Police commissioner Dame Cressida Dick

• AS the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill 2021 is going through parliament, the question is – how are we to be policed?

The bill would restrict the right to protest: Amnesty International UK predicts that if the measures become law, there will be more scenes like those at the Clapham Common vigil for Sarah Everard, where we witnessed police violence against women who were holding a vigil against violence.

Everyone now knows that rape has been virtually decriminalised in the UK and the bill will change nothing about that. But it would increase stop-and-search.

Police commissioner Dame Cressida Dick has already made known her wish to increase stop-and-search powers despite all the evidence that in London people of colour are 19 times more likely to be stopped. If that’s not institutional racism, what is?

It has just come to light that in 2013 Cressida Dick said, at a counter-terrorism conference in Israel, that “…we must continue to learn to avoid complacency, to fight terrorism with all our skills and power, and do so with the same virtues which have over the years been shown in Israel”.

We are shocked that she would praise a state accused of the crime of apartheid, even by Israeli organisations, and which is now under investigation by the International Criminal Court for war crimes.

Is this the future of policing in the UK?

CRISTEL AMISS
Women of Colour
Global Women’s Strike
Crossroads Women’s Centre