I'm an ex-officer. The Met police today looks and feels as racist as it was before Macpherson
The Black Lives Matter movement has grown in momentum in the five months since the George Floyd killing. As a 30-year veteran officer who swore to “protect and serve” the community – an oath similarly taken by the man who held his knee on Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds – I was reduced to tears to see the devastating actions of a Minneapolis officer, and how they came to be seen as symptomatic of an extreme violent minority within the police.
You might think that is only a US problem and it could never happen here in the UK. Unfortunately it has happened – as recently as 2017, when the avoidable death of Rashan Charles was recorded on a grocery shop’s CCTV in Hackney, east London. Following a chase on foot, an officer used a chokehold in an attempt to remove suspected drugs from Charles’s mouth; none of the actions were compliant with Metropolitan Police Service or College of Policing policy. Directly after that incident both organisations reemphasised that British officers were unauthorised to use such holds and tactics in drug searches, reiterating that in those circumstances the suspect should be treated as a patient and not just as a prisoner. However, the inquest decided the officer was not responsible for his death.
Other tactics, such as section 1 stopand-searches, also point to aggressive policing. The Met accounts for more than 300,000 of these encounters per year – half the national total – even though it is only one of 43 forces in England and Wales. The problem is not only in the volume of stops that are carried out but also the pre-emptive use of force – handcuffing people before the search is justified. Added to this is the racial profiling that has been evident for decades, where a black person is nine times more likely to be stopped and
searched for drugs than a white person.
For section 60 stops, pre-authorised by an inspector or above, the disproportionality is even greater: black people are stopped more than 11 times more than white people.
I recognise the increasing danger our officers face: more knives on the streets, along with anti-authority militants who direct their anger towards the police. Officers have suffered a growing number of injuries, and there have been heartrending fatalities too.
Yet these tragedies cannot be used to justify punitive enforcement tactics that erode trust and reinforce many people’s perception of the police, and the Met in particular, as an occupying force and not a service. In fact, when I observe Met policing today, the look and feel of it is similar to the organisation I was part of back in the 1990s. That’s before the 1999 Macpherson inquiry, which uncovered institutional racism and which was supposed to have sparked an overhaul in how the Met and other constabularies were run.
Back then, policing across the country had no independent oversight, and no one with the power to make it become more reflective of the community it served. Today most forces, including the Met, are well off the pace in trying to become representative organisations, even though, in the first 10 years after the Macpherson report, the Met showed significant improvement, with the proportion of black, Asian and minority-ethnic officers rising from about 2% to 12%. This was primarily down to the independent oversight of the Stephen Lawrence Steering Group, which monitored recruitment, retention and progression.
This helped to create a working environment that was more positive for minority officers to survive and strive, resulting in lower resignation rates. It also reduced the disproportionate number of disciplinary investigations that ethnic-minority officers faced. I can testify to that, having been subject to a witch-hunt for an £80 expenses claim while white officers in similar circumstances faced no action.
Improving the experiences of black police staff at work, and the service to the black community beyond, is the overarching aim of the Black Police Association (BPA), formed in 1994, of which I am a founder member. Our goals put us directly at odds with the Metropolitan Police Federation – the rank-and-file officers’ statutory staff association – because they knew we were looking at making culture changes both internally and externally. Even before we launched, they opposed us – stating we were an unnecessary development, and lobbying the Met commissioner in an attempt to prevent us from forming. They saw our presence – correctly – as a sign of their failure to adequately represent and support black officers. This set the tone for our relationship with white officers, who would try and intimidate us at our workplaces.
When Macpherson uncovered the disparity between the quality of policing that white and black communities received, stating clearly it was down to institutional racism, the federation resisted the inquiry’s recommendations.
I observed this directly in my role at that time as the first chair of the national BPA. I was amazed how much pressure the federation used on chief constables at Home Office meetings – repeatedly stating their members felt tarnished by the term “institutional racism”, and claiming their officers were frightened to use their powers on the street in black neighbourhoods. I saw police chiefs nodding along, which made me feel the tail was wagging the dog. Thankfully, Jack Straw, the then home secretary, would not play along with their tactics and held constabularies and the federation to the recommendations, helping to improve black communities’ trust in the police.
Subsequent home secretaries with a similar approach in holding the Met and its federation to account have produced similar results. Sadly, the last to do so was Theresa May, who left that office in 2016. Since then her successors have had a light touch on the constabularies and their federations, especially in the Met, and we now have a more intolerant work culture that is also toxic to the survival of black, Asian and minority-ethnic officers. This is leading to black people facing an ever more disproportionate use of force – be it the use of handcuffs, Tasers or firearms – and they are ultimately twice as likely to die in police custody as white people.
The only way to modernise the police service in a sustainable way, and make it fit for the 21st century, is by ensuring it moves on from its archaic mentality. It needs to start understanding and embracing racial diversity, equality and inclusion now, and making sure its new way of thinking impacts on the way it polices all communities, every single day.