Relatives and friends of the serial killer Stephen Port’s victims have welcomed Dame Cressida Dick’s resignation, saying they had no confidence in her leadership after her refusal to accept prejudice played a part in the inept police investigations into the four deaths.
Sarah Sak, the mother of fashion student Anthony Walgate, 23, Port’s first victim, said: “I’m really pleased. Week in, week out the Met is in the news. It’s about time somebody came in and took control.”.
During a recent meeting with Dick, Sak said she told the commissioner that she “truly believed the officers who originally dealt with Anthony’s case were homophobic”.
Sak said: “And she gave me this big long spiel about how diverse the Met is, how many gay officers, etc, etc. She just didn’t believe there was any homophobia. I felt she just paid lip service to me.”
“Somebody has got to get a grip and not be a political puppet,” said Sak, whose book of her experience, A Life Stolen, is published next week. “She was in charge. She was getting paid to be in charge, and it was all crumbling around her feet. She had no option, I think, but to resign.’”
A jury found Port, who fatally drug-raped victims he met on dating sites, might have been stopped sooner and lives saved but for police failings. For legal reasons, the jury was instructed it could not comment on whether prejudice, discrimination or homophobia played any part. The Met has consistently denied any prejudice.
John Pape, a friend of Port’s second victim Gabriel Kovari, 22, who accused the Met of “institutional homophobia” in his evidence to the inquests, said: “I feel relieved and gratified that someone in power, Sadiq Khan, has taken decisive action.
“It feels like somebody has got the message that we need radical change within the culture of the Met in order to restore confidence.”
Because of the legal scope of the inquest preventing the jury from being able to consider prejudice as a factor, Pape said of Dick: “She totally hid behind that.”
He claimed Dick had told a recent London assembly meeting Pape attended that the coroner had found there was no evidence of homophobia. “That’s was my tipping point. I thought, ‘Well, she has to go.’
“It feels like her instinct is always to defend the Met from the public. But the deal is we give them powers to arrest us, to use violence against us, and in return we are supposed to feel protected. But after the experience I’ve had with the Port case, as a gay Londoner, I don’t feel protected and I wonder who does.
“Their core values are supposed to be professionalism, integrity and courage. And I think by not acknowledging that prejudice played a part in the Port case, I feel she was unable to embody those values, and as such it is right that she has gone.”
Pape recently attended a meeting with the LGBT+ Met police advisory group, “and there were a couple of young LGBT+ people there who said they would now not go to the police if they had a problem because they had lost faith in the Metropolitan police. That’s downright dangerous if people have lost faith to the extent that they wouldn’t report crimes to the police.”
Ricky Waumsley, the partner of Port’s youngest victim, Daniel Whitworth, a chef aged 21, said he “didn’t have much faith” in Dick when he met her just before Christmas, and that she “definitely needed to go”.
“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 told Radio 4’s Today programme. He is calling for an investigation into the officers who handled the case to be reopened.
