English police officer Cressida Dick was BOTD in 1960. Born in Oxford to a middle-class academic family, she studied at Oxford University and later retrained as a criminologist. She joined the London Metropolitan Police Force in 1993, and was quickly fast-tracked for promotion, becoming chief inspector within a decade. In 2003, she headed anti-gang campaign Operation Trident, and became the face of the Met’s internal diversity campaign. She was widely criticised for her mismanagement of the 2005 killing of 27 year-old Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes, who was wrongly identified as a suicide bomber and shot to death by Met officers. Despite the ensuing controversy, Dick was promoted to assistant commissioner in 2009, and oversaw security operations for the 2012 London Olympic Games. In 2015, she announced her retirement from the Met to work to take an undefined role in the Foreign Office. She returned in 2017, becoming the first female and openly queer Commissioner in the Met’s history. Her tenure was marked by controversies over police handling of an alleged child sex abuse ring investigation, and evidence of racial bias in police use of stop-and-search checks and facial recognition systems. She also controversially approved officers carrying firearms when patrolling “high-risk residential areas”. In 2021, she was widely criticised for the Met’s handling of a vigil following the abduction and murder of Sarah Everard by a Met officer. The High Court later ruled that the Met had violated the vigil participants’ rights of freedom of speech and assembly. Two months later, Dick resigned as Commissioner, stating that London Mayor Sadiq Khan no longer had confidence in her leadership. Now retired from the force, Dick is in a relationship with a former Met inspector. She is portrayed by Emily Mortimer in the 2025 TV drama series Suspect, recounting Dick’s oversight of the shooting of de Menezez.