Friday, January 05, 2024
Are the police ‘institutionally racist’?
The Guardian reports on the view of the leader of Britain’s police chiefs’ organisation that policing is institutionally racist.
Gavin Stephens, the chair of the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) has called for a fundamental redesign of national policies and practices to eliminate discrimination, saying that black people should no longer experience disproportionate use of force, and that too little progress had been made to reform policing, with some leaders slow to accept the size of the challenge:
Stephens – elected by his fellow chief constables to lead their representative body – emphasised it was his personal view that discrimination in policing operated at an “institutional level”.
In an interview with the Guardian, he said: “It’s a leadership responsibility for us to describe to them what it [institutional racism] means and what it doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean that all police officers are racist.
“The way our policies, procedures [and] training have been designed and implemented for many years have not had the voices of black people involved in the design, the implementation, of those practices. And as a consequence of that, we get disproportionate outcomes in places where there shouldn’t be disproportionate outcomes.
“The most helpful discussion for policing to have in the future is how we redesign the policies, the practices, the implementation, of policing to remove that discrimination.”
Stephens’ remarks come as policing continues to wrestle with the issue of whether it should accept it suffers from institutional discrimination, a debate dating back more than 30 years.
His intervention will add to pressure on the heads of England’s biggest forces to adopt the idea – including the Metropolitan police commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley. Rowley refused to accept the terms “institutionally racist” and “institutionally misogynistic” after a damning report last year, with the Met commissioner claiming their meanings were unclear.
Those findings, by Louise Casey in March after the murder of Sarah Everard in 2021, were contained in the second report to find police to be institutionally racist. The first, by Sir William Macpherson in 1999, followed an inquiry into failings that allowed the racist killers of Stephen Lawrence to escape justice. Police leaders accepted the findings, then later claimed to have reformed the service to the extent that it no longer applied.
Stephens said his personal view was that the reports were correct. He said: “The problems that we need to solve across policing are at the institutional level and they need institutional changes. Whether you look at the Macpherson definition in the Stephen Lawrence report, or whether you look at Louise Casey’s definition, my personal view is that they apply to policing.”
Asked for clarity on whether his personal view was that “police are institutionally racist”, Stephens replied “yes”, while emphasising that his reasoning for reaching that conclusion was important.
That such a senior police officer has now acknowledged the institutional problems facing Britain's police forces is important, but until his view achieves widespread aceptance by his peers the problem will continue to persist.
Gavin Stephens, the chair of the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) has called for a fundamental redesign of national policies and practices to eliminate discrimination, saying that black people should no longer experience disproportionate use of force, and that too little progress had been made to reform policing, with some leaders slow to accept the size of the challenge:
Stephens – elected by his fellow chief constables to lead their representative body – emphasised it was his personal view that discrimination in policing operated at an “institutional level”.
In an interview with the Guardian, he said: “It’s a leadership responsibility for us to describe to them what it [institutional racism] means and what it doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean that all police officers are racist.
“The way our policies, procedures [and] training have been designed and implemented for many years have not had the voices of black people involved in the design, the implementation, of those practices. And as a consequence of that, we get disproportionate outcomes in places where there shouldn’t be disproportionate outcomes.
“The most helpful discussion for policing to have in the future is how we redesign the policies, the practices, the implementation, of policing to remove that discrimination.”
Stephens’ remarks come as policing continues to wrestle with the issue of whether it should accept it suffers from institutional discrimination, a debate dating back more than 30 years.
His intervention will add to pressure on the heads of England’s biggest forces to adopt the idea – including the Metropolitan police commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley. Rowley refused to accept the terms “institutionally racist” and “institutionally misogynistic” after a damning report last year, with the Met commissioner claiming their meanings were unclear.
Those findings, by Louise Casey in March after the murder of Sarah Everard in 2021, were contained in the second report to find police to be institutionally racist. The first, by Sir William Macpherson in 1999, followed an inquiry into failings that allowed the racist killers of Stephen Lawrence to escape justice. Police leaders accepted the findings, then later claimed to have reformed the service to the extent that it no longer applied.
Stephens said his personal view was that the reports were correct. He said: “The problems that we need to solve across policing are at the institutional level and they need institutional changes. Whether you look at the Macpherson definition in the Stephen Lawrence report, or whether you look at Louise Casey’s definition, my personal view is that they apply to policing.”
Asked for clarity on whether his personal view was that “police are institutionally racist”, Stephens replied “yes”, while emphasising that his reasoning for reaching that conclusion was important.
That such a senior police officer has now acknowledged the institutional problems facing Britain's police forces is important, but until his view achieves widespread aceptance by his peers the problem will continue to persist.
