If anyone doubted the need for that much-mocked practice, race awareness training, or the distance that it seems to have carried the Metropolitan police in the past 25 years, they should read the following quotes from a 1983 report, "Police and People in London," by the Policy Studies Institute.
"I call them niggers myself," said one Met officer. "Whilst not being very intelligent, they have this low animal cunning," was how another put it. A third said: "Well, they're used to running round in the jungle, plucking what they want from the trees…"
Then, the force's racism was unashamed and routine. Now, a single racist remark can end an officer's career. Then, the Met had 180 ethnic minority officers, the most senior an inspector. Now, it has 2,600 out of 31,000, the most senior of whom, assistant commissioner Tarique Ghaffur, is third-in-command of the force.
Yet racial harmony is as elusive as ever. Ghaffur is suing his employer for failing to promote him and stripping him of his responsibilities for the Olympics earlier this year. In August he held a press conference accusing the commissioner, Ian Blair, of racism. Blair's deputy subsequently told Ghaffur publicly to "shut up." Ghaffur was then suspended.
Every one of the next five most senior non-white officers has also brought a discrimination case against the Met. The Metropolitan Black Police Association (MBPA) has taken the unprecedented step of calling for a black recruitment boycott, after its national president, Ali Dizaei, one of the five, joined Ghaffur under official suspension. The Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA) is holding a formal enquiry into the mess.
The Met's problem is that both diagnoses are essentially correct. Many black officers in the force have grounds for complaint. But they have been badly served by the behaviour of the MBPA, and the standard-bearers of Met diversity, such as Dizaei and Ghaffur.
Ghaffur himself may be overplaying his hand. One of the interview panel that refused his promotion, the impeccably liberal Green London assembly and MPA member Jenny Jones, says: "I'm afraid Mr Ghaffur was not a strong candidate. His responses were not acute and he didn't even come close to the best candidate. There was no question of racial bias in this." The assistant commissioner's removal from the Olympics command may also have had something to do with the lack of a proper policing plan for the games three years on, as the National Audit Office recently pointed out.
Ghaffur sees things differently. He is known to feel that he deserved greater reward for his performance after 7/7 when, as the senior Muslim police officer in Britain, he was thrust onto the frontline. It is also true that Blair and Ghaffur did not get on. Blair was not an "inclusive" manager; he liked to surround himself with a small group of trusted advisers. Ghaffur was not among them. Several sources in the police and Whitehall confirm that Blair did not like or rate Ghaffur, and also thought he leaked to the press.
But was this a problem of racism, or a personality conflict? And was Ghaffur's very public response proportionate? According to one senior ethnic minority politician, his difficulty is not uncommon: "One of the problems for senior people from a minority background is that there is no serious metric of self-reflection. One is told that one is the 'first or most senior' this or that. There is usually no one else in the frame that one can test oneself against, to know if the praise is merited."
As for the MBPA, its behaviour has horrified some of its own members. David Michael, its co-founder and former chairman, disagrees strongly with the recruitment boycott and accuses the current chairman, Alfred John, and Dizaei of having "launched this action off their own bat without consultation with the wider membership."
Among the MBPA's strongest supporters, and currently threatening to call for the end of co-operation between black Londoners and the Met, is Lee Jasper, former adviser to the ex-mayor, Ken Livingstone. Jasper was forced to resign his City Hall job over allegations of cronyism, and has since lost influence in sections of the black community. But he is a key advocate of the politics of racial grievance, and may have influenced the course the MBPA has taken. (Confusingly, Livingstone himself recently publicly defended Blair's record on race issues.)
Many sources say that the whole crisis has become entangled, too, with the personal interests of Dizaei, an intelligent and charismatic figure who was cleared of criminal charges in 2003 but who faces serious new disciplinary allegations, including misuse of a police credit card, and interfering with a police investigation. "This is all about Ali Dizaei," says a source close to the events. "He doesn't want to be in the shit on his own, so he starts breathing in the ear of everyone with a complaint, saying we have to stand together."
