Words matter. These are the best Cressida Dick Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
London has a 50 per cent female population so we want to aim long term to have 50 per cent female officers. It’s good for police to reflect the public that we serve.
I want to bear down on violent crime, in all its aspects from terrorism to sexual offences but definitely knife and gun crime, particularly as it affects young people.
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.
Scent is very important to me but it is the case that my colleagues think it is hilarious that I simply cannot smell, ever, the smell of cannabis.
I don’t think the public want to see loads and loads of firearms officers everywhere, what they do want to know is that we are able to respond well and prevent things and we will protect them properly.
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.
It is not in my mind’s eye that all officers will be carrying a Taser but we should have people able to deploy it.
Some male colleagues, just as in accountancy, had doubts about whether women could perform some roles. There was a sense that women needed more protection or if men were out on the street they would be distracted by having to look after a female colleague.
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.
One of the things we do not want is to become a complete fortress. This is not going to happen with military on every street corner or armed police officers everywhere. We do not want that so we have to be intelligent in our response and to be proportionate in our response.
You have to intervene really, really strongly with people who are habitual knife-carriers, that includes stop and search definitely, you have to keep them locked up.
One of the things that I feel very blessed about is that I was given a fair amount of confidence as a young person and I constantly meet young people, even today, maybe even more today, when it is clearly not a given that they will have a reasonable amount of confidence.
Not having children isn’t something I regret. I acknowledge that some things have been easier for me than they would have been for others.
There is something about putting the uniform on. You’ve got a role to play, to be calm, to lead other people, to go forward when everyone else is running away. It gives you a sense of, not of courage but, ‘It’s my job.’
There will be occasions when someone has suffered a crime where it is either obvious that they are not looking for an investigation or that there are no investigative opportunities and you just have to be up front about that.
I want to see traditional policing with a modern flavour. I am completely committed to local, visible policing, but we have to modernise. There are such opportunities for people to interact with police through the digital sphere that we have not achieved yet.
Women take much the biggest proportion of work in terms of home and childcare. Societally we need a culture change. It’s still the case that expectations are different for men and women.
But a sense of – in old-fashioned speak – ‘I am OK, I do deserve to be here, I can do what I want to do, I can be myself, I can express myself’ is really important as you go into the working world.
