From adorning their uniforms with Pride flags to taking the knee at BLM marches, police officers regularly display their woke credentials. The latest trend is for the police to stand idly by as environmentalist protesters bring major cities to a standstill.
In the Critic, Charlie Peters examines the progressive networks behind woke policing.
One photo that elegantly encapsulates the appalling decline of British institutions is surely the Greater Manchester Police Gay Bee. The rainbow-coloured bumblebee outfit, worn by a police officer on a Pride march in Bolton in 2018, attracted ire from the public amidst the force’s many failures to deal with rocketing crime rates. Sadly, GMP’s Gay Bee did not buzz about in isolation. He has been joined by countless officers taking part in Pride marches, adorning their uniforms in rainbow designs. Even response cars were getting an LGBT-friendly lick of paint.
It’s not just sexual politics that the police have been slammed for adopting. In 2020, few incidents disturbed me more than the sight of police officers kneeling in front of protestors in central London as they defaced Churchill’s statue on BLM marches. More recently, the police have idly stood by as far-Left environmentalists have grafted to grind our economy to a halt. When they have been more active, they have often used their powers to clamp down on the “wrong” ideas, such as arresting people for silently praying or for tweeting about transgenderism.
The embarrassing spectacle of political campaigns being co-opted by the police was recently (and briefly) covered by a Minister when Home Secretary Suella Braverman set out her plans for “Common Sense Policing”. Speaking at the launch of an interesting new think tank call the Public Safety Foundation, Braverman took a swipe at politically-motivated constables, detailing her opposition to officers handing out cups of tea to eco-maniacs who had glued themselves to motorways or police chiefs spending precious resources on divisive critical race theory training. …
These nefarious interventions are downstream of a broader infrastructural deference to progressive causes. There are well over 200 ‘Staff Networks’ in the police, created by people who select according to personal characteristics such as ethnicity or religion. Leading examples include the National Black Police Association (NBPA) and the National Association of Muslim Police (NAMP). These groups are expanding, with Policy Exchange finding an 83% growth of national staff networks since the start of the last decade. The think tank claimed that the sectarian lobbying by some networks was “contrary to enabling forces to achieve their core mission”.
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