Cressida Dick’s ledger of failures

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In the end, it is a wonder she survived in the job so long.

Only last year, her force was officially branded ‘institutionally corrupt’. Incredibly, despite such a devastating finding, she did not resign.

Instead ‘Teflon’ Dame Cressida Dick has made a habit of trotting out humiliating apologies, for both recent and historical blunders, including admitting that the Sarah Everard debacle had brought ‘shame’ on the Metropolitan Police.

The daughter of two Oxford academics, Dame Cressida, 61, joined the Metropolitan Police in 1983 after graduating from Oxford University with a degree in agriculture and forest sciences. Apart from a six-year spell at Thames Valley Police, she has spent her entire policing career at Scotland Yard.

Her first arrest, which came in her very first beat patrol in London’s Soho in 1983, was of a man using a screwdriver to jemmy open the coin box in a telephone kiosk.

Later, at Bramshill Police College in 1995, she was the only woman out of ten officers chosen for fast-track promotion training, but she has been determined that her sex would not define her.

The police chief was one of the first female undergraduates at Oxford’s Balliol College in 1979. She always played cricket, football and rowed with ‘the boys’, saying it never bothered her. Later on, Dame Cressida was given time out to study for a qualification in criminology at Cambridge.

At the Metropolitan Police, she was given responsibility for Operation Trident – which investigated gun and gang crimes – counterterrorism, the 2012 London Olympics, and ended up as the country’s principal hostage negotiator.

But since rising from an impressive rookie cop in the 1980s to the very top of British policing at the country’s largest force, Dame Cressida has been embroiled in at least seven career-defining disasters.

The wonder is that the first of them didn’t spell the end.

Tube death blunder

In July 2005, Dame Cressida was in charge of the operation which saw blameless electrician Jean Charles de Menezes shot dead on a Tube train at Stockwell station in south London after he was mistaken for a terrorist who was under surveillance. 

It almost finished her career, and she says she thinks about it ‘very often’.

The armed officers believed him to be a fugitive suicide bomber who had escaped after failed attacks in London two weeks after the carnage of the 7/7 bombings. 

Dame Cressida was the ‘gold commander’ on the botched operation, and immediate lethal force – a shot to the head – was supposedly required because any other action risked setting off the suicide jacket. 

No officer, including Dame Cressida, faced any charges, and no one was reprimanded. 

The Met was found guilty of breaching health and safety laws and putting the public at risk, and was fined £175,000 and ordered to pay £385,000 costs from taxpayer funds. The Met chief was personally exonerated, but the shame of it lingered.

Operation Midland

In 2014, Dame Cressida sanctioned the creation of Operation Midland, a disastrous investigation into spurious VIP child sex abuse allegations that saw completely innocent men pursued by the force. 

Five years later, when the embarrassing operation began seriously unravelling, she refused to allow an inquiry into the conduct of officers involved.

This was despite former High Court judge Sir Richard Henriques revealing how officers had used false evidence to obtain a search warrant for the raids. Dame Cressida said that an inquiry would be ‘completely improper’.

While some of her calamities pre-dated her stint as Commissioner, this one sat squarely within her reign. A report in 2020 found the Metropolitan Police was more interested in covering up mistakes than learning from them. 

The Hampshire home of the Queen’s confidant, Lord Bramall – who was also former head of the Armed Forces – had been invaded by police with search warrants in the early hours on the basis of spurious allegations of abuse by paedophile Carl Beech, a palpable fantasist. 

After the Daily Mail exposed him, Beech was jailed. Before he died, D-Day hero Lord Bramall told his son Nick that ‘he had never been so mortally wounded, even in battle’.

Former Tory MP Harvey Proctor, who received a substantial payout after his life was ruined by the disastrous paedophile inquiry, last night expressed his delight at Dame Cressida’s downfall.

He was among seven high-profile victims of the Met – including Baroness Lawrence, whose son Stephen’s 1993 murder investigation was botched by racist officers – who last year came together in a Mail interview to accuse Dame Cressida of having ‘presided over a culture of incompetence’.

XR protests

In 2019, Dame Cressida’s force was widely condemned for its ‘light-touch’ policing of Extinction Rebellion protests, which blocked several key areas of London.

Under her watch, career eco-activists from XR and its off-shoot Insulate Britain were given free rein to cause mayhem.

Ambulances were stopped from getting through, while businesses and workers were forced to halt their activities.

A low point came when police were filmed asking road-blocking protesters if they needed anything – rather than just arresting them.

Daniel Morgan 

Perhaps the most jaw-dropping condemnation of Dame Cressida came in June of last year when an official report described her force as ‘institutionally corrupt’.

And far from blaming the fiasco on a predecessor, it concluded that she had personally placed ‘hurdles’ in the way of a search for the truth about the death of Daniel Morgan – a private investigator who was brutally murdered in a south London pub car park in 1987.

Dame Cressida was accused of ‘obfuscation’ for thwarting the Morgan inquiry team’s attempts to access sensitive documents, leading to delays that cost the taxpayer millions. The report by Baroness O’Loan found that Scotland Yard was ‘institutionally corrupt’.

The Met has never found Mr Morgan’s murderer, but there were long-standing allegations of police corruption over the killing and the aftermath.

Mr Morgan’s brother Alastair also joined Baroness Lawrence, Harvey Proctor and Lord Bramall in a devastating and unprecedented joint interview with the Daily Mail.

They all signed a letter to the PM demanding Dame Cressida’s resignation. Instead she clung on.

Sarah Everard 

The brutally horrific murder of Sarah Everard in March last year by serving Met firearms officer Wayne Couzens went from disastrous to worse for Dame Cressida. She faced a clamour to quit after he was exposed as the killer.

It then emerged Couzens had not been vetted properly and Met officers had failed to investigate after he was reported flashing women days before the murder.

But perhaps the worst moment for the Commissioner was her officers’ heavy-handed policing of a vigil for the murdered woman at Clapham Common in South London. 

Photographs of protesting women being pinned down by arresting officers who cited Covid restrictions on gatherings were published around the world, sparking condemnation.

When Couzens was convicted, it was dubbed Scotland Yard’s ‘darkest day’. Dame Cressida stood outside the Old Bailey and humbly admitted the murder had corroded trust in the police and brought ‘shame’ on her force.

Murder photos

In December last year, two Scotland Yard officers who took photos of the bodies of two murder victims were jailed. 

The sisters who died – Nicole Smallman, 27, and 46-year-old Bibaa Henry, were black and there were accusations of racism. 2021 was also the force’s worst ever year for teenage killings, with 30 deaths.

Charing Cross

Earlier this month, details emerged of horrific messages exchanged by officers at Charing Cross police station, by an official watchdog report.

Some 14 officers were investigated as a result, with two found to have a case to answer for gross misconduct.

One was sacked and another resigned before he would have been dismissed. Another two had already left, while in some of the other cases the Independent Office of Police Conduct found ‘no further action should be taken’.

Incredibly, nine officers kept their jobs and two were promoted – but their sickening WhatsApp messages exposed an ongoing culture of racism, sexism and bullying.

It appears this sickening episode was the straw which finally broke the back. For, by the end, it was clear that confidence in the police chief had gone.