This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

The Metropolitan police will be disproportionately white for at least another 100 years at the current rate of progress, but are no longer institutionally racist, leaders of the force have declared.

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Commissioner Cressida Dick and the Met’s head of human resources, Clare Davies, briefed journalists about the progress made, to mark the 20th anniversary of the landmark Macpherson report.

The report in 1999 found the London force was institutionally racist and that in part explained why errors by Met officers had allowed the racist murderers of Stephen Lawrence to escape justice. It would take until 2012 for two of a gang of at least five to be convicted of the murder.

Davies said: “If we continue, even with the great progress we’ve made, it would take over 100 years to be representative of London.”

Macpherson’s shock findings led the then Labour government to exact promises from each of the 43 police forces in England and Wales to have the same proportion of ethnic minority officers as in the population they serve.

No force met the target. The Met currently have 14% ethnic minority officers for a population that is 43% ethnic minority and growing. In 1999 just 3% of Met officers were from an ethnic minority.

The Met wants 35% of new recruits to be ethnic minority, an extra 250 new cadets a year, and Davies said: “For many the progress is too slow.”

She added: “It does take time to see the difference, particularly at senior levels.”

The Met is aiming for 19% of officers to be from an ethnic minority by 2022, but is thousands of minority officers short and is expected to remain so for decades.

Dick said the Met has transformed and is no longer institutionally racist, as she said the headline finding from Macpherson was redundant. “ I don’t feel it is now a useful way to describe the service and I don’t believe we are.

“I simply don’t see it as a helpful or accurate description.”

The institutionally racist description should never have been applied, some in the Met believe, and some officers claim to have felt it was a personal slur accusing them as individuals of prejudice.

Macpherson had said in the report: “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.”

Dick added: “There is an absolute determination to have zero tolerance for racism”, and also to reexamine every significant thing the Met does to improve. Her view sets Dick apart from policing colleagues, such as the Black Police Association, and other police chiefs.

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Last year Gareth Wilson, lead for the National Police Chiefs Council on diversity, told the Guardian: “I think if you look at where we are and what Macpherson said, you could argue that the definition is still true today.”

Nationally, 7% of police officers are from a black or minority ethnic (BAME) background, compared with 14% in the population.

Previous senior police leaders in the Met have worried that the large race gap damaged their legitimacy and ability to police by consent.

Dick said: “In communities people do genuinely respond often to somebody who speaks their language, literally … It does clearly help.”

She said she was not pursuing an argument with government to change the law to allow positive discrimination, such as that in Northern Ireland which saw more Catholics recruited to a predominantly protestant force. Dick said: “We are not lobbying at present for anything like the Northern Ireland change.” The Conservative government has made it clear it would not support such a change.

The Met said that ethnic minority officers are more likely to leave in the first two years than white colleagues, less likely to follow through with an application and more likely to file a grievance, with 36% coming from ethnic minority officers and staff, who make up 15% of the force.

Above the rank of PC just 10% are from an ethnic minority in the Met.

By comparison, New York’s police department is almost 50% ethnic minority, and much closer to looking like the communities it serves, though Dick said they envy the Met in some areas.

Dick said ethnic minority confidence in the Met was improving. It tends to be lower than for white people and it was an issue raised by Theresa May while home secretary when she pressed for police to improve on deaths in custody, racial disproportionality in stop and search and representation in the ranks.

Britain has not changed as much as Dick would have hoped in the last 20 years, she said: “I’m saddened across society that things have not changed more.”

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Dick added: “When you look at outcomes for young people of African Caribbean heritage in education, employment, health, I could go on, it’s not what we would all like.”

For knife crime deaths more victims and perpetrators are black, and police said that was why they now stop and search more black people than white, despite there being four times more white people in London’s population.

The Met commissioner said the investigation to hunt down Lawrence’s killers was still active and being pursued by a small team, which would grow if they got a breakthrough: “We are constantly on the alert for any changes in information and intelligence and technical possibilities.



“The Met doesn’t forget big, significant, egregious cases and there couldn’t be a more significant stain on our country than this case.”