Policing the force

Last year, Home Secretary Jack Straw set a target of over 8,000 black and Asian officers to be recruited over 10 years. This was an outcome of the Lord Macpherson Inquiry into the police investigation of the racist murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence. Macpherson found entrenched institutionalised racism in police forces across the country. Among his suggestions to deal with this was to make the police force more ethnically representative.

Currently, Asian and black officers are an insignificant component of the force. Even in areas like London, where 25.5 per cent of the population is non-white, black and Asian officers form under four per cent of the force. London’s metropolitan police will have to recruit 5,662 ethnic minority officers to meet its target. However, parliamentary data from earlier this year shows that they are not succeeding. The police forces with the highest targets – the Met, West Midlands, Greater Manchester, and West Yorkshire – are all failing to do so. In West Yorkshire, in fact, the number of officers from ethnic minority communities has fallen in the last two years from 133 to 127.

Guardian columnist Gary Younge says that young black people stay away from the police because of their experience of it. “With unemployment three times higher among young black men than their white counterparts, it is not as if they couldn’t do with the jobs… They are staying away because they keep falling foul of the law – not the law of the land but the law of probabilities that says they are far more likely to be humiliated or incarcerated than their white friends,” he observed.

Even where police forces succeed in recruiting officers from the ethnic minority communities, they are unable to retain them. It is widely accepted that this is because of the “canteen culture”, defined by an acceptance of racist abuse and racist jokes at the expense of black and Asians officers. A black woman police constable who quit last year described years of racist abuse in the Met. “They would use comments like BIF, which meant black, ignorant and f*** and `groid’, short for negroid,” she said.

Asian lawyer Imran Khan, who represented the family of Stephen Lawrence like many others in ethnic minority communities, feels that he has trouble recommending that non-white people join the police force. Khan said, “Essentially, the difficulty stems from the institutional nature of the problem. While the canteen culture still flourishes the police service is not going to welcome and retain black recruits.” He was criticised by the head of the Metropolitan Police for his negative approach.

But Nigerian born Ike Eze-Anyika, who quit the Met because of racism and has recently published a novel Canteen Culture, couldn’t agree more. He says that the police promotes a secret self-reinforcing culture which militates against anyone rocking the boat. Anyone who complains is forced out, as Sergeant Gurpal Singh Virdi, who was sacked in March this year, found out. Virdi had complained to seniors about the way his force handled a racist attack. After this he was set up — charged with sending racist hate mail to fellow officers — and sacked. Earlier this month, a tribunal ruled in his favour saying that he had been the victim of racial discrimination.

A Home Office study proves that these individual cases are not isolated. It found that 60 per cent of black and Asian officers claim to have experienced racism at the hands of their colleagues. It also found evidence of pervasive racism in the recruitment and retention of non-white officers, with ethnic minority officers twice as likely to resign and three times more likely to be sacked than their white peers.

For those who stay, on an average, it takes 12 months longer for an Asian constable (and 18 months longer for a black constable) to get promoted to the rank of sergeant than a white constable. All in all, not an attractive proposition.