The current Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Dame Cressida Dick is an officer that has come in for a lot of criticism over recent years. She has been criticised for her adherence to identity and left wing politics most notably her desire to see less white male officers recruited to the Met and her failure to stop her force being politicised which has led to Met officers kneeling to BLM/Marxist demonstrators and allowing the far left Extinction Rebellion group free reign to disrupt London. This blog has also criticised Dame Cressida Dick – who has become known as ‘Dickless Dick’ among her detractors – for her failure to properly acknowledge that certain types of sex crime, namely the sort of Islamic Rape Gangs that have plagued many British towns and cities, may also be operating in London.
There are also many who believe that Dame Cressida should have had the prospect of promotion to the high office that she holds blocked due to her involvement in the wrongful and erroneous shooting of a Brazilian electrician, Jean Charles De Menezes. In that case Dame Cressida was the senior commander during a hunt for potential active Islamic terrorists and was intimately connected to the chain of events that ended up with the shooting of what she believed was a terrorist at Stockwell underground station. However it did not take long for it to be revealed that the police had killed not a terrorist but an innocent man.
There is much suspicion among some members of the public that Cressida Dick was not promoted to the office she holds due to her abilities, but because of what she is, a lesbian and because she is willing to parrot the divisive ‘social justice’ pabulum to both her officers and to the long suffering general public. It may or may not be the case that she got her job because of who she is rather than her talents as a police officer, but it is a near certainty that if you asked the average Joe in London to name a police officer who is overtly politically correct then they’d more than likely name Cressida Dick. It is most certainly very true that since Cressida Dick came into the position as Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police the force has seem less interested in dealing with the sort of crime that bothers ordinary Londoners whilst expending an excessive amount of resources on tracking down and prosecuting those who say unpleasant things about those who possess the Orwellian sounding ‘protected characteristics’, as defined in the 2010 Equalities Act.
I find it rare when perusing the internet or talking to people in real life to come across anyone who has anything good to say about Cressida Dick. They mostly say what a terrible stain her tenure has been on the Met and how she has overseen a collapse in respect for the police as well as a surge in real crime during her term in office. In fact the only person who’s come out and consistently given Cressida Dick their unqualified support has been the Greater London Mayor Sadiq Khan, something that should tell you a lot about both Khan and Dick are both dedicated to politicised policing shithousery.
But something has come along that might finally be the shit that sticks to this seemingly Teflon coated police chief. Over the years she’s wriggled out of any blame for the Stockwell incident, avoided addressing the issue of potential Islamic Rape Gang activity in London, has allowed identity politics to become a factor in policing and presided over a period when there are massive levels of lethal violence occurring on London’s streets. Despite all this Cressida Dick has managed to avoid having any mud stick to her. However the results of a recent independent investigation into police corruption surrounding the murder of a private detective, Daniel Morgan, in 1987, might just be the scandal that sticks to her.
Daniel Morgan was an ex police officer who became a private detective and who worked with some of Britain’s tabloid newspapers such as the News of the World. He was found murdered with an axe that was left embedded in his head in a pub car park in South London. The subsequent police investigation into the murder was inconclusive and the Morgan family have been fighting for well over 30 years to find out who murdered Mr Morgan and to bring the killers to justice if possible.
In 2011 the Met themselves came out and admitted that the killers of Mr Morgan had been shielded by corrupt officers and that the murder case was probably ‘solvable’ if this shielding of the guilty had not happened. There have been five investigations into this murder yet none have resulted in any convictions. According to the Guardian newspaper, in 2013 the government ordered an inquiry into the Morgan case and although this inquiry could not compel witnesses or the gathering of evidence, the Met were supposed to cooperate with the inquiry. It is at this point that the crap starts to stick to Dame Cressida Dick.
As the recent report into the government ordered inquiry into the Daniel Morgan affair in the Guardian states, Cressida Dick, then an Assistant Commissioner, was supposed to assist the inquiry members in gathering the relevant evidence that they required. However, according to the Guardian report, this didn’t happen. Cressida Dick did not give the inquiry members access to the information that was necessary for them to do their job.
The Guardian said:
Dick, then an assistant commissioner, was supposed to make good on the Met promise to fully cooperate with the panel which was given no statutory powers to investigate, and thus reliant on those they were investigating agreeing to hand over evidence.
The panel accused the force of placing concerns about its reputation above properly confronting corruption. It said the Met misled the public and Morgan’s grieving family, exacerbating their pain.
The panel criticised police delays in giving access to a database with relevant documents, called “Holmes”, and Dick is named as one of those responsible. “The panel has never received any reasonable explanation for the refusal over seven years by [then] assistant commissioner Dick and her successors to provide access to the Holmes accounts to the Daniel Morgan independent panel,” they said.
So Cressida Dick was one of those named as responsible for assisting the inquiry but failed to do so. She was also responsible for the failure to deliver, in a reasonably timely manner, documents from a police database. What’s worse is that she failed to cooperate with the enquiry by giving access to the requested documents for seven bloody years.
Knowing how bureaucracies work and how sclerotic they can be when it comes to delivering information, it’s quite possible to understand how a delay of a few months, six months or maybe, at a push, a year, could have occurred in the delivery of requested information. These sort of delays could be the relatively innocent inherent incompetencies of big organisations. However, to not deliver documents requested for seven years, looks a lot less like incompetence and a lot more like malice. It gives the impression, even if it is an erroneous impression, that Cressida Dick and those who succeeded her are hiding something or protecting someone by her actions.
