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How Many Millions Did London Police Spend Waiting for Julian Assange?

The Metropolitan Police Service is counting £7.1 million in "opportunity cost" spent waiting for Assange to step foot outside the Ecuadorean embassy.

Police officers have been stationed outside the Ecuadorean embassy in London for three years, waiting for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to step foot outside so they can extradite him to Sweden over rape charges he denies. Though the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) still intends to arrest him, today its officers left their spot outside the embassy.

According to the BBC, the cost of assigning officers to wait for Assange totalled more than £12 million, but Scotland Yard spokesperson Alan Crockford tried to downplay that figure to Motherboard in a phone interview.

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"[The MPS] have a number of people who are dedicated to policing diplomatic premises, the Diplomatic Protection Group, and of course depending on what's happening in the world, their priorities will change from one embassy to another," he said.

For this reason, MPS is counting £7.1 million in "opportunity cost," an accounting term meaning it would have incurred that cost no matter what.

In addition to that, Crockford said MPS spent £3.4 million in overtime as a direct result of waiting for Assange outside the Ecuadorian embassy, and another £3.1 million in "indirect cost" in addition to the cost of staff.

That's a lot of money no matter how you slice it, and the MPS basically said in a press release that it has better things to do.

"Like all public services, MPS resources are finite," the press release read. "With so many different criminal, and other, threats to the city it protects, the current deployment of officers is no longer believed proportionate."

However, MPS added that it "remains committed to executing the arrest warrant and presenting Julian Assange before the court." As to how it plans to snatch Assange up now that there aren't police officers outside waiting for him, all MPS said is that it will deploy a number of "overt and covert" tactics.

According to the BBC, the statute of limitation for the lesser sexual allegations against Assange lapsed in August, but Swedish investigators still have until 2020 to question Assange on rape allegations. Swedish prosecutors even said that they're willing to fly the UK to interrogate him in the Ecuadorian embassy.

Assange previously said he's prepared to spend five years living in the embassy. He's almost halfway there.