Dame Cressida Dick with Mayor of London Sadiq Khan in 2021 (Victoria Jones/PA)
(Picture: PA Wire)In her final days as our Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Dame Cressida Dick has issued a thinly veiled attack on Mayor Sadiq Khan for his handling of Scotland Yard. In an exclusive letter to London, published in today’s Standard, Dame Cressida suggests that the “current politicisation of policing is a threat not just to policing but to trust in the whole criminal justice system”.
She is right that the priority for the Met must be to protect the public, working with Londoners in pursuit of justice and support of victims. And balancing the potentially conflicting demands issued by a Labour Mayor and a Conservative Home Secretary cannot have been easy.
Dame Cressida can also point to successes under her tenure, including the fall in certain types of violent crime, although some of this can be attributed to the pandemic.
Yet many of the achievements understandably got lost amid what at times has felt like a conveyor belt of scandal involving her offices, with stinging criticism about a culture of racism, misogyny and homophobia in the Met.
Furthermore, London suffered its worst-ever year for teenage killings in 2021, wreaking a devastating loss on families and communities across our city. All the while, public trust in the Met has fallen dramatically.
The next appointment will be critical. Londoners need a Commissioner who will address operational, cultural and, yes, political criticisms of the Met.
