Faced with massive political pressure, Cressida Dick decided to make the personal her best defence on Sunday, while focusing on loyalty to her officers no matter how vehement the criticism.
The first female commissioner since the founding of the Metropolitan police in 1829 stressed her identity as a woman as she tried to convince her critics she should stay in her job and bear down on violence, especially that suffered by other women and girls.
“If it had been lawful, I would have been there,” she said of the vigil for Sarah Everard on Clapham Common, which ended in shocking clashes between officers and mourners.
In a statement and interview on Sunday evening, Dick insisted she was not considering resigning. She added: “What happened to Sarah appalls me. As you know, I’m the first woman commissioner of the Met – perhaps it appalls me, in a way, even more because of that. What has happened makes me more determined, not less, to lead my organisation.”
There was not a word of criticism for the actions of officers that triggered an outcry across the political divide. She said the vigil had been peaceful for several hours before officers feared danger. “Unfortunately, later on, we had a really big crowd that gathered, lots of speeches and quite rightly, as far as I can see, my team felt this is now an unlawful gathering which poses a considerable risk to people’s health according to the regulations.”
She regretted the scenes, but Dick was mindful of the fact no force has to deal with the volume of protests the Met does: “What we do at one event sets precedents for other events.” Faced with an independent review by the policing inspectorate, Dick said she welcomed it. In reality, she has little choice.
Policing, she insisted, was “fiendishly difficult” and she took aim at “armchair” critics, a common way for those in policing to dismiss concerns.
After 24 hours during which the judgment of her force was questioned by the home secretary, the leader of the opposition, the mayor of London, backbench MPs and campaigners, the commissioner seemed to dismiss critics and said the demands her officers faced were not understood: “They have to make these really difficult calls and I don’t think anybody should be sitting back in an armchair and saying well that was done badly or I would’ve done it differently without actually understanding what was going through their minds.”
Throughout her career, Dick has shown an ability to escape calamities that would have sunk others, showing resilience when her career seemed all but over. She is intellectually self-confident, the daughter of academics, with a wealth of operational experience and a career spanning more than 30 years, which impresses the rank-and-file.
Cool under pressure, she can impress politicians of all parties with a demeanour more cabinet permanent secretary than stereotypical police leader – but she can infuriate them too.
Dick worked briefly at an accountancy firm before joining the Met in 1983 as a constable in central London. In 1995, she moved to the Thames Valley force and returning to the Met in 2001 when it was in crisis having been branded institutionally racist after prejudice and incompetence let the killers of black teenager Stephen Lawrence escape justice. She joined the force’s new diversity directorate, then gained a reputation as a skilled leader in charge of the unit tackling gun crime, particularly within black communities.
By 2005, she was a commander and on the morning of 22 July that year, she was the officer in charge when Jean Charles de Menezes, an innocent man, was shot dead after being mistaken for a terrorist. She told an inquest into the death in 2008: “If you ask me whether I think anybody did anything wrong or unreasonable on the operation, I don’t think they did.”
The second time she nearly lost her profession came after Dick got the post she coveted as head of counterterrorism. Her relationship with then Met commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe became strained and she was moved out of the job she loved and started looking to leave the Met.
She tried and failed to be the chief in Northern Ireland – but her saviour was Theresa May along with many in the security establishment, and Dick landed a security-related role at the Foreign Office. Her time in law enforcement seemed to be over.
Her return as Met commissioner in 2017 – as not only the first woman but the first openly gay holder of that post – saw her vow to bear down on violent crime and deal with huge financial pressures, which eased as the government decided rising crime was a potential electoral problem and handed over more money.
The Met under Dick is accused of being distant from communities and in the midst of a race crisis, underlined by the racial disparities over stop and search.
Even before Saturday evening, public confidence had fallen in the force. Embroiled in another career-threatening crisis, Dick’s future now rests in the hands of politicians: the home secretary, Priti Patel, and the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, potentially influenced by how the public mood changes over the days to come.