Shamed, the police forces without ANY black officers
FOUR police forces do not have a single black officer despite years of work to put more bobbies of all races in uniform, Home Secretary Theresa May has revealed.
The four are in Cheshire, Durham, North Yorkshire and Dyfed-Powys, although each has small numbers said to be either mixed race or of Asian or Chinese origin.
Eleven of the 43 forces in England and Wales have no black or ethnic officer at chief inspector rank or above, while every constabulary has a white chief constable.
In 1999, after the murder of Stephen Lawrence, ministers set a 7 per cent target for the proportion of ethnic minority officers by 2009. It currently stands at 5.5 per cent.
Meanwhile, only 28 per cent of police officers are women, who make up 51 per cent of the population. The most recent data for the UK’s ethnic make-up, from the 2011 Census, showed that 86 per cent of the population was white, 7.5 per cent Asian and 3.3 per cent black. A further 2.2 per cent of people were of mixed ethnicity, while 1 per cent were from other groups such as gypsies or travellers.
From today, each force will have to publish the proportion of ethnic and female officers alongside population statistics so the public can assess if the police reflect the communities they serve. Mrs May is expected to tell the National Black Police Association conference in Birmingham today: ‘Increasing diversity in our police forces is not an optional extra. It goes right to the heart of this country’s historic principle of policing by consent.
‘We must ensure that the public have trust and confidence in the police, and that the police reflect the communities they serve.
‘The figures are simply not good enough. I hope these figures will provide chief constables with the information they need to identify areas for improvement and for the public to hold them to account.’
The Metropolitan Police was branded ‘institutionally racist’ after the death of Stephen Lawrence, but earlier this year its head said all of society was ‘institutionally racist’.
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, the Met Commissioner, said in June it was not only police forces that failed to represent the communities they served, and that the judiciary, medical profession, media and government were also dominated by the white middle classes.