Senior officers in West Yorkshire Police – the force recently in the news for blocking white job applicants – intervened to ensure that an ethnic minority candidate who failed her interview was given the job, according to leaked documents seen by the Telegraph.
The female officer was initially rejected but eventually given a post after her case was taken up by the force’s chief officer team, which includes Chief Constable John Robins.
To get around her failure, West Yorkshire Police then scrapped interviews for officers transferring to the force, the documents show.
The move will increase pressure on the force, one of the UK’s largest, which has already been accused of prioritising ethnic minority candidates with “appalling racist hiring” practices.
West Yorkshire Police used the policy change to offer jobs to six other ethnic minority officers who had failed their interviews or had been rejected from shortlists in the previous eight months.
Eight white officers who had been rejected at the interview stage were also offered jobs as a consequence.
One email seen by the Telegraph shows that the female candidate was allowed to join before pre-employment checks were carried out on the orders of the chief officer team.
A senior officer involved in recruitment made an official complaint to the police watchdog.
An insider told the Telegraph: “West Yorkshire Police has lost the plot in becoming obsessed by race. It can’t be right that officers who failed interviews were then given jobs.”
But West Yorkshire Police said a complaint that the police constable had been “given favourable treatment” had been investigated “thoroughly” and no evidence had been found to support the allegations.
The force is under scrutiny after the Telegraph first disclosed that white British applicants are being temporarily blocked from jobs as new recruits to boost diversity.
A whistleblower complained to this newspaper that white candidates were being discriminated against illegally to increase the proportion of officers from under-represented groups, a claim the force denies.
Last month, Chief Constable Robins said that he stood by previous comments where he said that he wanted discrimination against white candidates to be legal.
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