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Cressida Dick: the Metropolitan police is not perfect, but it has changed a lot'
Britain's top female officer has announced her departure from the force, but is optimistic a woman will get the Yard's top job
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/...as-changed
The Oxbridge mafia really does look after its own!
Cressida Dick: the Metropolitan police is not perfect, but it has changed a lot'
Britain's top female officer has announced her departure from the force, but is optimistic a woman will get the Yard's top job
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/...as-changed
Quote:Britain's most senior woman police officer would like to see the appointment of a female commissioner to the Metropolitan force to send a strong signal to the wider world that the police service is a modern, progressive and representative organisation.
Cressida Dick, assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan police, who announced her departure from the force on Monday after 31 years as an officer, told the Guardian that a woman at the helm of Britain's biggest police force was something she would very much like to see in the near future.
"I don't think it is at all unlikely that a woman will be appointed, if not the next commissioner, then the one after that," she said. "I would like to see that very much. It would send a really strong message to other women that they can aspire to the highest roles and to the outside world that the police service is very modern and representative."
Dick spoke to the Guardian shortly before announcing she was to leave the Metropolitan police for a role in the Foreign Office. Her departure comes after a career in which she has risen from a bobby on the beat through most of the main specialist roles in policing to become the most senior counter-terrorism officer in the country a position she held for three years.
Most recently she was moved from her CT role one which she was said to love by the commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe to be made assistant commissioner specialist crime and operations.
As probably the most high profile female police officer in the country, Dick has seen huge changes to the service in her 31 years in the force, particularly in the opportunities for women officers.
"It's not perfect, but it has changed really dramatically," she said.
"Looking back to when I joined, some areas of policing were barred for women. So you couldn't do full public order training, you couldn't carry a firearm as a woman in the Met until 1988, there were no women dog handlers, and there was probably one woman in CID."
Women make up 27.9% of police officer strength in England and Wales compared with 16% in 2001. There are nine women chief constables, and female officers serve in every specialism.
But Dick believes there is still more work to be done. She believes the number of women in senior and chief officer ranks has to increase female officers in senior roles are under-represented at 18%, and in chief officer roles the 39 women in post amount to 19.1% of all chief officers.
The service also needs to increase female representation in specialist fields like such as firearms and public order and work to retain women officers once they have families.
"I would like to see even more women coming in to all roles, particularly into the specialisms like firearms and public order, I would like to see women being really confident and comfortable in those roles."
Next year marks the 100th anniversary of the first women joining the police service, an anniversary which will be celebrated with a series of events. As president of the British Association of Women in Policing, Dick has been at the helm of the 100th anniversary preparations.
"I have been doing a lot of looking back as we approach 100 years of women in policing. All that time there have been women who have really thrived, but equally there were in history quite a few pioneers, some of whom had to struggle, who stepped out of their comfort zone, who took on the system and said, This isn't right'.
"We owe so much to those women who went before us for where we are today."
Dick was born and brought up in Oxford, and went on to join the university, graduating from Balliol College. After a spell working for an accountancy firm, she joined the police in 1983 as a beat constable in the west end of London.
For many female officers today Dick was a pioneer and mentor, someone who herself broke down barriers and provided a role model.
She took her role supporting women in policing very seriously. She recently brought together the country's 140 women firearms officers as a way of allowing them to share their experiences, and inspire and support each other in a field in which women are heavily under-represented and can feel isolated.
"Women are flocking into CID, into homicide, which were once areas that were seen as very male like the Life on Mars and Sweeney stereotype.
"But the same is not true for firearms, and we are trying to do everything we can to reduce the barriers that maybe in people's minds are barriers that are actually there, to make it an attractive environment for people to work in."
The reasons women were not becoming firearms officers in greater numbers were complex, she said.
"Some people think that it's really not going to be for them. Being a firearms officer is incredibly highly scrutinised now, and I think it is one of the things that puts off quite a lot of people. And if you think that you are more visible in that role as a woman, you might feel slightly less inclined to go into it than a man."
Most notoriously in her long career, Dick was the gold commander on the day Jean Charles de Menezes was killed by firearms officers in July 2005. A jury at the trial in 2007 of the Metropolitan police for breaching health and safety rules took the unusual step when finding the Met guilty of a catastrophic series of errors in the operation, of declaring there was "no personal culpability for Commander Cressida Dick".
Dick's resilience to the pressure heaped on her in the aftermath of the fatal shooting was one reason she was promoted, and the tragedy caused little pause to her rise through the ranks.
One of Dick's last actions before announcing her departure from policing was to launch the British Association of Women in policing's third agenda for change.
It focuses on increasing and improving flexible working patterns and working to retain female officers who have had children.
"Policing has moved on from being very male dominated to the point where today in the UK we have better representation at senior levels and in specialist units than anywhere in the world," she said. "So we can beat ourselves up too much there is further to go, but we have come a very long way."
The Oxbridge mafia really does look after its own!
"There are three sorts of conspiracy: by the people who complain, by the people who write, by the people who take action. There is nothing to fear from the first group, the two others are more dangerous; but the police have to be part of all three,"
Joseph Fouche
Joseph Fouche
