I left yesterday's four hours of oral submissions to the race and faith inquiry with a humdinger Standard-style news stand message in my head: "Cop Chiefs Split Over Met Jobs For Boys". It wasn't like that, but it had struck me that any changes in Met custom and practice to correct the lack of progress of BME officers through its ranks will be achieved only after much vigorous debate.
The characterisations of the issue and how best to address it set out by Kit Malthouse, Sir Paul Stephenson and MPA chief executive Catherine Crawford varied in significant ways. Encouragingly, given that he's Boris's police man, Malthouse was the boldest: or, arguably, the most over-optimistic. He set out a version of what is known in this territory as "the business case" for ensuring that minority officers do better drawn from knowledge and experience of how it's been prosecuted in the private sector.
Beginning from a Tory view that special diversity provisions within organisations can have "unintended consequences" - a view bolstered by his doubts about the Tory "A list" of potential parliamentary candidates - he argued that you need two strands to a diversity strategy: one, ensuring fairness; two, enhancing effectiveness. Connecting the two, he said, "is key". His answer is that the Met needs programmes for "comprehensive career development" for all in the service to ensure that talent is spotted and supported. Kit is an aim high kind of guy.
Such programmes would recognise the benefit to the service of greater diversity, thereby "mainstreaming" the need to tackle the issue and lessening those "unintended consequences", such as resentment and perceptions of special treatment. There was no point in "tinkering" he said, advocating "drains up once and for all." He added: "I'd be more than happy if the Met showed a lead in moving the diversity issue on."
Crawford, who appeared next, spoke mostly about the role of the MPA and its relationship with the service. She, like the others, said there had been "considerable improvements" in the Met in recent years but that there was still much work to do. She made some telling points. Invoking a popular reformers' call, she said it wouldn't be enough for the MPS to "look like London" because it had to behave differently too. She thought Malthouse's aspiration to "mainstream" diversity issues was "premature". Asked about cultural barriers to achieving this, she spoke of social networks in which drinking was integral and excluded those who didn't fit in.
The extent to which Met occupational culture - operating both within the workplace and outside it - generates a "golden circle" that limits advancement to those it admits was a central theme of the questions put to Sir Paul Stephenson. He was also asked why he'd asserted in a recent speech that the term "institutional racism" was no longer applicable to the Met, and pressed on the implications of the Babar Ahmad and Belgravia station "apartheid" cases.
He said there were "definitely not" golden circles operating in the Met, and said it was essential to "build confidence internally" to correct the perception that there are. The term "institutional racism" as defined by William Macpherson, while never to his taste, had been nonetheless, "a useful driver" of reform, but had now ceased to be so. The Ahmad and Belgravia affairs indicated that there remained "pockets of bigotry," but these could and should be corrected by "intrusive supervision" from above.
It was fascinating to watch Sir Paul, Britain's most senior police officer, being subjected to a form of interrogation. He speaks quickly and confidently, and exudes tremendous energy. If he were a car you might say he had a high performance engine that runs a little hot. It's easy to imagine why Boris and Malthouse took to him: to them he must have have seemed every inch the no-nonsense alternative to a posturing, "political" Ian Blair.
I don't doubt Sir Paul recognises both the moral and operational need to eradicate discrimination from the Met, but his ideas for doing so caused me to recall the views of Professor Simon Holdaway - who's also appeared before the inquiry - that few senior police officers really grasped what "institutional racism" really meant and were sometimes in such a rush to take practical action that they failed to reflect properly first.
Asked why he thought BME officers weren't progressing well compared with white counterparts Sir Paul offered three reasons. The first was the "volume issue", by which he meant that the greater numbers of BME officers being recruited would come up through the ranks in the fullness of time. The second was a relative lack of access to "informal networking", something he saw as a natural and inevitable human phenomenon. His proposed remedy was to take "extraordinary measures" to ensure that BME officers received the same "advice and guidance" in other ways. The third was to look at the systems through which promotions are awarded. Were these as fair, transparent and incorruptible as they should be? If they weren't, they'd have to be fixed.
There, I thought, speaks an intelligent man of practical action, but I wondered if he was a man of truly broad vision too. And would his prescriptions amount to a "drains up" operation or just unusually energetic tinkering?
