**TL;DR: Following the events that took place on Saturday evening in Clapham Common, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan police, Cressida Dick, should resign.** Through Cressida Dick’s mismanagement of the Met Police on Saturday evening, the public were stripped of the peaceful opportunity to stand together in Clapham Common in memory of Sarah Everard and all other victims of sexual abuse/ harassment. Acknowledgement of this mistake is necessary and therefore the demand that Cressida Dick should resign, that the [Liberal Democrats](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/mar/14/minister-resists-calls-met-chief-cressida-dick-resign-sarah-everard-vigil) in particularly have voiced, is a well-founded one. The police missed the opportunity, in the first place, to cooperate with the Reclaim These Streets organisation to enable a Covid-friendly and safe vigil. By failing to agree to the gathering it took place without the necessary measures of management. This was an inevitable turn of events that the police, and particularly Cressida Dick, should have predicted. The public are frustrated by the police intervention and escalation of a non-violent event as they caused distress within the crowds. Images of women being pushed, pulled, dragged and even arrested are painful and painfully ironic when considering the cause for the vigil. Whilst Home Office minister [Victoria Atkins](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/sarah-everard-vigil-news-protest-police-b1816930.html) describes such footage as ‘very upsetting’, the Labour Leader, [Keir Starmer](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/sarah-everard-vigil-news-protest-police-b1816930.html), brands the response from the police as ‘deeply disturbing’. [Reclaim These Streets](https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/sarah-everard-priti-patel-boris-johnson-cressida-dick-london-b923992.html) state that they were ‘deeply saddened and angered’ by the scenes of officers ‘physically manhandling women at a vigil against male violence.’ They add that ‘this week of all weeks the police should have understood that women would need a place to mourn, reflect and show solidarity.' And so, under the leadership of Cressida Dick, it is undeniable that women have lost confidence in the Met Police Whether it is through donating to women’s charities such as [The Survivors Trust]( https://www.thesurvivorstrust.org), [Rape Crisis England & Wales](https://rapecrisis.org.uk) and [Women’s Aid](https://www.womensaid.org.uk) or through raising awareness over male behaviour through social media platforms or finally, through the resignation of Cressida Dick, change must come. Public outrage is rife and one thing that can be done to diffuse such anger is to acknowledge the poor policing led by Cressida Dick which, in turn, acknowledges the importance for unification to end violence against women.

**TL:DR: The responsibility for the debacle rests either above or below Cressida Dick** The Met, in my view, did a terrible job of policing Sarah Everard's vigil on Saturday 13th. But the responsibility should either lie with individual police who over-stretched their duties, or with government for creating the legal chaos we now live with. The vigil was peaceful and respectful but certainly not socially distanced or in line with current govt rules around groups congregating. Coronavirus is the government (and many Britons') absolute priority today, and policing the government's response to the virus has been the Met's chief concern for a year. In a sense, it's no wonder the police view of the vigil was exclusively from the perspective of the pandemic and not from that of civil liberty (for women, seeking safety on the streets, and for all of our right to come together, in a vigil or a protest).