17.02.2022
Downfall of a company woman
Cressida Dick’s departure will not lead to meaningful reform. Paul Demarty insists that the police force needs to be replaced by a well-drilled popular militia
So farewell then, Cressida Dick, who has been strong-armed into resigning by London mayor Sadiq Khan.
Dick had been commissioner of the Metropolitan Police for five years, and in that time the force had weathered its fair share of scandals (as, to be honest, it had in any given five-year period in its history, most likely). Some tepid liberal enthusiasm was attached to her being the first woman to have that role, but the reality of her reign was pretty dismal. Of the available candidates, Dick was the most conservative, the most jealously protective of the Met’s institutional turf - a company woman through and through.
For those of us on the left, Dick was notorious long before she made it to the top job. In 2005, a couple of weeks after the July 7 bombings, there was a botched attempt at a follow-up attack. The cops naturally set about rounding up the would-be perpetrators with their usual subtlety and skill, and in the course of so doing tailed a man into Stockwell tube station and shot him seven times in the head and once in the shoulder. The man, of course, was no terrorist, but a Brazilian electrician by the name of Jean Charles de Menezes, up to nothing more sinister than going to work. In the months afterwards, almost every detail of the police story of this case was shown to be a deliberate lie, although no officer involved was ever prosecuted, unsurprisingly. The following year, Dick - who had ordered this reprehensible act with little more evidence to go on than the fact that, according to the oafish cops involved, de Menezes had “Mongolian eyes” - was promoted to deputy assistant commissioner, and the in-house whitewash became her calling card.
Her only response to rises in reported violent crimes in the capital was more intrusive policing and stepping up controversial stop-and-search practices, which proved ineffective at anything other than reducing the trust Londoners had in the police (so perhaps we should be thankful …). She has, of course, endlessly whined about decreasing police numbers, allowed police drivers to ram motorcyclists in response to the panic over ‘scooter crime’, and insisted that the failure to allow the use of dystopian facial-recognition technology has “hamstrung” the Met - which really makes you wonder why society bothered with them in the centuries before such technology existed.
Almost as soon as she took the job, Dick courted scandal. From her predecessor, she inherited an almighty mess in the form of Operation Midland, wherein various éminences grises of the political establishment, including Edward Heath and Leon Brittan, were investigated for historic sexual abuse on the basis of allegations by a fraudulent and possibly pathological liar, Carl Beech. The fallout was crazy, as you would probably expect; it is easy enough to get the police on the rack for their malpractice, provided you are member of the Lords and not the family of a ‘Muslim-looking’ Brazilian electrician. An inquiry into the fiasco made a large number of recommendations for the Met to implement; however, Dick dragged her feet so petulantly that, by 2020, she was already facing calls to resign, but survived.
The following year, Sarah Everard, a young woman walking home in south London, was abducted, raped and murdered by the police officer, Wayne Couzens. The Met came under fire for aggressively policing vigils held as a result, and then for the great institutional shrug it made when asked if there would be any reforms to prevent its more psychopathic employees from following Couzens’ example. The subsequent leak of group chat messages between officers at Charing Cross nick, full of tasteless rapey banter (predating the murder of Everard, but throwing, shall we say, an interesting psychological light on it), also met endless obstructionism from Dick’s office, and it is this affair which caused Khan’s patience to finally snap.
Thin blue line
By social background - the privately-educated daughter of Oxford dons, who went on to Oxford herself - Dick is not, let us say, typical of the average beat cop. But she nevertheless joined up as a constable, like all other commissioners in the Met’s history, and found her upper-middle-class roots no obstacle to adopting the ‘thin blue line’ psychology that pits the police ‘gang’ against a purported horde of criminal degenerates (the only thing separating society from anarchy). She denounced the BBC drama Line of duty for its portrayal of rampant police corruption (showrunner Jed Mercurio shot back that the whole thing was inspired by the de Menezes case itself). She blamed social media for glamorizing gang culture. The list goes endlessly on.
Yet, of course, this petulant and authoritarian psychology is hardly limited to her, and it is to be expected - since this is a central government appointment - that Priti Patel will inflict someone of the same stripe on Londoners and on Sadiq Khan (hardly a ‘dovish’ character when it comes to law and order, but increasingly a whipping boy for a Tory government resentful of liberal Londonista types). The list of such potential candidates is likely to be very long. Dick was a bad apple - but not an apple fallen far from the tree.
The police force, despite the organisational principle of discrete ‘services’ in different localities, is essentially a national organisation. The Met is of course the oldest force, founded in 1829 to deal adequately with the political and social consequences of the industrial revolution. The population of London had soared, with a large part of the growth consisting of ground-down workers and pauperised lumpen elements living in squalor - ideal conditions for soaring crime, of course.
