There is no point grumbling about police racist anti-racist policies until a number of foundational myths upon which these policies are contingent are dismantled. The most beguiling is: the police must be reflective of the community they serve. We have Robert Peel to thank/blame: “The police are the public and the public are the police.” It sounds sweet and sensible. To win the trust of the community, the police should look like the community. Emotionally it makes sense, yet the pale cast of thought reveals it to be a dud. Until this foundational myth of community-reflective policing is dissolved, the moral debility of the police’s racist anti-racist ideology and tactics will necessarily remain in place.
The modern iteration of Peel’s original idea was expanded in Sir William Macpherson’s 1999 report into the death of Stephen Lawrence. He wrote:
The police service must be representative of the communities they serve. A diverse workforce is an essential tool in creating a service which has the trust and confidence of all elements of society.
Gone went any primacy of competence, merit, qualifications, strength, fitness or intelligence; instead, the police must be reflective of the policed. The Sherriff of Nottingham would have been a much more acceptable figure if he was a church mouse rather than a wolf.
Such sentiments quickly spawned into wider society with Sir John Parker’s 2016 report into the ethnic make-up of corporate boardrooms coming to the same conclusion: “The boardroom should reflect the society
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Always the women.
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The police are not a social service.
Their job is to serve the Law and to keep the peace, prevent crime, detect crime, bring those accused of crime to justice. That’s all.
They stopped doing that – it was old fashioned, Dixon of Dock Green style policing – in the 1990s when “modern” policing took over.
The police are not a social service.
Could have fooled me.
Of course, if they were truly reflective of their communities, about half of them would be right wing and so recognise ‘anti-racism’ as racism, and the average IQ would be 100+, so the idea would fizzle out rather quickly.
Will someone with more than the two little bollocks I was blessed with, please post a comment full of dreadful expletives, finishing with the line ‘Now that I have your attention, Mods, can you please explain what is wrong with the comments section, and tell us when it will be sorted, please.’
The main problem is that having a diverse workforce and having the best qualified workforce for the job is mutually exclusive. But no one wants to say that, it leads to cancellation at best or arrest and punishment for so called “hate crime”
Hear, hear!
I wonder why British athletics hasn’t adopted the same policy?
“the police must be reflective of the community they serve. “
So the filth will be beating women to death in Birmingham for not wearing a Burqa?
“the police must be reflective of the community they serve. “
To be fair to Peel, that was a reasonable position when the community was almost entirely what we now call native, white and British by birth. It was one of the reasons why a “cop killer” would be dealt with harshly by the criminal community – because “the cops and the robbers” were likely to have come from the same community.
It is no longer appropriate because we have a variety of ghettoised ethnic communities which do not understand the history of British policing; don’t respect it and live by their own Law/Rules.
Well the psychopath that attempted to murder that poor guy in Belfast was a policeman in Sudan. It seems they’ve got quite a different idea about what constitutes crime and lawful behaviour over there, and obviously the Islamic world in general. This is the problem. Therefore it seems a ridiculous aim to hire more of them just because of DEI targets. This is also why I find the existence of this National Association of Muslim Police problematic. They can’t be trusted to be impartial and not favour their own. NAMP was set up in 2007, so where were they when the Pakistani rape gangs were doing their thing across the country? Turning a blind eye along with the rest of the Muslim community, probably, but this organized national crime network would definitely have been on their radar;
”A Sudanese man charged with attempted murder after the Belfast knife attack served as a policeman in Khartoum, friends have told The Telegraph.”
https://archive.ph/0cWpm
NAMP was set up in 2007, so where were they when the Pakistani rape gangs were doing their thing across the country.
Driving the victims to the rapists if I recall correctly.
Stop right there… as soon as you’re on a judge’s bench, you’re ipse facto privileged and powerful. So the question is whether you will use that privilege and power well. I’m not sure that history teaches that giving power to those unused to power is necessarily good for justice.
PS – when can we get a sensible comment fomat back, please?
Indeed it’s a ridiculous idea – as I’ve said about “diversity” the key question is what exactly are we using to identify what is “diverse”. Same with “community”. I suppose some would say I am a member of the roller skating community. Of course the “communities” chosen are simply a reflection of what those pushing these policies want to foist on us. When I was a boy it mainly meant black people, then women got added, then got embarrassed and added “minority ethnic” but they didn’t mean Japanese people, then we had gay men, later lesbians, then they went big on disabled, trans and so on. These days it probably mainly means “muslim”. Community if it’s to mean anything has to mean everyone, not myriad subgroups. Of course these bastards try to portray us as being divisive but they are the people putting everyone into categories of their choice, and we mainly think people should be treated as individuals.