9th July, 2011
Tony Farrell had been employed for twelve years as ‘Principle Intelligence Analyst’ for South Yorkshire Police, 13th largest of the 44 police forces in the UK. His job involved producing a yearly ‘Strategic Threat Assessment Matrix’ to determine how the police force had to prioritise its activities. Assessed ‘threats’ ranged from ASBOs (anti-social behaviour orders) to the terrorist threat allegedly presented by Islamic extremists. Having a statistics degree, it was his job to translate the different ‘strategic threats’ into a ‘matrix’ of relative numerical weighted probabilities