One of the UK’s top officials has called on leaders to admit that institutional racism affects the police, declaring “we are guilty according to the accused” and blaming failures on law enforcement leadership.
Neil Basu, deputy commissioner of the metropolitan police and former counter-terrorism chief, told the Guardian that “positive discrimination” should be introduced to increase the number of ethnic minority officers in the ranks.
The intervention of Basu, the highest ethnic minority police officer in the country, comes on the second anniversary of the assassination of George Floyd by the US police. Protests sparked by the assassination in the UK led police chiefs to launch a career plan this week, seen as a historic attempt to restore strained relations and reverse a decline in confidence.
They admitted ashamed of the continued racial bias, but not of institutional racism, a finding made in 1999 by the Macpherson Report on police errors that set free Stephen Lawrence’s racist killers.
In a Guardian article, Basu speaks on behalf of a minority of England and Wales chiefs when he says: “The Achilles heel of the plain is the inability to galvanize all police chiefs to accept that we being racist institutionally and for apologizing for that and our post-Windrush story.
“If we can’t accept that we need to change and apologize to the people we hurt, how can we expect them to trust us?”
Basu had previously argued in 2019 that the police were not institutionally racist, but changed his mind after Floyd’s assassination, prompting discussions in which ethnic minority police personnel explained to their bosses the discrimination and the challenges they faced while wearing the uniform.
Basu said: “We are guilty of the accusation and the evidence can be found in the voices of our staff and communities of difference, and in the still inexplicable and disproportionate data that denote some of our poor policies and practices.”
He takes his share of the blame, with black confidence in the police below that of whites, and despite repeated claims by police leaders that they have reformed in the 23 years since the Macpherson report. Basu writes: “This is an indictment of our top leadership report after Macpherson, not the vast majority of our frontline staff, who do not deserve this stigma created by a minority in their ranks and the failure of their leadership to promote diversity.I am as guilty as anyone.
“We may be better than we were, but we are complacent. Society has moved faster and farther than we have.”
Citing investigations that show that the police will take six decades to have the same proportion of ethnic minority agents in their ranks as in the population, Basu calls for the law to be amended to allow for positive discrimination. One form of this was tested as part of the general police reforms in Northern Ireland and was considered to help reduce Catholic distrust.
Basu writes: “No one I know with protected characteristics wants positive discrimination – I didn’t do it 30 years ago – but now I’m a deputy commissioner, not a PC struggling to be recognized. It operated under limited time circumstances in Northern Ireland and may be needed in the rest of the UK. “
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Basu is said to have harassed Interior Secretary Priti Patel by calling for positive discrimination in a private meeting. It was a long-standing policy of police chiefs and was supported by Bernard Hogan-Howe when he was Met commissioner.
Basu and Hogan-Howe recently applied to be directors general of the National Crime Agency, seen as the second most important job in the police force. Basu reached the last two, Hogan-Howe did not. But after a Downing Street intervention, the process has been ruled out and will be restarted to try to help Hogan-Howe get the job done.
In addition to race, confidence among women has dropped in police following revelations about the misogyny and murder of Sarah Everard by a Met officer. Basu says the plan to resolve the police racial crisis can help bridge gaps with other communities: “The black community is not the only part of society that is losing trust and confidence in us. The actions we take in this plan they are transferable.
“We can and must reconnect with the public, as Robert Peel wanted when he first said that the public was the police and the police were the public. In 1829 it was an idea ahead of its time. The year 2022 is an ideal we have yet to fully realize. “