Met Police chief calls on Home Office to show ‘greater leadership’

Britain’s most senior police officer has demanded the Home Office shows “greater leadership” in tackling crime.



Cressida Dick, commissioner of the Met Police, says Sajid Javid’s department had “stepped back a lot” in recent years.

She also hit out at the government’s failure to introduce facial recognition technology to catch “bad guys”.

Speaking to the Telegraph, she said: “I do see a greater leadership role for the Home Office than the one they have chosen to take recently.

“Three years ago there was a sense from the then home secretary that you, the police, should transform yourselves and there are areas where that is really difficult. It has got to be led.”

She added: “I am very keen that the law keeps up with technology.

“I don’t feel that we are working in a tremendously enabling environment at the moment.”

Her comments come as violent crime continues to spiral in London, where there have already been nearly as many murders in 2018 as there were in all of 2017.

New stats last month meanwhile revealed knife crime was at an all-time high in England and Wales.

Official figures released this week show that knife offences leapt by 12% over the past 12 months, totalling 39,332 crimes recorded by police in the past 12 months.