‘Line of Duty is ludicrous’

Met Commissioner Cressida Dick on the challenges facing the police in London – and the problem with TV crime dramas.

There is good news for the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Service on the morning of our interview, and there is bad news. The highest-ranking police officer in the land – and the first woman and gay person to occupy that role in the institution’s 190-year history – has been granted a further honour to add to her CBE and QPM (Queen’s Police Medal), making her – with its slight end-of-pier panto alliteration – Dame Dick.

“I’m delighted, of course, and honoured and proud,” the 58-year-old says, in her calm, surprisingly gentle voice. “And I think my family and friends and people who have worked with me over the years will be thrilled, so that’s good.

As well as the family members who aren’t here, who would be laughing down from the heavens.”

This is a reference to her late mother Cecilia, an Oxford academic who encouraged her three children to be independent and ambitious but never to take themselves too seriously.

The bad news for Dick – known universally by her colleagues in the Met as her email sign-off “Cress” – is that there have been three more violent deaths in London in 12 hours, including the stabbing of a young mother in her early 20s, bringing the total murder figures in the capital to 104 this year. In other crime news, the Met’s UK head of counter-terrorism, Neil Basu, announced that 22 terror plots have been foiled since the Westminster Bridge attack in March 2017. Thus one day neatly flags up the immense policing job Cressida Dick has to oversee.

We’re sitting in a pod with lime-green sofa seats at New Scotland Yard – the Commissioner opposite me across the table, her amiably relaxed press relations officer cozily cinched in beside me. We’re here to talk about the third series of the BBC1 documentary The Met: Policing London, which Dick says she and the force have no editorial control over: “The BBC team film us as they find us.”

It’s a fascinating, hard-hitting and, at times, upsetting documentary. In the opening episode, a young woman has been raped and – her face blurred for protection – is sobbing from the trauma of the attack. In the second programme, which focuses on violent murders among young black gangs in the Tottenham/Wood Green area of north London, we start with the brother of a dying youth, who has been stabbed 14 times, talking on the phone to the emergency service as his sibling groans and dies. The crew interviews the grieving mothers of boys in rival gangs who have been murdered in tit-for-tat acts of revenge. We see the local community rise up in protest, marching in the afflicted streets.

Although Dick’s top operational priority is to reduce violence, particularly as it affects young people, “equally our priority is to improve further confidence in the police, and I do believe that the more people know, the better it is. So we’ve nothing to hide. These are good documentary-makers, and we get lots of interest from people as a consequence of it. People wanting to volunteer with us and get involved.”

Another unexpected source of recruitment is television cop-show drama; not that Dick is a fan. Has she watched Line of Duty? “I found myself sitting next to the lead actor [Vicky McClure] at an event and I thought she was quite interesting and so I thought, ‘I’d better watch a bit of this.’ But I was absolutely outraged by the level of casual and extreme corruption that was being portrayed as the way the police is in 2018-2019. It’s so far from that. The standards and the professionalism are so high.” Then, as if pulling herself up, “But I could see that it was good drama.”

The Bodyguard was another matter. “It drove everybody round here absolutely up the wall!” she says. “I actually did have to switch it off after about 20 minutes – the moment when the Home Secretary made a pass at the Protection Officer was just beyond me, I’m afraid.

“But both series actually make us look a bit cool and interesting – a net positive, probably. They bring in interest and applications. Even though it’s all completely ludicrous.”

We talk about the embedded culture of areas in London where generations of families have been involved in crime, making it tough for the young to walk away from the family business. Her view of gang leaders is that they are “very entrepreneurial, they’ve got very good leadership skills, they’re very bright and people respond to them. And that’s the scary thing. That’s why they’re so effective at grooming youngsters – that’s the only word for it – getting little tiny ones involved in drug dealing.” It’s like The Wire! “Well, I wouldn’t say London’s like The Wire,” she counters swiftly, with one of her many laughs. “London’s homicide rate is nothing like any of the large American cities.”

