The childless Cressida Dick said she believed that Londoners were proud of being “diverse” because it gave them “strength” she added. Police told Sky News they have interviewed 262 witnesses, from 19 countries.
“It’s desperately sad and poignant but among those who died is someone who’s British, there are French, Australian, Canadian, Spanish,” Cressida Dick told The Associated Press in an interview Saturday.
“In terms of our witnesses that we’ve spoken to so far, out of the 300-odd people, there are about 20 different countries of origin. And the London British population comes from all kinds of backgrounds and every kind of faith and ethnicity.
“We believe of course that that’s what makes our city so great,” she said. “It’s a place where the vast majority of time it’s incredibly integrated and that diversity gives us strength.”
The victims may have been diverse in terms of nationality, but not in terms of race. For a city that is currently at least 44 percent non-white, it cannot be a coincidence that the attackers targeted whites.
Dick was appointed as Commissioner in April, despite being in charge of a police operation which saw an innocent Brazilian man Jean Charles de Menezes shot dead by officers who had mistaken him for a terror accomplice.
Dick holds a similar view to that of London Mayor Sadiq Khan, who argued that terror attacks are “part and parcel” of living in a large city. She dismissed the increase in jihadist attacks saying that it was the role of the security services to adapt to change.
“The threat is changing,” she said. “We also have some quite volatile individuals who go from having what you and I would regard as utterly vile extremist views to being motivated to carry out an attack.” But she gave no reason for some “extremist” individuals becoming “volatile”.
The London Bridge jihadists tried to hire a 7.5-tonne truck online on the morning of their attack, police have revealed. With a bigger truck the death toll of the London Bridge attack would have been much higher.
The payment by the gang’s leader, Khuram Butt, failed to go through however. Instead the jihadists hired a white van which they weighed down with gravel sacks. Thirteen Molotov cocktails too were found in the van.
The UK’s most senior police officer revealed that she was in a same-sex relationship as she took over as Commissioner of London’s Metropolitan Police force in April from Sir Bernard Hogan Howe.
In an interview with the London’s Evening Standard newspaper, Dick revealed that she was in a relationship with a female colleague.
In the interview she vowed to clamp down on “violent hate crimes”, especially “domestic violence”. Dick’s promotion followed in the wake of an Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) investigation over potential “lapses” that allowed a killer to evade authorities, murdering four gay men between 2014 and 2015.