For some time now the New York Times has been a pioneer in the field of dodgy reporting on Britain. From declaring that Brits live on porridge and boiled mutton to suggesting that we love to cavort in swamps, the US paper of record has managed to paint an increasingly strange picture of life in this country. But could the NYT now be facing stiff completion from the New Yorker in the British fantasy genre?
This weekend, the magazine published a strange defence of Cressida Dick, after she was forced to resign as commissioner of the Metropolitan Police by Sadiq Khan.
The New Yorker piece, headlined ‘The Misogyny That Led to the Fall of London’s Police Commissioner’ argues that the police chief’s downfall came after she was ‘overwhelmed’ by the misogyny of the men she led – as opposed to the catalogue of errors that defined her career. This line of argument is rather undermined by Cressida Dick’s own tone-deaf and embarrassing responses to recent police scandals which saw the Met, for example, advise women to flag down a bus if they were approached by a lone male police officer following the arrest of Wayne Couzens.
But Steerpike was more concerned about the US magazine’s characterisation of the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes, who was shot dead by Metropolitan police officers on the tube in 2005, after they mistook him for a suicide bomber.
The New Yorker writes:
‘In 2005, Dick was in charge of the counterterrorism team that killed Jean Charles de Menezes, a Brazilian man, on the Tube, after mistaking him for a suicide bomber. Dick always handled that momentous error with dignity and grace.’
To describe de Menezes’s killing – which saw an innocent man shot seven times in the head by police officers – as being handled with ‘dignity and grace’ is stretching the truth to say the least. Cressida Dick was Gold Commander in charge of the bungled operation, which was later found to have committed catastrophic errors, although Dick was cleared of personal responsibility. Still, Dick didn’t quite seem to grasp the gravity of the Met’s errors when she told an inquiry in 2008 that ‘If you ask me whether I think anybody did anything wrong or unreasonable on the operation, I don’t think they did.’
In the aftermath of the killing a series of briefings from the Met suggested that de Menezes had somehow caused his own death. The Met suggested that de Menezes was dressed suspiciously and had failed to listen to officers at Stockwell station, claims that were later found to be false. The police force also attempted to block the police complaints commission from investigating the case.
In fact, the incident was handled with such ‘dignity and grace’ by the Met that de Menezes’s family this week said that Cressida Dick should have been fired 16 years ago for the fiasco.
Still, what do facts matter when Dick’s resignation can be seen through the prism of American identity politics?
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