Dame Cressida Dick – Four Lives & Nine Lives

The BBC’s ‘Four Lives’ – a drama based on the serial killer Stephen Port – provides further illustration of the incompetence of the Metropolitan Police; it is time for wholesale reform and for cat-like Dame Cressida Dick’s nine lives to end

We’ve repeatedly suggested we truly don’t believe Dame Cressida Dick DBE, QPM could organise a piss-up in a brewery; now, with the airing of the three-part Four Lives on BBC One, comes further proof that this incompetent woman and those that work under her couldn’t even find a serial killer in a graveyard and whose failings resulted in three killings entirely avoidable.

Featuring the story of Stephen Port and four men he sadistically drugged, raped and murdered in Barking, London in 2014 and 2015 – Anthony Walgate, 23; Gabriel Kovari, 22; Daniel Whitworth, 21 and Jack Taylor, 25 – Four Lives, as The Guardian’s Lucy Mangan points out, does “make the victims live again.” It is a story that doesn’t just focus on the sickness of the slayer, but also one that celebrates the spirit and souls of the slayed and equally, it rightly illustrates the disgraceful ineptness and cackhandedness of the Met Police.

Described in March 2017 as a “catalogue of police failings,” the Met’s decision to ignore credible witnesses prepared to state what they knew about Port and their refusal to admit to the family members of the victims that the deaths of their loved ones were anything other than “sordid misadventures gone wrong” – in spite of clear evidence to the contrary – again illustrates a police force riddled with rot.

Officers mixed up clearly different individuals featured in CCTV imagery walking and not walking with Port and did not even listen to the woman who found the bodies of two of the victims on two separate occasions in the same location in the very same churchyard. Of this, she later remarked: “They had no idea what they were doing.” Instead, they basically just wanted this whole “episode” swept under the carpet and without the tenacity of one victim’s mother, they’d have gotten away with just that.

The Metropolitan Police emerge from this story with yet more stains of incompetence and guilt and yet again today we call for its head’s head to roll. It is impossible to bring back the four lives lost to Stephen Port, but it is possible for cat-like Dame Cressida Dick’s nine lives to finally end. She ought to do the decent thing as we begin 2022: Resign with her head held in shame.

‘Four Lives’ continues on BBC One tonight at 9pm and all three episodes are available now on iPlayer.

Pictured top – Rapist and serial killer Stephen Port (often monikered as ‘The Grindr Killer’ and pictured far left and left with Stephen Merchant playing him) was given a life sentence with a whole life order on the 25^th November 2016, meaning he we never be released; last night’s ‘Four Lives’ showed the force that Dame Cressida Dick (right) currently heads, yet again, to be inept and uncaring towards the families of victims. She, as head honcho, needs to take responsibility and after her having been seen to preside over countless other similarly grossly handled episodes, it is time for her do one thing: Just go.