More important was the birth of working class politics, however - Chartism and the nascent labour movement gave rise to mass popular protests that posed very particular problems. The old systems of amateur constables, duties usually gifted between notables as a sort of political sinecure, was completely inadequate to the task. Regular army units, recruited from the same layers that needed to feel the rough hand of the law, were not reliably forceful. The yeomanry, recruited from among the exploiting classes, could not reliably hold back from inflammatory outrages like the Peterloo massacre. A professional police force was a timely ‘solution’ - a just-violent-enough response to the seditious activities of the working class. It was recognised as such by the Chartists and other radicals, and duly denounced. The model was rapidly expanded beyond London, but as late as the first Labour election platform, abolishing the police - to be replaced with a militia system that actually worked - was an utterly uncontroversial demand among British radicals and socialists.
Easy come …
If an institution can make it to its 100th birthday, however, it will start to look like it has always been there, and life without it will become unimaginable, at least to the ordinary philistine. Among such philistines are to be counted political opportunists, who always have a Baldrickian ‘cunning plan’ to dodge the issue; and the labour bureaucrats, who wonder what the hair-raising demand for abolition of the police has to do with their members’ jobs and conditions.
So it has proven - at least up until the summer of 2020, when police abolition became modish in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests in the US. For, as long as rejecting this pillar of capitalist power meant being a voice crying in the wilderness, scarcely a far leftist could be found to defend it except in ‘Sunday school’ pieties. Now our opportunist comrades scramble to catch up to the radical liberals, who have overtaken them in one of their characteristic enthusiasms. It is an improvement of a sort; but easy come, easy go. The question of the police is a serious strategic issue, and it should not be treated as an empty recruiter’s gimmick, to be dropped the minute it falls out of the goldfish memory of atomised (and now largely online) activists.
In a certain sense, Everard’s murder rather demonstrates the issue. For the activists who took up the crime - the sort of people roughed up by Cressida Dick’s thugs - the political salience of it, in the end, is that women do not feel safe in the streets and that ‘something should be done’ about ‘violence against women’. Addressed to the state, this cannot in the end amount to anything other than demanding higher conviction rates, stiffer sentences and … more police powers. Yet Everard was murdered by a cop, and one specifically abusing his authority to abduct her.
This contradiction is known to the literature - indeed, US activists have invented the term “carceral feminism” for this sort of appeal to the strong arm of the state to more aggressively prosecute those accused of sexual assault and rape, and so forth. It is a problem not just for Marxists, but for intersectionalite liberals, who are ever keen to remind us of the role of ‘white women’s tears’ (ie, phony accusations of rape against black men) in the lynchings of the old south, and (implicitly) making some modest contribution to the staggering rates of incarceration of black men in America today.
There is a logical puzzle here, one that can hardly be resolved either by ignoring the well-founded anxieties surfaced by this repellent crime or by supposing that the professional police force is an adequate instrument, in the end, for making London (or anywhere else) a safer place for women to walk home at night. Rape conviction rates are a recurrent source of scandal, but it is worth noting that only a minority of reported crime receives even the most cursory investigation. The only thing the police force is reliably good at - as we approach the 200th anniversary of the founding of the Met - remains inflicting capitalist revenge against political activism. It is fitted not to its supposed role in society, but to the actual contradiction that gave it birth. I am as happy as the next leftie to see Dick finally come to grief, when she should really have been put away as an accessory to murder 16 years ago. But she is, after all, a company woman. Her vices are a peculiarly strong distillation of those of the armed body to whom she has dedicated her life.
By way of contrast, Socialist Worker’s Simon Basketter paints a suitably unflattering portrait of Dick and concludes, correctly if banally, that a new face at the top will not fix the Met, because “the real problem lies with the fact that an institutionally racist, sexist, homophobic and corrupt force remains. It’s not just Dick that should go, but all cops.”1 This is both unscientific (it is not a list of ‘institutional’ prejudices that makes this necessary, but the fact that the police are an arm of the bourgeois state) and ultimately a posture. Yes, all cops “should go” - but how? Should they be pressured into resigning until the Met disappears by natural wastage? Or should we have something to say about what positively replaces it - and what should that be?
In this light, ‘Abolish the police’ - never mind its more modest cousin, ‘Defund the police’ - is insufficient. It does not provide even the barest elements of a positive proposal for law enforcement to replace the police. In the meantime, the empirical evidence is clear: petty and violent crime is correlated closely with a neighbourhood’s class character. Poor working class neighbourhoods suffer, bourgeois neighbourhoods do not. (In spite of George Floyd, Michael Brown and all the rest, black Americans are actually far chillier towards ‘abolitionist’ rhetoric than whites: polling data suggests that their main complaint is not that the police inflict arbitrary terror on them, but that they do not answer 911 calls from their areas, and so forth.)
Alas, there is only one coherent alternative - and it is the one our forebears knew well: replace the police and army with universal military training and militia service for able-bodied adults. It is not, presently, very popular - which merely makes it all the more necessary to renormalise the idea.
paul.demarty@weeklyworker.co.uk