Institutional racism is a stain on our police force – we can ignore it no longer

Is racism still a problem in Britain’s police forces? In particular, does the nation’s biggest service, the Metropolitan Police, still suffer from what has been called “institutional racism”?

The evidence suggests that, whatever label may be attached to it, racism is still indeed an evil that successive police chiefs and ministers have failed to eradicate. It also seems to be that, in some instances, matters are getting worse.

In such circumstances, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that there are cultural, “institutional” factors at work, as successive enquiries have found and as some senior officers now admit. Despite respecting the bravery and dedication of individual officers, this is a cause for deep concern.

Our exclusive on the increasing numbers of employment tribunal cases launched on the grounds of racial discrimination in the Met shows that something has been going badly wrong in the way the force treats its officers of colour. Data obtained by The Independent shows that cases brought against the Met on the grounds of racism more than doubled from 2022 to 2023.

For a case to end up in a formal tribunal means that the existing internal mechanisms for dealing with complaints have not been effective, itself an indicator that those procedures aren’t delivering justice and do not carry the confidence of ethnic minority personnel. For anyone to enter into legal proceedings with their employer is a forbidding task, fraught with risk, and for these reasons, the volume of tribunal cases gives something of a misleadingly low reading on the incidence of racist employment practices.

Many smaller, more casual or nuanced instances of unfair discrimination will not make it to a courtroom, and there is no reason to doubt that these may too be on the increase.

Just as the police mirror the society they serve, so it is that cultural changes and the political climate can affect the attitudes of police officers. In recent years, particularly on social media, there has been a distressing rise in the quantity of deep racial hatred of all kinds. This was seen most visibly in the reaction to

the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, but it has spread and become more and more open.

Some political leaders must bear some share of blame for the language they use, particularly about Muslim people – with talk of “Islamists” running London, of “invaders” and, perhaps most grievously, gaslighting the very people who have been the victims of racism.

Despite the representation of ethnic minorities in the cabinet, Britain is far from a society of truly equal life chances. The attitude of some in government seems to be that all would be well if only everyone stopped talking about racism, and that Islamophobia is meaningless; sadly, of course, the exact opposite is true.

Increasingly overt racism has been reported. One serving Black police officer, who has raised a grievance over race discrimination, says that racism was now “blatant”, adding: “There are also a lot of angry white people in the force, who are upset by so-called ‘wokeness’ and take it out on people even more.” It is not long since two Met officers were found to have “dehumanised” two black murder victims “for their own amusement” by taking and sharing photos from the scene where they lay dead, inflicting more hurt on the bereaved.

Evidence from the employment tribunals corroborates what Baroness Casey recently found during her official investigation into racism, misogyny and homophobia in the force. Prompted by the Sarah Everard case and other scandals, and the BLM protests, Baroness Casey’s report found that Black officers are 81 per cent more likely to be in the misconduct system than their white counterparts. She concluded that was not some maverick statistic: “There are people in the Met with racist attitudes, and Black, Asian and ethnic minority officers and staff are more likely to experience racism, discrimination and bullying at their hands.”

Such trends are doubly unfortunate because getting more Black people into the police and progressing through the ranks has always been thought of as one of the best ways to dilute any racist tendencies. If white officers are actively or subconsciously holding back and deterring Black officers from making a career serving the public, it makes the challenge of reforming attitudes and policies still more intractable. Policing by consent – the foundational principle of the Metropolitan Police – can’t operate in a force that doesn’t wish to reflect the multicultural make-up of the population.

It’s worth stressing how many police officers work in dangerous circumstances, and how many of them are anything but racist. Many officers acknowledge that the racism is institutional, even though Mark Rowley, the commissioner of the Met, baulks at the term. Yet it can’t be denied that for the past half century and more, Britain’s Black community has suffered too often from its dealings with the police.

The Windrush generation, who came to rebuild post-war Britain, suffered from overt racism, including from the police. After the 1981 riots, the Scarman report highlighted how the police had ceased to serve fairly and support Black communities, and had become adversarial. The murder of Stephen Lawrence

in 1993 remains not fully resolved; it haunts the nation, just as the Met is haunted by the later inquiry by Sir William Macpherson and its verdict of “institutional racism”. Last year’s Casey report confronted us all with the lack of progress in recent years.

Police leaders nationally are at least aware of the problem and have launched the Police Race Action Plan. As yet, though, there seems little tangible evidence of improvement, and the employment tribunal figures suggest that in some respects the treatment of Black policemen and women is deteriorating in a dire fashion.

The re-elected mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, and, in all likelihood, a new home secretary later in the year will need to push the Met and all the other forces to end the racism we know exists in the police. It is too corrosive to the cohesion of society to be denied and neglected any longer.

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