A veteran Metropolitan Police officer has accused Scotland Yard of being captured by the “woke mind virus”, claiming the force has spent more than a decade pursuing equality of outcome between ethnic groups rather than equal treatment under the law. Rick Prior, former chairman of the Metropolitan Police Federation, makes the claims in a foreword to a Free Speech Union report into the policies and training materials that inevitably led to the police believing Henry Nowak’s murderer over his victim. The Telegraph has the story:
Scotland Yard has been captured by the “woke mind virus” and no longer treats citizens equally under the law, a veteran police officer has claimed.
Rick Prior, the former chairman of the Metropolitan Police Federation, said the force had prioritised equalising outcomes among different ethnic groups over ensuring equality of opportunity for more than a decade.
He said this had led to a loss of skills in the force and had affected the policing of London’s streets.
He also claimed the force had rejected his suggestions that officers should be banned from wearing political symbols, such as rainbow lanyards representing the LGBT community, after he was invited to draw up new guidelines on Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) last summer.
Forces across the country are facing an ongoing row about the impact of EDI policy in policing in the wake of the murder of Henry Nowak in Southampton.
The 18 year-old university student was arrested and handcuffed as he was dying after his killer, Vickrum Digwa, who is Sikh, falsely claimed that Mr Nowak had racially abused him and knocked his turban off.
Forces are under mounting pressure to review their EDI policies and rethink their Race Action Plans.
In a foreword to a report by the Free Speech Union (FSU) into the Nowak case, Mr Prior described his concerns about the state of the country’s largest force.
He wrote: “It has been clear to me that for more than a decade, the Met has been pursuing equity of outcome between ethnic groups rather than equality of opportunity and equal treatment under the law. I have seen it in the forced rotation of skilled firearms officers to manufacture ‘churn’ and diversify armed policing, at great cost in lost skills.
“I saw it in 2022, when two very senior officers were found by a tribunal to have racially discriminated against a white inspector, by removing him from a promotion process and inserting a less qualified black candidate instead.”
Mr Prior added that after the death of George Floyd in 2020 in the United States, the ideology of pursuing equal outcomes had “shifted from policy backrooms to operational policing through the London Race Action Plan”.
He continued: “Even worse is the national Police Anti-Racism Commitment issued in March last year, a smoking gun of two-tier policing, which baldly states that its goal of ‘producing equality of policing outcomes … does not mean treating everyone the same’ or being ‘colourblind’.
“I have seen this logic in action. One very senior officer told me the Met had what she termed a ‘disproportionality matrix’: a system to assess which ‘low-level’ crimes are likely to bring the Met disproportionately into conflict with the black community if it seeks to enforce the law.”
Worth reading in full, and you can read the Free Speech Union’s report – ‘With Fear and Favour: Britain’s Policing Emergency’ – here.
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The common factor is these instances appears largely to be female. Commended police officer Lorne Castle was fired after a female rookie complained he was too rough when he tackled a youth with a knife and didn’t treat the youth with respect. The complaint was upheld by the Chief Constable (female). Nothing happened to the youth.
But the Prime Liar denies that there is any two-tier policing and two-tier justice of any kind.
He is obviously incapable of following the evidence …..
Time to to disband all police forces and start again. The Keystone Cops have more credibility than the UK’s police forces.
And who was Home Secretary 10 years ago. Among her other achievements was the College of Policing. That is a quango that decides policing policy, audits performance and makes law through its recommendations which no force can ignore.
The idea that our elected officials in parliament make the law is total bullshit.
The things they call regulations, guidance, policy are all in effect laws. They are rules that we have to live by or are affected by and cannot avoid.
Most of it isn’t made by elected MPs but by bureaucrats and hand picked officials, as you point out.
The story of our democracy and how we ultimately decide how things are done in our society is a fairytale they teach us and we chose to believe because facing the actual truth is just too unsettling.
Equality is a long held and widely recognised socialist objective. Most people believe in it to a large degree and don’t realise the mind trick that is being played on them over and over again.
Equality of anything is pure utopia. The pursuit of utopias generally results in dystopias.
We aren’t equal and can’t be because we aren’t all the same, don’t have the same circumstances, and let’s be clear, don’t deserve the same things either.
The moment you make equality your goal – for anything – you are embarking on a dehumanising process. And that includes equality of opportunity, which most people think they believe in.
If you get your first principles wrong, you’re going to end up with this kind of crap. No matter how hard you try to avoid it.
One of the verbal judo tricks is to associate ‘equality’ with ‘fairness’ – it’s an easy trick to pull off, but it is a fundamental misdirection.
Most ordinary people want ‘fairness’ in the sense that good people benefit and bad people don’t. And when they see some particular ‘group’ apparently receive better treatment than they deserve that’s unfairness – even if it was intended to correct some previous inequality.
Nothing in reality is equal.
Cultures not equal.
There is a reason why Western Civilisation was pre-eminent.
3000 year old historical heritage including Christianity.
Multi Kulti is a Marxist tool to destroy that legacy.
I think it would be wrong to have laws that applied differently to different categories of citizen, as they did in the United States during slavery. I also think it doesn’t make much sense to deny people opportunities based on criteria unconnected to whatever it is that you are selecting for. The extent to which this can be enforced and legislated for without ending up with the opposite of what you were supposedly aiming for is doubtful.
I don’t think reasonable people would disagree with any of that. But to use the word “equality” to explain any of that obfuscates more than clarifies, in my view.
Uniformity, consistency, fairness explain it better than the very loaded term “equal”.
It might seem like nitpicking, but words matter. Ask socialists, who attack the meaning of words all the tine and very deliberately to shape reality.
Yes, “equality” is one of those words that has such an elastic meaning as to be useless, or worse. In my experience it’s usually used to deceive by people who have an agenda.
“The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.”
Aristotle
Leftists have compartmentalised their brain, no wonder they are mad. On the one hand everyone is equal but but they know they are not the same. People cleave to their groups, have cultural and intellectual differences etc. As they can’t cope with this nonsense idea they are desperate for the ‘reason’ and of course it’s the original sinner, being a whitey, and the sinful behaviour of muh-racism. This dangerous ideology is only one step away from genocide of white people because you are against the sin why not do away with the sinner?
Equality of opportunity is the only fair equality. Anything else is totally unfair.