Cyber Crime and Cyber Terrorism

7
 
The response
THE RESPONSE
Aside from stretching and reworking legal principles such as jurisdiction and issu-
ing strategies, there have been several key responses to the challenges of cybercrime 
and cyber-enabled criminality. For example, the Metropolitan Police Service was 
recently reported as having substantially expanded its E-crime unit to a reported 
500 officers in response to the threat of “cybercrime” having become a Tier One 
National Security threat. This is consistent with the responses having effect across 
the UK law enforcement community. The Police Reform and Social Responsibility 
Act 2011—the legislation that created elected police and crime commissioners—
also introduced the concept of the Strategic Policing Requirement (SPR). The SPR 
is published by the Home Secretary and sets out those national threats that require 
a coordinated or aggregated response in which resources are brought together from 
a number of police forces; it applies to all police forces in England and Wales and 
is referred to by other law enforcement agencies throughout the United Kingdom.
The SPR identifies how police forces and their governance bodies often need to 
work collaboratively inter se, and with other partners, national agencies or national 
arrangements, to ensure such threats are tackled efficiently and effectively.
The SPR contains five areas of activity and threat that are, if at a Tier One or Tier 
Two risk level in the National Security Risk Assessment, covered. These are:
• Terrorism (Tier One)
• Other civil emergencies requiring an aggregated response across police force 
boundaries
• Organized crime (Tier Two)
• Threats to public order or public safety that cannot be managed by a single 
police force acting alone
• A large-scale cyber incident (Tier One) including the risk of a hostile attack 
upon cyberspace by other states
The SPR recognizes that there may be considerable overlap between these areas. For 
example, there may be a substantial organized crime element involved in a cyber inci-
dent and vice versa. All elected police and crime commissioners and their respective 
chief police officers must have regard to the SPR in their planning and operational ar-
rangements. This is an important legal obligation for reasons that are discussed below.
Having set out these key risks to national security, the SPR requires policing bod-
ies to have adequate arrangements in place to ensure that their local resources can 
deliver the requisite:
Capacity
Capability
Consistency
Connectivity and
Contribution
to the national effort (the five “‘Cs”).

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