Cressida Dick’s long-overdue resignation as chief commissioner of the Metropolitan Police finally came last week, after she lost the confidence of London mayor Sadiq Khan.
The final nail in the coffin was a report by the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC), which identified ‘disgraceful behaviour’ by officers predominantly working at Charing Cross police station. The report stemmed from nine ‘linked investigations’ which were orginally launched in 2018, following an allegation that an on-duty officer had had sex with a drunk person at the station. This allegation was never proven. In the end, the investigation uncovered numerous offensive messages exchanged between officers on WhatsApp.
The Metropolitan Police Federation, which represents officers, has now hit back at Khan for pushing Dick out, declaring on Tuesday that it had ‘no faith’ in his leadership.
There is something wholly unedifying about the spat between the Met and Khan. It is ironic that amid a serious spike in youth violence, and at a time when record numbers of burglaries are going unsolved, what actually brought Dick down was the WhatsApp chatter of a small group of officers. The WhatsApp messages have led to accusations that the Met Police are institutionally racist and sexist, though it ought to be clear that, however bad things may be now, they have come a long way from the racism and sexism that dogged them in the past.
Clearly, the Met Police have many other, far more serious problems on their hands than offensive WhatsApp messages. In the past year alone, the Met Police have been rocked by multiple high-profile scandals. In December 2021 an inquest found that serial killer Stephen Port was allowed to carry on killing due to multiple police failings. In the same month, two officers who took photographs of the bodies of sisters Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry, after they had been murdered, were jailed. In June, an inquiry into the death of private detective Daniel Morgan in the 1980s accused the Met of being ‘institutionally corrupt’, after the force obstructed its investigation. And in January that year, the policing of a vigil for Sarah Everard was widely denounced as disproportionate and heavy-handed.
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