Yet the fact that some of the highest-profile race cases are questionable should not delude us that all is well. Until recently, there was an element of denial among parts of London's liberal establishment, including the until recently Labour-controlled MPA: a belief that police racism had been "fixed" with the plethora of initiatives introduced after the Macpherson report into the death of the black teenager, Stephen Lawrence.
The broader statistical picture remains worrying. Though London's overall proportion of black police officers has risen, it has done so only slightly—from 7 per cent in 2005, to 8.3 per cent now. (The Met polishes the figures by lumping in community support officers, who are more diverse.)
After Macpherson, the home office set a target that by 2010 the Met should reflect the proportion of ethnic minorities in the city it policed: 26.2 per cent. It will come nowhere near this. Instead, the target is to be abolished.
True, black recruitment is rising: the percentage of the non-white intake now approaches the target. But black officers in the Met are twice as likely to leave in their first six months as whites, and they are two-and-a-half times more likely to be disciplined by the force. The Met makes much of the fact that it has recently lost only five tribunal claims where race was a factor—but in the last five years it has paid out £1.2m to settle racism claims, often precisely to avoid such hearings.
And whatever the justice of Ghaffur's case, there can be no doubt that black officers do find it harder to win promotion than whites. No black officer, apart from Dizaei, has been promoted to the most senior ranks in the Met for many years, despite several strong candidates.
The impact of all this is arguably felt most on the streets. Black victims of crime are around seven percentage points less satisfied than whites with the Met's service, a gap that has been widening. The Met also makes far more use of stop-and-search than any other British force. And London blacks are four times more likely to be stopped and searched than whites.
Some black leaders, like the Tory parliamentary candidate Shaun Bailey, say this is the price of safety; and it is true that knife and gun criminals are disproportionately black. But it still causes great resentment. With only around 12 per cent of stops resulting in arrest, the question is whether it does more harm than good. The impact on relations with the Muslim community of no-reason-needed stops under new terror laws, and the fallout from sometimes heavy-handed raids on suspects, has also been negative.
It is easy to see how the very public disaffection of the most senior non-white officers—whether justified or not—will, at least in the short term, make matters even worse. Ghaffur, in particular, spent a lot of time meeting Asian and black groups in London and has a big personal following.
It's also easy to understand why some of the Met's white officers have become either infuriated, or intimidated, or both, by the perceived imperatives of race politics. Macpherson's diagnosis of "institutional racism" is still deeply resented by many highly professional white officers. One commander told me furiously how he faced an official complaint of racism after cancelling a black officer's secondment to the CID, even though the man had proven unfit for detective work. Others have been unwilling to enter the race minefield, meaning that what are often initially quite small problems are left to fester into much bigger ones.
The Met's problem, though, may be that it has engaged too far in race politics—in that parallel universe of black police associations, consultative groups and community forums—without changing enough on the ground. "The station sergeants set the tone and there is still a problem with some of them," says one long-standing anti-racism campaigner. "If you're going to tackle this, you've got to do it at the coalface. You've got to be brutally tough with those sergeants, and if they don't cooperate, get rid of them." The panels that fast-track officers for big jobs are still mainly white, with conventional ideas about what makes a top police officer.
The mess, in short, is a problem of leadership as well as race. Though Blair proclaimed himself a "diversity champion," and sincerely wanted to be one, he proved unable to put his words into effect; unable, it seems, to get to grips with hold-out sergeants or aggrieved members of his senior management team. Much depends on who succeeds him.
The optimistic scenario is as follows: a new, tough commissioner, enjoying the respect that Blair lacked, can attack some of the force's race politicians, making clear that the MBPA must put its house in order or fold—while getting to grips with the practical barriers to equal opportunity in the Met. London's mayor, Boris Johnson, can provide the external political support the commissioner needs to drive change through. It will be interesting, too, to see if black Londoners take any notice of the MBPA's call not to join up.
But after the charges of racism flung at Johnson during the election campaign, the risk is that the mayor will feel too hamstrung to tackle the race-mongers. The pessimistic scenario is that it all gets filed as "too difficult"—and that would be bad news both for the police, and for black Londoners.
