Police must acknowledge they are ‘institutionally racist’, says top officer

Police must acknowledge they are ‘institutionally racist’

Police forces need to acknowledge they are “institutionally racist”, says one of Britain’s top officers.

Gavin Stephens, chair of the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC), said policing needed to avoid being defensive and admit the scale of problems in order to gain the support of local communities.

The former Surrey chief constable who took over at the NPCC last April said: “What I’ve found, over the last 11 months, is that some groups simply won’t work with us or take us seriously if we don’t accept the diagnosis of institutional racism and say it out loud.

“That’s why I’ve [publicly accepted institutional racism.] I did it when I was chief in Surrey as well.”

He said policing needed to go further by recognising it extended to “other areas of discrimination” identified in the report by Dame Elish Angiolini into Met police officer Wayne Couzens’ behaviour before he murdered and raped Sarah Everard.

“You may have seen one of the Angiolini recommendations is about having a commitment to being anti-sexist, misogynistic and so on. I think we extend that. We need to be anti-discriminatory in all of its forms,” he told a conference on police leadership at Staffordshire University.

Gavin Stephens, Head of the National Police Chiefs’ Council – Geoff Pugh

His comments put him at odds with Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley who has rejected the term “institutional” which was used by the Dame Louise Casey to describe his force’s problems with racism, misogyny and homophobia.

While fully accepting the “diagnosis” of the Casey review, he said it was “ambiguous” and a “political term” that might imply most people in the Met were racist.

Former home secretary Suella Braverman, who backed Sir Mark, said: “It’s wrong to assert that the police are institutionally racist and for police chiefs to keep asserting it does a huge disservice to the thousands of brave men and women who out themselves forward to keep us all safe day in, day out.

“It also does nothing to improve community relations. Police leaders need to focus on cutting crime and keeping our streets safe, not virtue-signalling. Police chiefs should not be pandering to lobby groups. They are independent and must enforce the law without fear or favour.”

Some police chiefs including those of Scotland and Avon and Somerset have admitted institutional racism in their forces, which has provoked a backlash within their ranks from frontline officers.

Mr Stephens acknowledged it was a potentially divisive issue but suggested that the meaning of institutional racism had been misinterpreted.

“In amongst all that debate, I completely accept that – even today – there isn’t a settled position across all chiefs on institutional racism. There are differences of views about the use of the term and the language,” he said.

“Some [people], in my view, quite wrongly imply that it means widespread racism across the workforce.

“I think that it’s a leadership responsibility to explain that’s not what it means. That’s not what Sir William Macpherson meant by it. It’s not what Louise Casey meant by it either.”

Sir William defined it as: “The collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture, or ethnic origin.

“It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people.”

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