Although she isn’t complacent about the violent deaths – “I’ve had 19 teenagers killed in London this year [there have been two more since]. I think it’s appalling. I want it to stop” – Dick says that until recently, according to both recorded crime figures and the crime survey, crime was going down and “the vast majority of people will go about their whole lives in London without being touched by it.”

But the criminal justice system isn’t working. Sixty-four per cent of prisoners on short sentences of less than 12 months re-offend within a year of being released. Policing cannot be looked at in isolation from prison and probation. “No, of course not,” she says, “but London gets all the focus. If you look at many cities in this country, they’ve actually got a higher murder rate per head of population than London has. There are challenges across society. It’s about education, it’s about health and children’s services. It’s about effectively working with people to divert them from getting in prison.”

So what can be done to staunch the tide of young black men killing one another? “Since I became Commissioner [she’s half-way through her five year contract], we – the big We – have dealt with it quite head-on. Many people within our Caribbean and African-origin communities will speak up about this as a shocking phenomenon affecting those communities. The really sad thing is that when you look at the geographic areas, an awful lot have been areas of the highest concentration for serious drugs crime for almost as long as I have been a police officer.”

Dick reckons that it will take a long time, maybe ten years, to turn things around. “We have got people from our black community, who are best placed, talking about this now, but it’s an outrage,” she says, her voice dropping.

The Commissioner comes across as a serious person but laughs readily and wears her obvious intelligence lightly. On Desert Island Discs in February among the serious music choices, she picked a very silly one: Colin Firth and Rupert Everett singing Love Is in the Air from the film of St Trinian’s. She also said she couldn’t believe that she hadn’t found room for Abba. So what is her favourite Abba song? “The saddest one of all, The Winner Takes It All. But I also particularly like the French and Saunders take-off.”

Life away from the office is important to her, although she sometimes has to work at the weekends. “I pride myself on trying not to be somebody who’s a workaholic. I don’t want people not to aspire to the most senior level because they think you’ve got to be working all the time. So I’m very good at relaxing, I take lots of time off and turn off the phone – but they know how to get me if they need me.”

She says that she’s learnt to be very, very calm (indeed, it’s strangely soothing being in her company) because of her experience as a hostage negotiator. She can sleep and switch off easily. Her pleasures include “fairly severe walking and open-water swimming”, bird watching, and gardening: “I like a good dahlia – in fact, I cut one for my bathroom just yesterday.” She lives in central London and does her gardening on her balcony.

Sport is important and she watches tennis, rugby, athletics and cricket. On holiday she tends to re-read old favourites – Sebastian Faulks and Armistead Maupin.

Her partner, Helen, has retired from the police force, “but she’s keeping busy, that’s for sure”. I wonder if they have a rule about not talking about work at home: “Actually, we did talk shop a bit,” she admits. “When we were both policing we had some pretty strong Chinese walls about what we did talk about. So when I was working in counterterrorism, I never, ever would have dreamt of talking about something that was sensitive or secret. But the idea that in order to stay sane you never talk about the job… no. We found that on occasion it was quite handy to be able to say, ‘It’s been a tough old day’.” Do you think you will marry? “God! Ha! I don’t know. Watch this space.”

She is famous for not being able to detect the smell of cannabis. Did she smoke it while studying at Oxford? “No.” Were you offered it? “No, not that I can remember at all.” Really? “I know, I know – I was blissfully unaware of it. One knew of people who were said to be keen but I just never came across it at all.” Unusual. “I agree.”

Would you say you were square? “That’s a funny old word. Yes and no. I was quite serious as a child and I always spent a lot of time around people who were older than me. And even atcollege, I had a lot of friends who were older. But then I also do really like a good laugh and I laugh a lot of the time. I really enjoy myself – at work and in my home life and I like laughing as I go. And, secondly, I think I’m actually a little bit rebellious – at least to the extent that I’m very, very much my own person.”

How would she say she’s has made the job her own? She pauses and starts: “I’m a very good age but I’m quite modern. I’m unstuffy. Quite practical. I want policing to be seen as something they [the officers] are proud of and love, and for them to know that most of the public cares about them and that they are good people doing their best in difficult circumstances, and that I’ve got their back.”

Radio Times