When more than 100,000 flag-waving, cheering royal fans gather for the wedding of Prince Harry to Meghan Markle next month, British police will be treating every one as a potential terrorist, prankster or royal obsessive.<\/p>\n
Barriers to stop vehicle attacks, armed patrols, and airport-style security will be among the measures employed in what will be one of the largest police operations the picturesque town of Windsor has ever seen.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is a real challenge,\u201d said Bob Broadhurst, a former police officer who was \u201cGold Commander\u201d in charge of policing the 2011 wedding of Harry\u2019s elder brother William to wife Kate.
\n\u201cIt is impossible to search tens of thousands of people who want to come and line the streets, any one of which could be a potential terrorist; someone who\u2019s besotted with the royal family \u2013 and there are a number of those; or just an attention seeker.<\/p>\n
Harry and Meghan will tie the knot on May 19 at St George\u2019s Chapel in Windsor Castle, Queen Elizabeth\u2019s residence which dominates Windsor, about 20 miles (30 km) west of London.
\n\u201cIn the coming weeks and months residents, local businesses and visitors to the town can expect to see an increased police presence, with police officers, both armed and unarmed, search dogs, the mounted section, the roads policing unit and the National Police Air Service,\u201d the police said in a statement.<\/p>\n
Visitors arriving by car and train on the day will face random searches and \u201cany items that may pose a risk to the public will be removed,\u201d they said.<\/p>\n
The conundrum for police will be ensuring that security does not overshadow the event, said Broadhurst, who was also in charge of policing the 2012 London Olympics and the wedding of Harry\u2019s father, Prince Charles, to his second wife Camilla in Windsor in 2005.<\/p>\n
\u201cEssentially you\u2019re managing somebody\u2019s wedding and you want it to be joyous and happy for the couple, for the family and for the visitors,\u201d Broadhurst told Reuters.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe trick for those planning the policing of this particular event will be to make the security as unobtrusive as possible so it doesn\u2019t impinge on the celebration,\u201d he said.
\n\u201cThat is a really tricky thing to do \u2013 in this day and age, security must always trump celebration.\u201d<\/p>\n
Britain is on its second-highest threat level \u2013 \u201csevere\u201d \u2013 meaning an attack is considered highly likely. Last year there were five incidents classified as terrorism in which 36 people were killed. Three of those involved a vehicle being driven at crowds, and in two the assailants then attacked passers-by with knives. The move towards such simple tactics poses a greater threat than in the past, Broadhurst said.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou don\u2019t need to have spent hours or months building sophisticated bombs or other weaponry. You just need a kitchen knife, a gun up your jumper, or even just a hire car,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI very much doubt if the wedding itself will be targeted because of all the security implications, but there\u2019s still the town centre, there\u2019s still central London. What you don\u2019t want is a celebratory event in Windsor and an attack of some sort in London.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 2003, Aaron Barschak, who called himself \u201cthe comedy terrorist\u201d, managed to bypass castle security wearing a pink dress and an Osama bin Laden-style beard to crash William\u2019s 21st birthday party and give him a kiss.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt can just be a stunt that\u2019s not going to harm anybody but it becomes headline news and it kind of then takes the gloss off the wedding itself,\u201d Broadhurst said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThose reputation issues are always there and what they do is they undermine the confidence of the people in the police and the security services to get things right.\u201d Police commanders will have envisaged all such scenarios during the six months of preparation, but even the best-laid plans can be severely tested.<\/p>\n
On the day of William\u2019s wedding, minutes before Kate was due to set off, officers discovered a car had been abandoned around the corner and considered sending her a different route \u2013 which would have involved missing the crowds. In the end they were able to confirm in time that it was not a security risk.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When more than 100,000 flag-waving, cheering royal fans gather for the wedding of Prince Harry to Meghan Markle next month, British police will be treating every one as a potential terrorist, prankster or royal obsessive. Barriers to stop vehicle attacks, armed patrols, and airport-style security will be among the measures employed in what will be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":27662,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27661","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27661","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27661"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27661\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27663,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27661\/revisions\/27663"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27662"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}