Britain’s new most senior police officer has spoken of her “huge concern” about the rise in gun and knife crime and said tackling violence will define her time in the role.

Cressida Dick, who formally began work last week as the first female commissioner of the Metropolitan police, pledged to “bear down across the wide spectrum of violent crime”.

Latest figures for London showed gun crime was up 42% and knife crime rose 24%. “The figures worry me,” Dick told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

“I’m not sure we can be sure it’s a trend. But if it is the case that gun crime and knife crime is going up, then that’s of huge concern to me, and it will mark out my commissionership trying to bear down on violence in general and those two crimes in particular.”

She paid tribute to her predecessor, Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, for leaving the Met in “good shape”, but added that while she thought the Met was the finest police force in the world, it “could do better”.

Asked which challenges facing the Met most worried her, she said: “None of them will keep me awake at night. I won’t be a very good commissioner if I am tossing and turning at night.”

On her first day in the new role last week, Dick attended the funeral of PC Keith Palmer, the police officer killed in the Westminster terrorist attack.

Dick cautioned against automatically arming all police officers guarding the House of Commons, as many have suggested.

She said: “It is very hard to say that if Keith had been armed he would be alive today … There’s a backdrop of loads of members of the public where he was standing, so even if he had had a firearm it might have been difficult for him to take a shot.”



She added that decisions about arming officers would have to be based on the threats they faced.

The Met’s £3bn annual budget needs to be cut by at least £400m. Dick said she would not be “crying wolf” about challenges facing the Met and would look at ways to “cut fat”.

She said: “I will be looking … at innovative ways to cut our costs, whilst providing the service we want to provide. If there are services that we have to cut back on, I will be upfront about that and I’ll explain why. I won’t be crying wolf, but of course I want the resources that my staff need.”

She pledged to modernise the Met by using digital technology to enhance how the public contact the police.



Dick said: “Huge numbers of members of the public, particularly but not exclusively from the younger generation, want to contact us in all sorts of different ways which are not about picking up the telephone or going into a police station. The world is changing, we need to respond fast to it … We need to make the most of digital, but not at the expense of traditional values in policing.”



The new commissioner also pledged to champion diversity. Asked whether she would bring a different perspective to the role, Dick said: “In some ways, I am slightly different. When I joined there were very few women, so one was made constantly conscious of the fact that you were one of a few. Now I’m the first woman commissioner, and I think that’s a good thing, but I’m incredibly proud of the Met. I think it is a fantastic service. I do genuinely think it is the finest in the world. It could be better. It will be. But it is chock full of good people who are very diverse. I want to encourage that diversity of thought, of challenge, of background. That’s the modern world.”

Dick said she was too busy to watch TV police dramas. “I don’t. It is very shaming … I don’t actually have a television at home, but I do have a licence and I do watch catch-up. It is that I just don’t watch cop programmes that much … at the moment, I’m too busy to watch.”