We’ve followed the evolving and spreading counter-terrorism tactic Project Servator for four years. It’s taken us to a busy shopping centre and piazza in the City of London, Glasgow for the Commonwealth Games in 2014, and Kings Cross station in London. Now it’s going nuclear; we’ve taken up an invitation from the Civil Nuclear Constabulary (CNC) to see it at Sellafield.
The snowdrops are out; the daffodils are not quite out; it’s an overcast end of winter weekday. On the fells on the horizon there’s snow. At one of the gates to the Sellafield nuclear plant on west Cumbrian coast, the CNC have set up a Project Servator deployment (pictured).
A car approaching from the north sees the police vehicles and uniformed officers and does a U-turn. Now why would the driver do that?! And what happened next? More in the April 2017 print issue of Professional Security magazine.
More about Servator: visit the City of London Police website. Also see the new Servator entry on Wikipedia.
Background
The CNC, dating from 2005, are the police force in charge of protecting civil nuclear sites and nuclear materials in England, Scotland and Wales. As an aside, you can talk about ‘join the Army and see the world’; if you join the CNC, you might be able to sail with nuclear material for months around the world’s oceans to Japan. For the weaponry they carry – and in any case CNC are a 100pc armed force – visit https://www.gov.uk/government/news/strategic-escort-group-travel-nearly-30000-miles.
For a recent, Christmas example of the posters and messages that are part of the Servator counter-terrorism work, see https://www.gov.uk/government/news/festive-feeling-coming-to-project-servator.
While Servator originated in London, and was taken up in Scotland for the 2014 Games, it is now spreading across the country; for example last year by Essex Police to Stansted Airport.
