First responder describes London attack, shares details of most challenging moment of his career

Jim Cole’s shift on Saturday, 3 June, started out like any normal weekend, but ended up being the most challenging one of his 18-year policing career. Cole was one the first responders on the scene of the London Bridge attack.

The 41-year-old Southwark Safer Neighbourhoods officer Inspector Jim Cole had been on reserve duty in central London and had just arrived back at Peckham Police Station, getting ready to finish his shift and go home to his family. Then the call about the London Bridge attack came in. It said a van had ploughed into pedestrians on London Bridge.

“I instantly knew it was serious and I feared the worst,” Inspector Cole said.

He describes the moments right after, before getting to the scene of the attack:

“It was all hands to the pump, it was like something out of a Battle of Britain film. Everyone went running and every available police vehicle was filled with officers. My lot got into a police carrier and we went up to London Bridge.”

Cole says he an his colleagues pulled up in Borough High Street by the war memorial and made their way on foot to Borough Market. By then, updates on the radio let them know at least three man attacked people with knives.

“We were not really sure what to expect. When we got there, there were a number of armed officers and there were casualties on the pavements. I asked my officers to form a cordon to stop the public from going into the market, and that’s when the shooting started just behind us. We had no idea what was going on, we didn’t know if it was us shooting or if the bad guys had guns,” Inspector Cole recalls.

His first priority was to help those injured and to keep the petrified members of public safe during the pandemonium. Inspector Cole spotted a nearby pub in Southwark Street and decided it was the safest place for people to shelter.

“We got the door open and I instructed my medic to set-up a triage area downstairs,” explained Inspector Cole. “There was a casualty on the pavement near me. I saw a marked police car. I flagged it down and I got the driver to get the casualty out of there. I then saw a few injured people who were bleeding, including a man who had been stabbed in the stomach and we got them to safety in the pub. I then heard more shouting and a stream of people came out of the market screaming and panicking. I got them to go into the pub’s basement as a place of hard cover,” Inspector Cole remembers.

He adds: “It then started to stabilise a bit. It felt like that had only been a few moments, but it had actually been about 10 or 15 minutes.

The Southwark Safer Neighbourhoods officer inspector then checked with his medic and, since he heard officers on London Bridge desperately calling for ambulances on his radio he decided to get his medic up there to help. He managed to grab a couple of armed officers to escort his medic, then found a police car to get a man who had been stabbed in the stomach to hospital.

Cole then went back to the people sheltering in the pub.

“I spoke with the 200 frightened people in the basement and told them that there were armed officers outside, we were safe and we would evacuate them as soon as we could and I got a big round of applause. That was a really nice, unexpected moment. It was a nice touch,” he says.

The 41-year-old recalls realising the magnitude of the event only on Sunday morning.

“You have no time to think about anything, it’s almost robotic. It’s really automatic, it just kicks in. You don’t really have time to consider your own safety. It was just a case of making sure everyone was doing their bit. It wasn’t really until the next morning that it sunk in and I thought ‘crikey, that was pretty major. It all feels very surreal, it almost feels like it isn’t real. Without a shadow of a doubt, it was the most challenging, most intense situation I’ve dealt with. I’ve dealt with a lot of death and I’ve been to some pretty horrific scenes in my career, but nothing has ever been on that scale. It’s going to stick with me for a long time,” Cole concluded.

Eight people were killed and 48 were injured, including four unarmed police officers, after three men drove a van into pedestrians on London Bridge. Wielding knives, the men then left the van and went to the nearby Borough Market area, where they stabbed people in and around restaurants and pubs.

Police have made more than a dozen arrests in the wake of the London Bridge attacks, but most have now been released without charge.