In public life, especially for those in positions that give them the power to impinge on the freedom and liberties of the citizen or who are empowered to use violence against the citizen, such as police officers and those who lead them, there is a need for such people to be on unimpeachable character. They must not only be clean but be seen to be clean and to not even give the hint of a suggestion that they are not. Holding back documents from an inquiry that urgently needs to see and examine them, especially when those documents are connected to allegations of corruption, doesn’t in my opinion give the impression to the public that Cressida Dick is clean. She may well be innocent of any wrongdoing, but the sort of allegations that are being levelled against her regarding the documentation doesn’t make her look particularly clean, especially when you consider that neither Dame Cressida nor her successors have adequately explained to the inquiry why there was such a horrendous delay in the supply of requested documents.
The Guardian is certainly not playing down the significance of the inquiry’s findings. They are calling the description of the Met as ‘Institutionally Corrupt’ as serious as the judgement that the Met was ‘Institutionally Racist’ following the murder of Stephen Lawrence. Personally I believe that the Guardian is aiming too low with their comparisons. The results of this inquiry have the potential to be much bigger than that. It’s quite possible that it could not only be bigger than the Lawrence case but that the case could end up being even bigger than Operation Countryman, the operation in the 1970’s and early 1980’s that uncovered massive amounts of corruption in the Met. The reason I say that the Morgan Affair could end up bigger than Countryman is that the corrupt officers involved then were mostly just taking money from armed robbers to tip the robbers off about possible police investigations. Whilst this was bad in and of itself, it didn’t, as the Morgan Affair does, involve allegations about the covering up of a murder.
It’s quite obvious that corruption is still somewhat endemic in the Met. Countryman didn’t clean up the Met to the extent that it needed cleaning up. Operation Tiberius for example that was run during the early 21st century, found that Met officers were being bribed by members of organised crime gangs, that evidence associated with ongoing cases was found to have been tampered and that the criminals used their membership of the Freemasons to build links with corrupt officers. Things got so bad at this time that an unnamed murder investigator allegedly said: “I feel that at the current time I cannot carry out an ethical murder investigation without the fear of it being compromised”. Yes, corruption in the Metropolitan Police has not gone away and what’s worse is that the Met has now got two types of corruption that it needs to deal with. The Met is now afflicted by both the ‘normal’ type of fiscal corruption that of officers in exchange for information useful to criminals, but also the sort of political corruption and political bias that has seen any last vestige of an image of impartiality in policing swept away, much to the disgust of the public.
The result of the criticisms that have been aimed at the Met and at Dame Cressida in particular, has been for the police to close ranks around her and deny that she has any good reason to step down from the position of Commissioner. This is something that should be expected from a police force, especially one where corruption was described as being ‘endemic’ even back in 2001 during the Operation Tiberius days. Dame Cressida has also been supported by that appalling failure of a mayor Sadiq Khan. This is again to be expected, after all Khan appears to share many of the same Left wing views as we’ve heard being spouted by Dame Cressida. Also to a certain extent the Met Commissioner is a bit of a shield for Khan as he can point to the Commissioner and say that London’s epidemic of street violence is an operational matter for the police and not the result of or linked to Khan’s policies. The Guardian is also claiming that their source in the Home Office has said that the Home Secretary Pritti Patel has ‘full confidence’ in the Commissioner but added that the Home Secretary has ordered Cressida Dick to explain herself.
The Guardian added:
Patel said she had written to Dick demanding the Met’s response to the report, and has requested Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary look at the findings of the report and that a review of the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) would be brought forward.
So far it seems that Dick has powerful political friends who are sticking by her but whether these friends will continue to support her if there is more information about Met corruption under her watch as Commissioner or whilst she was in senior management positions, than that which has come out so far, is another question? Time will tell on this.
It may be that the Home Secretary could consider it politically expedient to encourage Dick to resign especially as it appears that Dick is directly implicated in the failure to disclose evidence to the inquiry. It might even be the case that having Cressida Dick removed might also remove one of the shields that Khan has used to shroud his incompetence from full public criticism, this would no doubt benefit the Tories at the expense of Khan and Labour. The Home Secretary could gain kudos with the public by removing support for Cressida Dick as, let’s face it, Cressida Dick is not exactly massively popular with the public, at least from what I’ve seen. She’s not a popular copper. She’s not a Sir Robert Mark, or a Sir Paul Condon, or a Sir Peter Imbert, officers who had the trust and confidence of most of the public. Instead Cressida Dick is a politically biased police officer who has presided over a police force that is stuffed full of political bias. Any Home Secretary who removed her or had a hand in removing her would find themselves much more popular than if they strongly supported keeping her in place.
To conclude: There has been an awful lot of dung been slung towards Cressida Dick, some of it has not been justified but a lot has been justified. So far none of that crap has stuck to her. The results of the inquiry into the Morgan Affair might just have produced the right sort of crap that will stick to Dick and not be able to be brushed off.
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If you enjoyed this piece then you may also enjoy the commentary on this case given by the commentators over at The Lotus Eaters.
