Commissioner Cressida Dick has handed in her resignation as the most senior police officer in the United Kingdom after the Mayor of London said he no longer had faith in her leadership.
London’s scandal-struck Chief Commissioner has announced her resignation, with the Labour Mayor of the City saying in a statement that after he told the top officer that he was not satisfied with her response to an ultimatum to improve, she said she would “step aside”.
Dick said in a statement Thursday that “it is clear that [the Mayor] no longer has sufficient confidence in my leadership to continue”.
Astonishingly, the resignation came just hours after Dick said on national radio: “I have absolutely no intention of going and I believe that I am and have been, actually for the last five years, leading a real transformation in the Met”, The Daily Telegraph reported.
Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London and at one time apparently a close ally of Dick, released a punchy statement in which he said: “Last week, I made clear to the Metropolitan Police Commissioner the scale of the change I believe is urgently required to rebuild the trust and confidence of Londoners in the Met and to root out the racism, sexism, homophobia, bullying, discrimination and misogyny that still exists.
“I am not satisfied with the Commissioner’s response… I will now work closely with the Home Secretary on the appointment of a new Commissioner so that we can move quickly to restore trust in the capital’s police service while keeping London safe.”
The Metropolitan Police has been accused of having a serious dysfunctional policing culture in recent months after a series of high-profile incidents involving serving officers. Most notable among them was the rape and murder by a police officer of Sarah Everard. It was subsequently revealed that Metropolitan Police officer Wayne Couzens had used the pretence of coronavirus lockdown regulations and his police badge to falsely arrest Everard, allowing him to drive her to a secluded location where he raped and strangled her.
The shocking events surrounding the murder were intensified by the Police’s own response, which quickly became a total public relations disaster. When Londoners came together to hold a vigil to remember Sarah, police officers heavy-handedly broke up the mourners, again citing coronavirus regulations.
The reputation of the Met as actually being a credible emergency service took another hit when the force suggested that lone women who were afraid that they were being arrested on less than credible pretexes should flag down a passing bus for help. The suggestion was widely derided as being ridiculous and underlining the failure of the force to grasp the problem. Commissioner Dick later claimed the advice was “not intended and it is not how we see things”.
Commissioner Cressida Dick, who first came to the broader public’s attention in the wake of a fatal police shooting of an innocent man on the London Underground in 2005 in a counter-terror operation she commanded, was made the force’s first female, and first openly gay commissioner in 2017. She was due to leave the role this year, but despite having the opportunity to retire the increasingly controversial officer, the government elected to renew her contract last year.
The decision by the government — which had the ultimate power in renewing her contract through the Home Office — came after Dick had overseen the force’s policing of several political protests, which was widely discussed at the time as having been outright biased. The differential in policing was especially pronounced between the force’s approach to Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion, and anti-lockdown protests.
As Breitbart London reported at the time of her renewal, on the sad fate that has befallen London during hers — and erstwhile ally Mayor Sadiq Khan’s — tenures:
Dame Cressida’s tenure as top cop in Britain has been marred by rampant knife crime and rising homicide rates. In the year prior to the Chinese coronavirus crisis, London saw the highest number of homicides in ten years, with 150 people losing their lives.
Despite the city being placed under some of the strictest lockdown conditions in the country for most of last year, London still saw 126 homicides in 2020, 15 of whom were teenagers.
Knife crime has been at the heart of the violence epidemic in London, with 15,600 offences with knives or sharp blades being recorded in pre-lockdonwn year of 2019/20, compared to 9,700 in 2014/15.
Aside from her failures to tackle the crime wave in her city, Dame Cressida has also been criticised for spearheading the woke agenda pushed by leftist mayor Sadiq Khan.
Former member of the European Parliament and political commentator Martin Daubney reflected on this record upon Dick’s dismissal Thursday, noting that it was, in his opinion: “Utterly pathetic that [Khan] didn’t finally come out [against] Dick because of the endless, record butchery, murder & knife crime that he oversaw in London, but for the virtue signalling nonsense of “sexism, racism & misogyny”. Shameful, cowardly politics.”
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