For 120 years, the words "Special Branch" represented a uniquely British vision of security: They conjured up pictures of heavily built, middle aged police detectives in plain clothes and raincoats politely but doggedly questioning suspects and protecting the realm from Nazi saboteurs, communist spies and Irish terrorists with weary, good manners and low-key, relentless efficiency.

But now following the shock of the July 7 London bombings that killed 56 people and wounded 700 more, the London Metropolitan police is scrapping Special Branch to streamline its anti-terrorist forces in the fight against Islamist extremists who may come from Britain's 1.6 million to 2 million Muslim minority community.

On Sept. 8, Sir Ian Blair, the commissioner of the London Metropolitan Police, or Met, the biggest and premier police force in Britain, announced that Special Branch would be scrapped and replaced in part by an elite new 2,000-man strong Counter Terrorism Command that would focus on fighting terrorism.

Special Branch did that too. But it never did so exclusively: Nor was it designed to. And Blair took a lot of heat for the police's alleged lack of preparedness before the suicide bomb attacks of what Britons now refer to as "7/7".

The Met's assistant commissioner, Andy Hayman, said that the July 7 attacks had shown the police's own anti-terrorist forces need more manpower and resources. As part of the restructuring, 500 extra police officers will be added to the 1,500 currently serving on the Met's Anti-Terrorist Branch.

The reform will be part of a major three-year restructuring plan that will also boost the size and resources of the Met's Specialist Anti-Crime Directorate. Two other police departments will be charged with protecting buildings from terrorist attack and protecting people regarded as high-risk potential victims of assassination attacks.

London's police have collected a lot of criticism and embarrassment in recent years for their alleged lack of professionalism in dealing with hard-core Islamist terrorists. First, there was an infamous incident some years ago when a captured Islamist suspect broke free and stabbed to death one of the policemen who had captured him in an apartment. Then, after the London bombings, an innocent Brazilian was shot dead at a London rail station after being wrongly identified as a terrorist suspect. Although the police went out of their way to apologize and explain the circumstances, critics noted that even in heavily armed America, no such incident ever occurred in the heated weeks following the deaths of 2,800 people in the Sept. 11, 2001, mega-terrorist attacks. Nor has anything like that occurred in Israel during the entire second intifada, despite a wave of Palestinian suicide bombings that killed nearly a thousand Israeli civilians, many of them women and children.

The Met's Anti-Terrorist Branch was also swamped by the unprecedented demands put upon it in the investigation of the July 7 attacks and the unsuccessful ones on July 21. It therefore made sense to both boost the squad's manpower and also to divert more resources into the training and equipping of its members.

Special Branch has also suffered from overlaps and turf battles with MI5, the British domestic security service, which faced heavy criticism of its own following the July 7 attacks. Many American analysts have cited MI5 as a preferred model for a new integrated U.S. domestic security service separate from both the CIA and the FBI.

But, in fact, the British model was often misunderstood: For Britain did not have one domestic service. It had two -- the Special Branch and MI5. MI5 was generally charged with gathering intelligence on security threats while Special Branch focused on gathering the evidence needed to prosecute offenders.

The system was often cited as a classic way to maintain security while preserving civil liberties. And it worked extremely well against the Irish Republican Army and its splinter groups, as well as against communist spy rings. But it was too slow reacting, too cumbersome, and lacked the fast-reaction paramilitary skills needed to deal with small cells of fanatical terrorists ready to kill and be killed in the radically different world of Islamist terror.

Ironically, under the new system, the British system will finally start to look like the model that many American commentators have long wrongly imagined it to be. MI5, finally boosted by extra funding and infusions of many more full time officers, long promised but not yet delivered by the government of Prime Minister Tony Blair will finally become Britain's unchallenged domestic security service. The expanded Anti- Terrorism Branch may well take on much of the trappings, lethal, fast reaction capabilities and macho swagger of American SWAT teams, freeing up the Special Air Service to focus more on the clandestine military operations that have always been its specialty.

And as for Special Branch, it will join the many artifacts of Britain's law and order past like the gallows and hangman and the old high helmet of the street policeman armed only with his truncheon -- assured of a long and vivid afterlife in the public imagination, but as irrelevant as the crossbow to the law and order challenges of the 21st century.

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