New report demonstrates that urgent action needed to tackle deep rooted and persistent racial disparities in Policing
(Photo by Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)
The Home Affairs Select Committee is calling for urgent action to tackle low levels of BME recruitment and retention, unjustified racial disparities in the use of stop and search and other police powers, and a worrying decline of confidence in the police among some BME communities.
Twenty-two years on from the publication of the Macpherson report that followed the Inquiry into the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence, the Committee has found that whilst policing has changed for the better in many areas, there are still serious and deep rooted racial disparities, and that neither police forces nor governments have taken race equality seriously enough for too long.
The report adopts as a key finding an admission made in a Guardian interviewby Martin Hewitt, the chair of the National Police Chiefsâ Council, that race undermines policingâs legitimacy and effectiveness. It also says confidence in the police is lower among some BAME communities than among white people, and that the gap is growing.
Hewitt welcomed the report: â[The committeeâs] thorough report does justice to the significant impact that Sir William Macpherson has had on society since 1999. Since then, policing has changed, but as this report makes clear, not far or fast enough to secure the confidence of all communities and especially black people,â he said.
West Midlands Police accused of failing to recruit enough black and ethnic minority police officers
Failure to recruit ethnic minority officers undermines legitimacy and trust and is completely inexcusable
Latest news email updates straight to your inboxInvalid EmailSomething went wrong, please try again later.
Subscribe
We use your sign-up to provide content in ways you ve consented to and to improve our understanding of you. This may include adverts from us and 3rd parties based on our understanding. You can unsubscribe at any time.More info
Thank you for subscribingWe have more newslettersShow meSee ourprivacy notice
West Midlands Police is still failing to recruit enough black and other ethnic minority police officers, an inquiry has found. The failure of police forces to represent the communities they serve undermines legitimacy and trust and is completely inexcusable , said the Home Affairs Select Committee.
Deep-rooted racial disparities remain in policing, report finds morningstaronline.co.uk - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from morningstaronline.co.uk Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Structural racism: what it is and how it works
The Conversation
01 Jul 2021, 04:42 GMT+10
From the moment it was published, the UK s Commission on Racial and Ethnic Disparities report was met with a media storm driven by both its supporters and detractors. Months later, amid continued division over the report s position that racism isn t pronounced in the UK, there s still some confusion about what exactly some of the report s buzzwords mean.
The terms structural racism and institutional racism are among many of the concepts that have been mentioned in relation to the report s position on whether or not racism is ingrained in the UK.