METROPOLITAN Police Commissioner Dame Cressida Dick has quit! Millions will be cheering the news, and demanding that the whole Met Police force be disbanded to slash the crime rate.
Sisters Uncut said yesterday: ‘Cressida Dick is resigning but she is leaving behind an institution that is rotten to the core.’ Campaign group Reclaim The Streets tweeted: ‘Good Riddance.’ With one of its representatives adding that ‘this is just the start.’
Tory Home Secretary Priti Patel came out yesterday vowing to appoint a successor to Dame Cressida Dick that ‘will deliver results’ for London. She said that Labour Mayor Sadiq Khan’s move to put Dick on notice was ‘unprofessional and rude’. However, apparently Khan still wanted Dick to change her ways and was not for kicking her out, so her resignation overnight Thursday came as a shock even to him.
Now they are looking for a replacement to fashion the Met into the type of instrument that the ruling class can use to brutally put down the massive protests of millions of workers and their families who will driven out onto the streets this year by the savagely rising cost of living crisis, as well as pay, pensions, jobs and housing cuts.
The Tories are considering offering Simon Byrne the job. He is the Chief Constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) the force that specialises in holding down the majority of the people by force.
Despite quitting Dick is expected to leave with a six-figure pay off because her contract runs until 2024 – plus her gold-plated pension pot believed to be worth at least £9 million – or an annual taxpayer-funded income of £181,500 a year.
Cressida Dick’s record reads as a litany of scandals. Dick cut her teeth in 2005, when she was the officer in charge of the operation in which a young Brazilian man, Jean Charles de Menezes was ‘mistaken as a suicide bomber’ and shot seven times in the head and once in the shoulder by armed police while on the London Underground. The family of Jean Charles de Menezes said yesterday that Dick should have ‘resigned 16 years ago’.
In March 2021 Sarah Everard was murdered by serving police officer Wayne Couzens, he raped her and burned her body. At the peaceful vigil at Clapham Common, Dick ordered her officers to storm the bandstand where women were pictured being bundled to the floor and arrested.
The officer guarding Sarah Everard’s body sent colleagues a memo that featured images of a woman being abducted by a uniformed police officer.
In June of the same year, when two sisters Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman were found murdered in a park their officers took pictures of the dead girls and shared them on social media calling the victims ‘dead birds’.
Also in June 2021, a long-awaited report into the axe murder of a private detective Daniel Morgan accused the force of ‘institutional corruption’ this follows the Macpherson Report which examined the murder of Stephen Lawrence and concluded that the force was ‘institutionally racist’.
Alastair Morgan, who has spent decades campaigning for justice after the murder of his brother Daniel said of the Met yesterday: ‘This is an organisation that for years, decades, has been out of control.’
Under Dick’s watch a recent Freedom of Information Request revealed that within the past three years, the Met also took on new recruits with records for actual bodily harm (ABH), multiple possession of the class A drug cocaine, drunk and disorderly, and assault. Most the recruits, including the sex offender, are still serving with the force.
There have been 1,805 deaths in police custody since 1990, with the only police officer ever convicted of murder being Sarah Everard’s killer, Wayne Couzens.
People have been found face down on the floor of a police cell, or in the back of a police van, shot dead by police, dead from a heart attack after being Tasered, or in a road accident while being chased by the police.
The police are instruments of the capitalist state.
The entire institution serves the interests of capitalism. It is for the protection of private property, profits and big business. It always has and always will be. This is why it is not a question of reform but of disbanding the entire national force, starting with the Met.
The trade union movement must strike over this issue. All trade unionists will remember the out-and-out police violence against the miners and printers during the miners’ and printers’ strikes in the 1980’s.
In fact, what is needed is for the trade unions to call an all out general strike to bring down this government, bring down the capitalist system, and disband the police and destroy the capitalist state to go forward to a workers’ government and socialism.
