What was Cressida Dick's salary? Met police chief earns more than the Prime Minister

Dame Cressida Dick’s reign as Commissioner of the Met police is over, after announcing her resignation on 10 February.

Her tenure at the top of London’s police has coincided with the city’s bloodiest few years in the last decade, while also being laden with scandal.

The news of her resignation came just hours after she told a radio phone in show that she intended to stay on in her post, to get rid of the toxic culture at the Met.

Meanwhile, days ago London Mayor Sadiq Khan said Dame Dick was ‘on notice’ and had to rapidly reform or risk losing her job.

Public opinion of the Met has plummeted during her time in charge, with the already rotten culture at Scotland Yard festing under her reign.

Recently it was revealed police offers had been sending photos of dead victims in Whatsapp groups. While other officers were sharing racist, sexist, misogynistic and Islamophobic messages with each other.

Perhaps the event which garnered the most negative attention was the reaction by the Met police to the brutal killing of Sarah Everard by one of their officers.

Under the pretense she was being detained for breaking Covid restrictions, Wayne Couzens kidnapped, raped and killed the 34-year-old woman.

It later emerged that before the killing, Couzens was jokingly nicknamed ‘the rapist’ by colleagues.

In reaction to a vigil held on Clapham Common to remember Everard, the Met Police broke up the peaceful gathering by arresting several women, pinning one to the floor in what has become a famous image.

What is Cressida Dick’s salary?

Despite never previously been in charge of an entire police force before, Dick was appointed Commissioner of the Metropolitan Policecompleting rocky rise to power in 2017.

At the time of her appointment, it was reported she was offered the same salary as her predecessor Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe of £270,648 plus benefits. However, she chose to be paid £40,000 less.

Dick was in charge of security at the London 2012 Olympics, has training as a hostage negotiator and had what journalist Martin Evans described as “an unspecified and rather shadowy security role” at the Foreign Office before beating many other established police professionals to get the top job.

Her career was almost derailed in 2005 during ‘Operation Kratos’. She was the commander in charge of the control room when the Met shot and killed Jean Charles de Menezes, an innocent Brazilian man who had been wrongly identified as a potential suicide bomber.

A trial into the shooting found the Met to have committed catastrophic errors.

“If you ask me whether I think anybody did anything wrong or unreasonable on the operation, I don’t think they did,” Dick said.

Despite this, she was promoted a year later and received a dame-hood from the Queen in 2019.

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