London Bridge murders criminology fail

I have been in Britain for a couple of weeks, including the Friday when the London Bridge murders took place. There were two things that struck me.

The first was that the event at which the murders occurred had been organised by academic criminologists, and that the one of the victims was himself qualified in the discipline. I would have thought that these academics were aware by now that there is a difference between ordinary criminals and criminals whose actions were motivated by Islamic teaching. This difference is so obvious that their failure can only be ascribed to willful blindness, verging, in view of the consequences, on criminal negligence. What are the driving forces behind this?

The second point is that the police appeared to have arrived on the scene just in time to prevent a third murder from taking place, with the inevitability of a court case which would have been embarrassing for both the authorities and the Cambridge academics who had organised the fatal event.