Dame Cressida Rose Dick DBE QPM was Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police from 2017 until 11 February 2022. Despite her having declared earlier on the very same day that she had no intention of quitting, the clearly stated lack of confidence in her from London Mayor Sadiq Khan made her position untenable. Dick’s four years in charge of the Met have seen the force repeatedly exposed for the fundamentally racist and sexist institution it is and always has been. NICKI JAMESON reports.
Although the Mayor’s office has an overseeing role in relation to the Met Police – London being one of the only three areas in England and Wales not to have a separate Police and Crime Commissioner – the actual power of hire and fire lies with the Home Secretary, Priti Patel. Whilst Prime Minister Boris Johnson fulsomely thanked Dick for ‘serv[ing] her country with great dedication and distinction over many decades…protecting the public and making our streets safer’ Patel restricted herself to congratulating Dick on being ‘the first woman to hold the post and…exemplif[ying] the increasingly diverse nature of our police, demonstrating that all can aspire to hold leadership roles in policing in this country today.’
This is nonsense. The fact that for the past four years the chief of the biggest police force in the country has been a woman, and a lesbian, has done absolutely nothing at all to prevent that force being as riven with misogyny as it is with racism. That Cressida Dick – who previously oversaw the 2005 counter-terrorism shoot-to-kill operation which took the life of the innocent Brazilian worker Jean Charles de Menezes – was even considered for such a position, graphically demonstrates the kind of attributes which the ruling class actually think are needed to ‘hold leadership roles in policing’ in Britain. Nonetheless, the repeated scandals that have beset the Met in the last two years of the Covid-19 pandemic in particular, finally made it impossible for the establishment to stand behind her.
These include:
- The mishandling of the disappearance and murders of black sisters Nicole Smallman and Biba Henry in June 2020. In December 2021, two Met police officers were imprisoned for having taken selfies at the murder scene and WhatsApped them to friends and colleagues. Following Dick’s resignation, the mother of the deceased, Mina Smallman, accused her of having deliberately misled her, by apologising for the officers’ behaviour on the basis that it was a one-off and not indicative of any generalised climate of racism or misogyny, despite being fully aware that other inquiries were ongoing into similar misconduct.
- The blatantly racist use of both Covid Regulations and stop-and-search powers. Young black men in London were stopped and searched by the police more than 20,000 times between March and May 2020, equivalent to more than a quarter of all black 15-24-year-olds in the capital; more than 80% of the 21,950 searches resulted in no further action. When questioned by the Home Office Select Committee in June 2020 as to whether she found these statistics alarming, Dick replied ‘I’m not alarmed, I’m alert’.
- The murder of Sarah Everard on 3 March 2021 by Wayne Couzens, a serving police officer, who used Covid-19 Regulations as cover in order to abduct, rape and kill a young woman. Couzens’ former colleagues had nicknamed him ‘the rapist’ and on 25 March 2022 he was charged with four counts of indecent exposure in January-February 2021. Other cops who were in a WhatApp group with Couzens are currently on trial for ‘sending grossly offensive messages on a public communications network’.
- The criminalisation of a vigil held following Sarah Everard’s murder, again under the pretext of Covid Regulations, followed by a gratuitous physical attack on participants. Dick claimed officers had been in ‘an invidious position’. She weathered calls for her resignation with the support of Labour Leader Keir Starmer (who had been Director of Public Prosecutions at the time of Menezes unlawful killing).
- The publication in June 2021 of a government-appointed independent panel report into the 1987 murder of private detective Daniel Morgan in south London – a crime for which nobody has ever been convicted. A Channel 4 documentary Murder in the Car Park, which aired in 2020, pointed to the involvement of corrupt police officers both in the murder itself and in covering this up in subsequent years. The report strongly criticised the Met in general as ‘institutionally corrupt’ and named Dick as having obstructed the panel’s access to documents.
- Repeated incidents of serving police officers being arrested and charged with criminal offences including bribery, rape and causing death by dangerous driving. David Carrick, a Met Police firearms officer with the Parliamentary and Diplomatic Protection Command, is currently on remand in Belmarsh prison awaiting trial on 41 charges of rape, indecent assault and coercive behaviour.
The final straw came on 1 February 2022, with the publication of a report by the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) into the conduct of officers at Charing Cross Police Station. The IOPC had launched an investigation in March 2018 into allegations an officer had sex with a drunk person in a police station. As more witnesses, including staff whistle-blowers, came forward, the investigation grew to encompass nine different strands of inquiry. The resulting report revealed systematic ‘bullying and discrimination…racism, misogyny, harassment and the exchange of offensive social media messages’.
It was the publication of some of these messages which finally forced Cressida Dick to stand down. Alongside a slew of racist and homophobic language and insults, the messages included graphic threats of and jokes about rape and domestic violence. Even then, it was not until Sadiq Khan, shaking his head in embarrassment at the evidence that the Met Police was still stuck in the bigoted ways of the ‘bad old days’ of the 1970s-80s, made it clear that he had no trust in her to improve matters, that she finally went.
The hunt is now on for a successor. Various names are in the frame but it makes no difference who is put in charge. The Metropolitan Police is a thoroughly racist, sexist institution because it is part of the apparatus of a thoroughly racist, sexist state. As we wrote in 1999, following the publication of the McPherson Report into the 1993 murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence: ‘The problem is that the Lawrence Inquiry, however well-meaning, cannot tackle police racism because it cannot identify the root cause – the British state. The British state is an imperialist state, maintaining its control over oppressed nations by political, economic and military means…The British police force is the frontline of the state’s armoury of repression. It cannot be anything but racist.’
