Mayor Boris’s delicate putsch of Met chief Ian Blair in October distracted from, for a moment at least, the simmering racial tensions which now seem routine among London’s police. Before Blair’s ousting, the Metropolitan Black Police Assocation had even taken the seemingly extraordinary step of taking out advertisements discouraging minorities from applying to police the capital’s streets. Indeed, the situation can hardly be good when every one of the Met’s five most senior non-white officers have brought discrimination cases. Prospect asked Andrew Gilligan to take a view behind the scenes, and in particular to dig into the truth behind the occasionally colourful personalities (including Ali Dizaei, the man many think is central to race tensions in the force.) Gilligan takes an even-handed view:
“The Met’s problem is that both diagnoses are essentially correct. Many black officers in the force have grounds for complaint. But they have been badly served by the behaviour of the MBPA, and the standard-bearers of Met diversity, such as Dizaei.”
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Andrew Gillian repeats the seemingly unshakable matra of police community relations that the 1999 Stephen Lawrence Inquiry revealed ‘institutional racism’ in the police service, and in the Metropolitan Police in particular. Yet the finding will not, and does not, stand critical examination, as I have conclusively shown in an article based on peer-group reviewed research published in the Criminal Law Review in 2002.
The problem is that no-one will publish that comprehensive destruction of the work of the Macpherson Inquiry which, it might be thought, is as clear an example as could be imagined of precisely the ‘politically correct’ attiitude that the scribbling classes are too fond of catergorisng as typical of the leadership of the police.
The problems of the police are structural and political and have been created by the policy errors of successive governments going back to the Thatcher years. To focus, as Andrew Gilligan does, on personalities, and on ‘leadership’ as the ‘problem’ to which ‘a new tough commissioner’ is the solution, is merely to perpetuate and reinforce the policy errors which have brought us to the sorry pass he describes.
Searched London police in msn but for some reason found this page.great info
I still find it odd that there’s never a White Police Officers’ Association.