UK Police Chief watched from inside locked police car while Islamist stabbed PC to death
Tuesday, 09 October 2018
Nothing to use to assist your colleague? ...tyre lever, car jack, aerial, briefcase, shoe. I thought Bobbies were ‘trained’?
— Andrew Close (@SaltwaterFix) October 8, 2018
No weapon.
No radio.
No point in having him.
Scotland Yard’s acting commissioner has told how he witnessed the fatal stabbing of PC Keith Palmer in the Westminster Bridge Attack but fled the scene because no one in his vehicle had protective equipment or a radio.
Sir Craig Mackey, the Met’s deputy commissioner, said his first instinct was to jump out and help but an assistant locked the car doors because they had nothing with which to stop the Islamist terrorist Khalid Masood.
Sir Craig was sitting in the front seat of his official vehicle with his driver and chief of staff on March 22 after a meeting with Brandon Lewis, the policing minister, when the attack unfolded in front of him.
He told the inquest into the fatal shooting of Masood, who also killed four people by running them down in a car on Westminster Bridge, that his first instinct was to get out of his vehicle, which was passing through the vehicle barrier just inside the main gates. However, he was told by a police constable at the gate to “get out, make safe, go, shut the door”, and his colleague in the car had already locked the doors.
Sir Craig, who was temporarily in charge of the Met before Cressida Dick, said his first instinct to leave the vehicle was “not the right response”. He added: “I was in shirtsleeves, with no radio, I didn’t know if the attack was ongoing … we had no protective equipment at all, no communications, we had been in a ministerial meeting.”
Within seconds the car had pulled away. Sir Craig said: “I had no personal equipment, no radio, two colleagues with me who were quite traumatised by what they had seen, so we moved out and I began co-ordinating the response you saw.”