Quite frankly finding anything suspicious on a train is hard when it's the only mode of transport (maybe a bus, but you/the driver can see who gets on and leaves what) where people will leave things unattended in the public domain. 

Good, they should search more, if something happened now then there would be outrage saying that the BTP don't do enough!

Only if there is evidence that it works, not just to make the BTP feel like they are doing something

It might be ok if there were 5 times as many people being questioned, unfortunately it's generally the same people being frisked 5 times more frequently.

BTP  "Could you please tell me what's in your bag Brian"

Brian "Chicken paste sarnies Kev"

BTP "What again, you had those yesterday"

etc etc

160,000 stop and questioned easy peasy.

Please tell me that the BTP are not working to some meaningless target. 

Why can't the governemnt trust professionals to do their job?  Whether its police officers or doctors or Train Managers is noone allowed to exercise professional judgement and discretion these days

I agree with vacman - more people searched makes me feel safer. I wish people would leave the police alone and let them get on with their job (which they do VERY WELL).

Well I'm glad you feel safe, but the thing is that getting on for half of BTP's officers are in the London area and I should think that the overwhelming majority of these searches were in London, where there is a great obsession with being seen to be doing something, on the part of the Met as much as BTP, whether or not is is actually effective - how else do you account for this mushrooming in searches and the use (or is it abuse?) of anti-terror powers?

Across the rest of Britain, a handful of BTP officers are left to cover enormous swathes of the country - can you actually remember the last time you saw any on duty, because I can't - and frisking people is about the last thing they have time for.

Whilst on the 'lawn' at Mumbai CST, I noticed metal detector 'arches', just like those in airports.  These were obviously working because various lights and buzzers were going off as people walked through.  The only thing missing were the security staff.  5 days later, some 50 people were killed on that very spot in a terrorist attack.

To tighten the surveillance screw and thus create disruption is handing terrorists a partial victory on a plate.   I do walk through my trains, check under seats, WCs etc, but I cannot afford the time to be obsessive about doing so.  In the west, BTP, when numbers permit, do sterling work, but they are, IMO, much too thin on the ground to provide a consistent deterrent.  With the limited resources available, how do we provide better security cover?

It is not the police's job to make you feel safer.  It is the police's job to make you safer. 


They should certainly be left alone to get on with their job and not be given meaningless targets.

I really doubt that the BTP have any impact on security from terrorism.  However if their searches detect Knifes, drugs, stolen goods etc and more people get arrested for "ordinary" crimes than that is great

the only way to do this (albeit imperfectly) is to rely on inteligence (deploy police at stations where the spooks think there is a higher security risk - follow and search people who the spooks think might be terrorists rather than the general public).  This places a huge responsibility onto the police and security services and the day will come when they slip-up and make a mistake which I don't think we ought to blame them for

Some figures, if I may:

Searches carried out, 2007/08 = 160,000
BTP officers (from their website) = 2835
Works out at 56 searches per calendar year, per officer.

Assuming 200 worked days per officer (allowing for annual leave/sickness/paperwork/giving evidence in court, etc) per year:

That equates to 2 searches per working week, per officer.  Not exactly stretching - if it were indeed a target?

Don't get me wrong - I am a great supporter of the police generally - but I don't think this is a target: these figures are just what is actually happening, out there on our behalf.

However, as willc has pointed out, the majority of these searches may well be being carried out in London - perhaps leaving the rest of the country rather vulnerable?

I've worked In-house and as a contractor and something that I feel uneasy about is that the railway seems full of contractors, my experience with contract break-down work is why fix it in an hour! make it last all day!!!!

And a cleaning bill from a national cleaning company that pays minimum wage (or a few pence above) that I've seen was for labour at ^19 PER HOUR so who's ripping who off?

I spoke to an BTP Inspector just before Christmas and stated my view that contractors are the most likely way for a terrorist to get right into the heart of the railway and he agreed with me.

Just how do station staff etc finding a contractor turning up to do a job check that it isn't the brother of one O bin Larden who's turned up?

(If in doubt I think O bin Larden is America's most wanted).