The racist Metropolitan police service?
jon gower davies, 19 April 2012
The Macpherson inquiry of 1997/9 into the murder of Stephen Lawrence successfully imposed upon the MPS the description of ‘institutional racism’. Macpherson explicitly extended this description to all police forces: and in a series of approving quotes from other ‘experts’ he applied it also to British society as a whole. Given the opportunity, institutions such as the BBC and the Church of England, anxious not to be left out, applied to have the ‘institutionally racist’ banner flown above their own particular fiefdoms too: guilt about who we are is now of course evidence of civic virtue, a kind of patriotism. All this has a gruesome logic to it. Now that the coalition government has down-sized the Army, the police service, at 130 000 officers, is the largest working class uniformed organisation in the country. If the police are institutionally racist, then so is the working class and the society, the country, from which they are drawn and in which the police live and operate.
Yet in an earlier report, but 20 years before (The Brixton Disorders, 1981) another wise judge, Lord Scarman, had explicitly rejected ‘institutional racism’, preferring the ‘rotten apple’ metaphor, in which a minority of racist police coexisted within the context of an otherwise decent impartial body of men. ‘The direction and policies of the Metropolitan Police are not racist’, he wrote: and ‘institutional racism does not exist in Great Britain’ (pp 11, 62, 64, 135).
These are very different opinions – and opinions are what they are. Macpherson, for example, said (astonishingly enough!) that ‘we have not heard evidence of overt racism or discrimination’ (page 20). Recently, the long-delayed verdict on the murder of Stephen Lawrence has provoked some kind of search for ‘evidence’. From newspapers at the beginning of April we learn that between 2005 and 2011 there were 2584 complaints about MPS ‘racism’ made by members of the public and 136 reported by colleagues. Of these (2720 in total) 42 have been substantiated and 2 officers have been dismissed. The MPS has 31 500 sworn officers in employment. If all the 2720 complaints were in fact ‘true’, then that gives us about 8-9% of the MPS. The 42 substantiated cases give us 0.15% of the force. Another way of getting all this in perspective is to compute all six years (2005-11) as 189 000 police years: this then gives us one complaint for every 70 years of policing or one substantiated complaint for every 4500 police years.
A Sunday Times poll of 27 July 2008 described 33% of Muslim students in Britain as believing that killing in the name of Islam was justified. Are we to assume from such figures that support for such murderous institutionalised homicide is what Muslim students represent?
Another, usually inexplicit, claim in Macpherson is that ‘racism’ is what typifies whites, and whites only. This is such nonsense: we all, from birth, belong to various collectivities, initially involuntarily, increasingly voluntary. Our membership of this complexity provides us with necessary pre-judgements – who is, and who is not, ‘like us’. Such pre-judgements can only too easily become pre-judices; such as for example the Muslims who called a Birmingham Vicar a ‘fucking white bastard’ and who would appear to have daubed ‘dirty white dogs’ on the Church door (islam-watch 11/04/2012). Whites are not the only racists: and, pace Macpherson, the pre-judgements of us whites do not, generally or when embodied in the various police forces, become racist prejudice.
The working classes are nowadays seen either as ‘chavs’ or they are quaintified as ‘Pitman Painters’. Most policemen and policewomen are neither: and the generalised and evidence-free opinions of Macpherson should be seen for the trendy superficialities they are.