WITH its dispersal of the vigil at Clapham Common Bandstand on Saturday, where thousands of people were peacefully paying their last respects to the murdered Sarah Everard, the capitalist state, and its Metropolitan Police force has shown its contempt for the working people of the UK.
The Met Police Commissioner Cressida Dick has declared that: ‘I am the state’ and to hell with the people.
She was not held back by the knowledge that a police officer has been charged with the murder of Sarah and had in fact been treated quite differently by the London Met police leadership, to the point where he was able to murder Sarah.
A few days before the murder the accused police officer with just two years service, who was currently acting as a guard for diplomatic premises, was reported for twice exposing himself publicly.
In a normal police force he would have been charged and held in custody. He was not. He kept his freedom and a few days later, according to the police, he abducted and murdered Sarah Everard.
After this, Dick should have been removed at once by the Home Office, but she was allowed to continue, to assault the vigil on Saturday night.
Cressida Dick has a record. As Assistant Police Commissioner she led the operation that pumped seven bullets into an entirely innocent man, Jean Charles de Menezes on July 22, 2005.
For killing an innocent man the London police force got off extraordinarily lightly. It was fined £175,000. Dick should have been sacked then, but survived to become the London Police Commissioner.
The force itself was defined by this terrorist attack that it had launched on an innocent man.
However, this was not its first major crime. On February 24th 1999 the MacPherson Report was published in the wake of the failure of the Met to get to the bottom of who exactly murdered Stephen Lawrence in a racist knife attack.
MacPherson found that the Metropolitan police was ‘institutionally racist’. The 350-page document stated that the investigation into the killing was ‘marred by a combination of professional incompetence and institutional racism’.
The Metropolitan Police should have been disbanded then, but it wasn’t. Cressida Dick now London Police Commissioner simply soldiered on.
Cressida Dick, Britain’s most senior police officer, believes the MacPherson Report was ‘the most important thing that’s happened in my service’.
It was found that: ‘Currently 14% of Met officers were from BAME (black, Asian and minority ethnic) backgrounds. However, 40% of London’s population comes from BAME backgrounds.’
This means, if the Met continues to recruit at this rate, it will take 100 years to build a workforce that truly reflects the community it serves.
Despite this, Dick says she does not believe the force is still institutionally racist. ‘I simply don’t see it as a helpful or accurate description. This is an utterly different Metropolitan Police,’ she claimed.
At the same time as it practised racism, the Metropolitan Police adopted a policy of intervening in legitimate protest movements. Police officers were given new identities, stolen from children who had died, and were sent into protest movements, where they were encouraged to act as spies and provocateurs.
To help with the work they were encouraged to marry or have relationships with women members of the groups, even have children with them, before they vanished into the blue leaving the women concerned, in a desperate crisis.
Peoples lives were completely destroyed by this tactic. But the police spies carried on with their police careers and were awarded for their work.
Workers in the trade unions must now demand that not only is Dick sacked but that the Metropolitan Police Force is dismantled.
In a period of serious economic crisis and catastrophe the working class must not just put an end to the police state but to capitalism itself.
This requires building up the revolutionary leadership of the WRP and the YS to organise the working class and the youth to carry out the British socialist revolution to bring in a nationalised and planned economy.
