Content Note: This article mentions racism, rape, child abuse, and murder

Dame Cressida Dick, Commissioner of Police for the Metropolis, has announced she will stand down. Seemingly she has finally lost the confidence of Sadiq Khan. Not a moment too soon – she should never have been anywhere near the helm of the country’s largest force. However, we mustn’t celebrate her demise too much. Rather than being an aberration for the Met, her tenure is in fact emblematic of the sort of people we trust to run our most complex public services.

In a way, one must admire Cressida’s ability to ‘fail upwards’. Appointed gold commander in the aftermath of the July 2005 bombings, Dick was the officer in charge when Jean Charles de Menezes was murdered on a tube train at Stockwell Station. She oversaw the officers who misidentified de Menezes, ultimately leading to his shooting. In the aftermath, the Met tried their best to cover up (and lie about) the shooting. Instead of being fired, Dame Cressida was promoted just one year later. Soon she was working in what Martin Evans described as a “rather shadowy security role” at the Foreign Office. From here she moved back to the Met, appointed Commissioner in 2017 by the then Conservative Home Secretary, Amber Rudd.

“Her tenure is, in fact, emblematic of the sort of people we trust to run our most complex public services.”

Once in post, Dick quickly set about attacking the freedoms of people across the capital. The outgoing Commissioner has been a staunch defender of stop-and-search, a policy that stops Black, Asian and minority ethnic people 2.4 times more frequently than white people. She has also been an enthusiastic proponent of privacy-destroying facial recognition technology that, should she have her way, would see us scanned near-constantly as we move through cities, inaccurately checking our features against a shadowy police database. And it has been Dick who has presided over failure to learn from Operation Midland, the Met’s catastrophically botched investigation into fake claims of child abuse. Worth noting too that a recent report into the case of Daniel Morgan - a private investigator axed to death in a Sydenham pub car park in 1987 - found that the Met to be “institutionally corrupt” and personally censured Dick for obstructing the investigation.

When, in March last year, a serving Met officer abducted Sarah Everard in South London, raped and murdered her, true to form, Dick brought her special brand of petty-authoritarian incompetence to the response. The Met announced that any woman confronted by a police officer that made them feel unsafe should, perhaps, flag down a bus. Gee, thanks Cressida. When Londoners held a vigil marking Everard’s death and protesting against the police, the Met responded by violently suppressing demonstrators - pinning women to the ground for the COVID-crime of meeting outside to protest.

“The Met police are institutionally corrupt, institutionally racist, and institutionally incapable of providing safety and security to Londoners”

There’s an incredible quote from Dick where she lambasts the BBC drama Line of Duty: “I was absolutely outraged by the level of casual and extreme corruption that was being portrayed as the way the police is”. And yet, isn’t this precisely what we see in Dick’s Met - a litany of lies, closing ranks and cover-ups? It’s telling that a show about a professional standards unit, tasked with finding the ‘bad apples’, is what occupied Cressida’s thoughts and got her hackles up. I can’t help but think this speaks to her overwhelming priority as a leader: to protect her own. No wonder she got so far in the Met.

What finally brought Dick down, after years of mendacious incompetence, were the twin pressures of widespread misogyny at the Charing Cross Police Station found by the Independent Office for Police Conduct, and the abject failure to investigate the Downing Street parties. These poisoned cherries on the toxic cake that is London’s policing have, at last, brought an end to Dame Cressida’s sorry career, or at least we have to hope they have...

But we must not celebrate too much. Dick is not a lone bad apple. Her tenure is simply symptomatic of the rot at the heart of our nation’s largest police force. The Metropolitan Police is institutionally corrupt, institutionally racist, and institutionally incapable of providing safety and security to Londoners. Case after case shows that they cannot command the trust of the public and nor should they. Two of Dick’s three predecessors have been forced out before the end of their terms as Commissioners. Crisis after crisis shows us just how bad things are, whilst seemingly every other failing is accompanied by a wide-scale cover-up.

The Metropolitan Police needs to be completely replaced. The entire leadership needs to be sacked and new, stronger oversight brought in. This has worked before. In Northern Ireland, the Royal Ulster Constabulary was replaced by the Police Service of Northern Ireland in a successful transition that was critical to creating a more just and representative Police Force. This is the sort of radical change London needs and deserves. We can take a moment to enjoy the demise of Dame Cressida, but until politicians get serious about delivering actual change, the hard truth is that come dawn, the Met will still be there. And it will still be corrupt.