Your leader (The Met moves with the times, but not fast enough, 24 February) says that Cressida Dick’s reputation is “stained” by the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes, but notes that she was personally exonerated of blame by the jury. This may be true, but it is beside the point. As commander of the police operation, she bore responsibility for it: even if she was not personally at fault for Menezes’s death, she should have accepted the consequences and resigned. That is what accountability should mean.
What kind of message does it send that, after an innocent member of the public is wrongfully killed by the police, the officer with command responsibility is not fired or disciplined, but promoted to head of the Met? The obvious conclusion is that the police can act with complete impunity. In communities already resentful and suspicious of the Met, trust in the police will only be damaged further by this appointment. And to the Menezes family, it is a gesture of utter contempt.
Alasdair Murray
Richmond upon Thames
• So it’s a massive breakthrough for women when Cressida Dick, a privately schooled, Oxbridge-educated, “fast-tracked” (apparently constable to superintendent within 10 years) daughter of Oxbridge academics, becomes the first female head of the Metropolitan police service – though a bit of letdown for her elite status that she read agriculture and not PPE at Oxford (The degree that runs Britain, 23 February).
I’ll know that the high walls of inequality are tumbling down when a lass from Lincoln’s Ermine estate with a degree from Lincoln University and years of frontline policing experience, including running a police force, gets to run the Met.
Brent Charlesworth
Lincoln
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