Buckle up for Monday’s exciting episode of The Met: Policing London, the BBC’s fly-on-the-wall series about Scotland Yard.
Talking points galore as the force looks to buff its image in the aftermath of the Mark Duggan shooting. The commissioner, Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe – AKA Britain’s top cop – got into trouble last week when asked to speak about the force’s record on race. But then he took a curious approach: asked if his force was “institutionally racist”, he said it probably is if people say it is. On the topic of stop and search, he confirmed the continuing disproportion that means black citizens are six times more likely to be stopped than white, but couldn’t “fully explain” why. Ignorance is no defence, as chippy lawyers say.
There is much confusion about the concept of institutional racism, not least its derivation. Reporting Sir Bernard’s curious position, the Daily Mail informed its readers that the term was coined by Sir William Macpherson during the Stephen Lawrence inquiry. As if! The judge did many fine things, but this wasn’t one of them. In fact, the phrase was the 1960s handiwork of the famous/infamous American black power leader Stokely Carmichael. His other legacy was the phrase “black power” itself. Little wonder the Mail airbrushes him.
In the 1967 book Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America, Carmichael and fellow author Charles V Hamilton contrasted “individual racism and institutional racism”. The latter was, they said, “less overt, far more subtle, less identifiable in terms of specific individuals committing the acts. But it is no less destructive of human life.”
Because it operates in “established and respected forces in society”, they observed, institutional racism receives “far less public condemnation”.
When Sir William framed his definition, in 1999, he spoke of “processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority people”. This retained the notion that the sum of parts, many of them virtuous, could be a corporate, faceless racism. The key in both cases is not intent – it is outcomes.
This is a concept many find difficult to understand or embrace. During the Lawrence inquiry, I heard an aggrieved police officer insist that he was not institutionally racist. He was, of course, correct. One woman spoke movingly of a friend maligned by an accusation that she was institutionally racist. By definition, if nothing else, the poor woman suffered unnecessarily.
