The struggle with Iran has raised issues about attainable retaliatory terrorist assaults in main cities resembling London, the place the police commissioner says they’ve intensified concentrate on attainable threats.
But in contrast to within the US, the place authorities officers have raised alarm of attainable so-called Iranian sleeper cells, UK counterparts describe a extra diffuse risk that might come from lone-wolf assaults.
Sir Mark Rowley, London’s police commissioner, informed NCS in a latest interview that police had disrupted 20 plots within the final two years. Most have concerned Iranian operatives looking for to rent attackers, some by the darkish internet, to goal Iranian diaspora members who oppose the Tehran authorities and towards Jewish establishments, he stated.
“It’s sometimes ordinary criminals responding to adverts on the dark web, which is extraordinary, because it’s a different sort of state craft, isn’t it?” Rowley stated of the recruitment efforts by Iran for employed gunmen, who he stated have been akin to “useful idiots.”
Rowley famous that the idea of sleeper cells — a worry expressed by Republican lawmakers and Trump officers that brokers for Iran might be lurking within the US, prepared to be activated for an assault — sounded “a bit Jason Bourne to me.”
“The idea of longterm strategic placement by Iran is not the core of what we have seen,” Rowley stated.
The risk of short-term actors employed on Iran’s behalf stays.
On Wednesday, the Metropolitan police in London introduced expenses towards two Iranian males accused of surveilling “locations and individuals linked to the Jewish community in the London area” for Iran’s intelligence service final summer time.
The two males, arrested earlier this month, appeared in court docket Wednesday and have but to enter pleas within the case, in accordance to native media experiences.
The risk of terrorist assaults and associated threats was central a part of the police commissioner’s discussions with prime officers and key companions within the US throughout his journey to the United States, together with the FBI, New York Police Department and past, he stated.
In discussing London’s strategy to crime, a metropolis that noticed a historic low within the murder price final yr — 97 deaths, lower than a 3rd of New York City, which is comparable in inhabitants and likewise noticed historic lows in homicides in 2025 — Rowley pointed to a expertise that many Americans would rage towards however which he says over 80% of Londoners approve of: surveillance paired with facial recognition.
The MPD has just lately begun to deploy identifiable police vans outfitted with cameras and facial recognition software program in excessive site visitors, excessive crime areas within the metropolis. The recognition software program makes use of datasets of individuals needed by the police or who could also be in violation of constrictions imposed by the court docket.
“It is a very narrow set of criminals who we are targeting through their images — dangerous wanted offenders and registered sex offenders,” Rowley stated whereas including that after an individual is captured on digital camera who shouldn’t be needed by the police, their picture is deleted.
The failure price for such expertise — figuring out the fallacious particular person — is exceptionally low, in accordance to Rowley. Only 10 folks have been misidentified as being needed by the police out of three million folks whose photographs have been captured, an MPD report revealed final fall discovered.
To function such a program in a democratic society, Rowley stated, “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 stated. “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 stated of belief within the police in London.