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Cressida Dick isn’t the problem. The police are the problem

By:   []

Date: 2022-02 

UK home secretary Priti Patel has pledged to replace Cressida Dick with a Met commissioner who is up to the task of delivering public safety and restoring public confidence in the police service.

This is a tall order for an institution repeatedly accused of structural racism, misogyny, and corruption. While there is clearly a crisis of public support for the Met, a change in leadership is unlikely to lead to the kind of transformative changes needed.

Cressida Dick is the product of an institution she has inhabited for almost 30 years.

In 1999, the Macpherson report demonstrated that the Met suffered from structural racism following its failure to investigate the death of Stephen Lawrence. In 2005, an anti-terrorism operation run by Dick erroneously killed Jean Charles de Menezes, leading to widespread allegations of incompetence and overzealousness in such operations.

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In 2021, an independent panel investigating the mishandling of the murder of Daniel Morgan in 2013 found a pattern of institutional corruption in which the Met was more concerned about covering up its mistakes than resolving the case. And in 2022 – following the murder of Sarah Everard by a Met officer, and the ensuing investigative failures and repression of protests – the Met was found to harbour a culture of misogyny that was further supported by incidents of sexual assault, failures to protect women, and repeated incidents of racist, misogynist and homophobic discourse and behaviour according to the Independent Office for Police Conduct.

Just as it would be a mistake to blame Dick for all of these institutional crises, it is a mistake to think that replacing her with new leadership will make any substantial difference in the basic nature and functioning of the Met.

But this won’t prevent political leaders from all parties from attempting to mobilise a discourse of leadership transformation in the service of restoring police legitimacy.
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