An attempt by police chiefs to grapple with racism claims by launching a panel to recommend action has been criticised by victims’ representatives and met with scepticism from within their own ranks.
The National Police Chiefs’ Council declared that policing was not racist but had to do more to tackle or challenge “bias, disproportionality, discrimination or racism”.
Imran Khan, the solicitor for Doreen Lawrence, dismissed it as a “cynical effort to … pretend there is change”, and criticised the NPCC for making no mention of racism in the ranks blocking progress or of treating ethnic minorities unfairly as it launched the initiative.
Twenty-one years after the Macpherson report found police guilty of institutional racism over failings in the Stephen Lawrence murder inquiry, race remains a faultline for British policing.
The simmering tensions have intensified to the point where police chiefs feel a new initiative is needed following protests in response to the death of George Floyd at the hands of police in the US. More than 220,000 people have marched in the UK for racial justice.
Martin Hewitt, the chair of the NPCC, said policing by consent, the bedrock principle of British policing, was in jeopardy for some. “We rightly pride ourselves on a police service that is of the community and polices with the consent of that community. What has become clear is that for some of our staff and for some of our communities, that is not how it feels. We need to act now.”
He added: “How do we make our service more reflective of the communities we serve, and inclusive? How do we address concerns about use of stop and search and the use of force? These are complex challenges, and they are not new. Much work has been done or is being done to address them and progress has been made. But we fear it is not enough and change is not moving as quickly as it needs to.”
The NPCC announced a 12-strong working group of police leaders. Two are from an ethnic minority, the most senior of whom is the Metropolitan police assistant commissioner Neil Basu, the NPCC’s lead on counter-terrorism policing.
Among the panel are Mike Cunningham, who leads the College of Policing, who has previously spoken out about “eye-watering” levels of stop and search of black people, and Dave Thompson, the West Midlands chief constable, who this week apologised for the way the force had historically treated black communities.
Currently 7% of officers are from black, Asian or other minority ethnic groups, compared with 14.9% of the population in England and Wales.
Asked whether policing was still institutionally racist, a NPCC spokesperson said in a statement: “There are many in BAME communities who believe there is structural racism across the UK and its institutions. There are different perspectives on what racism is. We don’t think policing is racist, but we have more to do to tackle or challenge bias, disproportionality, discrimination or racism.”
One police chief said his colleagues should have announced action rather than more discussion. “It’s not clear what they are going to do. They need to say what action they will take. We’ve already done a lot of thinking,” they said.
Khan, who represented the Lawrence family at the Macpherson inquiry, accused police chiefs of being delusional. “What is glaringly missing from that statement is that they are institutionally racist. It is another attempt to deflect and pretend there is change when there is no change,” he said. “The communities they serve and the police chiefs are poles apart. They live in a different world they’ve made up for themselves.”
Stafford Scott, a veteran community activist whose 62-year-old brother was Tasered in his own home by police, said: “The police have always spoken out of both sides of its mouth at the same time, especially the Met with its massive PR budgets. It says one thing to the media and it shows black communities a totally different face. I’ll believe it when I see it and I haven’t seen non-racist, unbiased, non-discriminatory policing in my lifetime.”
Sgt Tola Munro, the president of the National Black Police Association, said: “This is a response to the community movement and those inside the service talking about their experience of discrimination. Clearly the public feels something needs to change; there’s been a significant number of people marching and would have been more but for Covid.”
The NPCC said plans for action would be announced next month and then consulted on.
