In January, shortly after Sabina Nessa’s murder in south-east London, I Googled the teacher’s name. And yet still, the Met is wasting time and resources trying to reverse a high court decision that ruled its policing of the Sarah Everard vigil was unlawful. Whoever is appointed, it will be vital that they learn from Dick’s mistakes: namely that it is violent men, not protesting women, who need to be policed. I couldn’t see a place in the appointment process for that discussion.” Nor does it bode particularly well that Jon Boutcher, one of the only possible candidates with a real record of speaking out about institutional inequality in policing, has already been eliminated from the race. It is depressingly telling that the one potential female candidate for the job said she would not apply because “the substantial reform required needs the support of national and local politicians. “Some corners” of policing left to address, indeed. This is all on top of the 2,000 officers accused of sexual misconduct in the past four years alone. In March, a 52-year-old serving officer was convicted of grooming after he arranged to meet what he thought was a 13-year-old girl hoping for what the Telegraph euphemistically described as “sex”. In April, it emerged that one Met officer won’t face criminal charges even though a misconduct hearing concluded he raped two women. Or, indeed, the one in five who had received sexually explicit emails or texts from a colleague, or the almost one in 10 who had been told that sexual favours could lead to preferential treatment. But his assertion that policing has been largely “transformed” since the 1980s and that it is only “some corners” that still need attention may provide little comfort to the 49% of police staff members across England, Scotland and Wales who, when surveyed as recently as 2018, said they’d heard sexualised jokes told repeatedly at work. Rowley, the man many consider the frontrunner, has already acknowledged that cultural reform is needed. The new commissioner has a gargantuan task ahead: tackling the deep-rooted, institutional misogyny and inequality in British policing. It’s disappointing, but unsurprising, that almost every candidate touted was a white man. Cressida Dick’s replacement as the Met police commissioner has been whittled down to two men: the former counter-terroism chief Sir Mark Rowley and one of Dick’s lieutenants, Nick Ephgrave.