The Metropolitan police commissioner, Cressida Dick, has vowed to be “extraordinarily cooperative” with an investigation into her role in the botched multimillion-pound investigation into allegations of a Westminster paedophile ring.

Dick was referred last week to the police watchdog by the Mayor of London’s Office for Policing and Crime over her handling of Operation Midland following a complaint from a member of the public.

She had been responsible for supervising the senior investigating officer who said the claims by Carl Beech – which were subsequently shown to be false – were “credible and true”.

She told Radio 4’s Today programme: “Of course it is appropriate if somebody has a complaint about me or anybody else, they are able to make a complaint and it is appropriate for the mayor’s office to refer that … to the IOPC. I will, of course, be extraordinarily cooperative with the IOPC and we will see what happens.

“I certainly regret the phrase ‘credible and true’. I have apologised for the fact that that happened in the few weeks that I sat above Operation Midland and supervised the senior officer.”

Responding to suggestions that some people wanted officers to face stern consequences, Dick said: “I’m sure some people would want heads to roll.”

In a wide-ranging interview on Friday, Dick said she recognised there were lessons to be learned from the London Bridge attack in November, when 28-year-old Usman Khan – who had been convicted of a terrorism offence in 2012 – killed two people and injured two others before he was shot dead by police.

She revealed that anti-terror officers had foiled 25 lethal attacks since 2017 and that the force was dealing with 800 live investigations.

But she added: “Sometimes it is very hard to know what someone’s intent is. People are sometimes extremely private and we have had cases of that in the last couple of years where somebody had been intent of carrying out a lethal attack or even tried to and there was absolutely no sign to anybody else.”﻿

In a week where there have been eight killings in London, at the end of a year that was already the capital’s most murderous in more than a decade, Dick said she wanted more of a public debate about the use of technology to combat crime.

She said police officers already monitored social media in accordance with the law. “We can see gang tensions sometimes being played out very publicly and when we do that, if there’s a threat to life, we’ll intervene,” she said.

“In the future, there will be ways in which we look at the data we hold or other people hold and be able to make links about people, places and subjects in a manner that potentially some people could find worrying.

“And that’s where we need to have a debate, we need to have the government involved, we may in the future need to have new laws.”