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Daily Mirror
Daily Mirror
National
Kelly-Ann Mills

Brother of Stephen Lawrence says Cressida Dick's resignation was 'needed'

The brother of Stephen Lawrence, who was killed in a racially motivated attack in 1993, has said the Metropolitan Police commissioner's resignation was "needed".

He hoped that Dame Cressida Dick quitting the top job yesterday has set the police "on a pathway now of seeing real change".

Speaking to BBC Breakfast, Stuart Lawrence said: "I have met her a good couple of times and those meetings always have been productive, she has always come across to me personally as someone who wants to implement change and wants to see things done differently, but she just hasn't been able to really put that down to the rest of the forces and the people who are responsible for the different teams throughout the Metropolitan Police force.

"Its a big service, there's lots of different members and lots of different moving parts and it's a big job and we really need someone that's going to be put in post now that's going really to be able to stamp a real clean step of a new direction to go in."

Stephen's mother Doreen Lawrence with her son and his brother, Stuart (Getty Images)

His sentiments were echoed by Ricky Waumsley, whose partner Daniel Whitworth was murdered by serial killer Stephen Port.

He said he "didn't have much faith" in Dame Cressida Dick when he met her just before Christmas and welcomed her resignation as she "definitely needed to go".

Outlining his meeting with the former Met chief after an inquest into the deaths of Port's victims concluded in December, Mr Waumsley told the Today programme on BBC Radio 4: "It went OK. She came across [as] friendly and she said she was going to look into improving the Met Police, but I didn't really have much faith in her."

(PA)

Explaining why, he said it was due to a combination of the scale of what had happened and because of that meeting.

"There's so much homophobic, sexist and racist stuff going on within the Met Police right now. I don't think she is capable of sorting out these issues," he said.

Mr Waumsley had called for her to quit in December after an inquest jury found police failures had likely contributed to the deaths of Mr Whitworth and those of two more of Port's victims.

Ricky Waumsley spoke out about Cressida Dick (PA)
Daniel Whitworth, Ricky's boyfriend (MDM)

Port, known as the Grindr Killer, drugged, raped and killed four men between June 2014 and September 2015 in Barking, east London, and sexually assaulted more than a dozen others.

The inquests into the four deaths revealed that officers failed to carry out basic evidence gathering such as examining Port's laptop, testing DNA on bedsheets on which two of the bodies were found, and checking the veracity of a fake suicide note found with Mr Whitworth's body.

Seventeen officers were investigated by the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC), and nine were found to have performance failings.

None of the nine were disciplined or lost their jobs, and five had been promoted.

Last year, Assistant Commissioner Helen Ball issued an apology on behalf of the Met but rejected the claim that homophobia played a part in its investigation into Port.

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