The Misogyny That Led to the Fall of London’s Police Commissioner

Cressida Dick was supposed to be a pioneering reformer, but she couldn’t overcome the culture of the force.

By Sam Knight The New Yorker

Photograph by Jonathan Brady / PA Images / Reuters

Until now, Dick’s experience and symbolic importance protected her. But the symbol has been undone by reality. 

On Thursday evening, Cressida Dick, the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and Britain’s most senior police officer, announced her resignation. The Met, as it is known in Britain, is in a bad place, stricken with allegations of racism, homophobia, corruption, incompetence, and, most grievously, an appalling capacity for violence against women. Dick, a counterterrorism specialist who has led the Met since 2017, was the first female commissioner in its hundred-and-ninety-three-year history. For a while, she seemed to be the perfect—the only—person for the job. “I have absolutely no intention of going, and I believe I am—and have been, actually—for the last five years been leading a real transformation in the Met,” Dick told the BBC, on the morning of February 10th. But, a few hours later, Dick was summoned to a meeting with Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, who oversees policing in the capital, to explain her latest plans to get a grip on the force. Rather than attending, Dick quit. “It is quite clear that the mayor no longer has sufficient confidence in my leadership,” she said. “He has left me no choice but to step aside. I say this with deep sadness and regret.” Maybe Dick was exasperated. Maybe she didn’t grasp the extent of the crisis. Dick has previously enjoyed almost unanimous support from Britain’s political leaders, in part because of the symbolism that she represents. In her resignation statement, she didn’t say that she had done anything wrong.

Although there were many problems, Dick was finally overwhelmed by the misogyny (and worse) of the men she led. In March, 2021, Wayne Couzens, a Met officer, came off a security shift at the United States Embassy in London and used his handcuffs and warrant card to kidnap, rape, and murder Sarah Everard, a thirty-three-year-old woman who was walking home. Couzens strangled Everard with his police-issue belt and attempted to dispose of her body by burning it in a fridge. The Met’s response to the murder was boneheaded to the core. Officers tried to cancel a vigil for Everard on Clapham Common, which was visited briefly by the Duchess of Cambridge, because of coronavirus restrictions. That night, male officers ended up dispersing female protesters by force. In the days after Everard’s murder, the department told women in London who were worried about being approached by lone plainclothes male officers to call 999, the emergency number, or hail a passing bus. “I have forty-four thousand people working in the Met. Sadly, some of them are abused at home, for example, and sadly, on occasion, I have a bad ’un,” Dick said, a few months later.

The fallout from Couzens’s crime has been limitless, and has focussed attention on a sickening casualness about rape and the bodies and rights of women, and on a moribund culture of police “banter”. Last December, two Met officers were jailed for taking selfies with the bodies of two murdered sisters, and sending pictures of the “dead birds” to their colleagues on WhatsApp. A further five officers—three serving in London—were found to have exchanged racist and misogynistic material with Couzens in 2019. Each investigation has pulled on the thread of another. Earlier this month, the Independent Office for Police Conduct, which investigates complaints against the police in England and Wales, presented the findings of Operation Hotton, a series of nine interlinked inquiries into misconduct centered on a single police station, in Charing Cross, in central London. The I.O.P.C. report was almost unprintable. Officers joked about beating their partners: “Knock a bird about and she will love you. Human nature. They are biologically programmed to like that shit.” One police constable was known as “mcrapey raperson” for his “particular fondness of IC3 and IC4”—Met codes for people of Black and Asian ethnicity. Bullying, racism, and misogyny were constant. Junior officers went unsupervised for weeks. One male officer texted his female colleague, “I would happily rape you.” Of the fourteen officers reprimanded by the investigation, one was dismissed. Nine are still serving.

Operation Hotton proved insurmountable for Dick. “We believe these incidents are not isolated or simply the behavior of a few ‘bad apples,’ ” the I.O.P.C. concluded. Earlier this week, Khan said that he was waiting to receive a plan from Dick to reform the Met and win back public confidence, and that her job depended on it. The commissioner of the Metropolitan Police is appointed by the Home Secretary (currently a member of the Conservative Party), but the force is overseen by the mayor. Khan styles himself as a progressive, and he has previously worked closely with Dick, supporting her in difficult moments. Just last month, the Met made a last-minute and ill-advised intervention in a government inquiry into parties held in Downing Street during Britain’s coronavirus lockdowns. Dick has previously been criticized for increasing the use of “stop and search” powers, which disproportionately target young Black and ethnic-minority men in London, and for the Met’s handling of a series of murders of gay men, in 2014. But, until now, Dick’s experience and symbolic importance protected her. She started out as a bobby—a beat cop—in 1983. Dick is gay, and her partner was also a police officer. In 2005, Dick was in charge of the counterterrorism team that killed Jean Charles de Menezes, a Brazilian man, on the Tube, after mistaking him for a suicide bomber. Dick always handled that momentous error with dignity and grace. The idea of a female leader of Britain’s largest police force gestured at the kind of society—and policing—that a city like London might aspire to. But the symbol has been undone by the reality.