Home Affairs Committee
Oral evidence: The Macpherson Report: Twenty Years On, HC 1829
Tuesday 5 February 2019
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 5 February 2019.
Members present: Yvette Cooper (Chair); Kate Green; Tim Loughton; Stuart C. McDonald; Alex Norris; Douglas Ross.
Questions 1-71
Witnesses
I: Baroness Lawrence of Clarendon OBE.
II: Detective Sergeant Janet Hills, Chair, Metropolitan Black Police Association, Inspector Mustafa Mohammed QPM, President, National Association of Muslim Police, Police Sergeant Tola Munro, President, National Black Police Association, and Bevan Powell MBE, former Chair of the Metropolitan Black Police Association and founding member of the National Black Police Association.
Written evidence from witnesses:
– National Black Police Association (MPR0004)
– Metropolitan Police Black Police Association (MPR0032)
Witnesses: Baroness Lawrence.
Q1 Chair: I welcome everyone to this session of the Home Affairs Committee, and I particularly welcome Baroness Lawrence who is here to give evidence today. This month is the 20th anniversary of the end of the Stephen Lawrence inquiry and the publication of Sir William Macpherson’s report. Ten years ago, our predecessor Home Affairs Committee conducted an inquiry into and produced a report on 10 years on from the Stephen Lawrence inquiry. We want to look again at those issues 20 years on. We are mindful of the importance of and the continuing need for progress across all organisations and institutions, including policing and Parliament, in promoting diversity and challenging unwitting racism and prejudice wherever it is found. We are grateful to Dr Nicola Rollock for being the Committee’s adviser for this inquiry and to all those who have given us evidence so far.
Baroness Lawrence, may I welcome you and ask if you could give us your thoughts on the 20 years since the Stephen Lawrence inquiry? We are all very grateful to you for the huge amount of work you have done campaigning for Stephen and his legacy over many years in order to get change. What are your initial thoughts on what you think has changed, what progress has been made and where you still have concerns about the challenges ahead?
Baroness Lawrence: When I was looking to come here, I tried to find information that sets out, around the 70 recommendations, where we have moved on, how many recommendations have been implemented, be it in the police, be it in schools, and I found it really difficult to find anything. It seems as if things have become really stagnant and nothing seems to have moved.
Ten years ago, when we had the last look at the Macpherson Stephen Lawrence inquiry, when talking about, say, police recruitment and retention, there was a figure, but even back then they had not reached that figure, and now it is even worse. I was speaking to somebody who is acting police, and he said that the figures for women are really dire; that there is no improvement in that or for police staff who are women; and that, on BAME, they seem to be recruiting Asians but not black African Caribbean. That doesn’t seem to have moved on at all.
On education, I remember when the inquiry was first published, it referred to reporting racist incidents in schools and citizenship. At the time, when the report came out, I would have loved to have seen a more mandatory approach to how schools dealt with racism. Even on things such as history, if we taught our true history I think young people growing up would understand the world, how people travel around the world, and how black people arrived here in this country. But when I wrote to someone in education—I don’t remember who—I was told that it was up to the individual teachers in schools, but that way nobody would do anything.
I was also trying to find out, within reporting, how many schools have reported racist incidents. I can’t find anything. Okay, schools have a little difficulty because if they are known or seen to have a lot of racism in their schools, parents will think differently about whether to send their children to that school. Even so, if it is something that should be done, I expected to find that a report had been made somewhere, but I couldn’t find anything.
Q2 Chair: Why do you think that is? Why do you think there has been a failure to record, report and monitor?
Baroness Lawrence: When the report was first done, I think everybody saw it as something they could actually do something about, but as time went on, it’s as though they changed the word from “racism” to “diversity”, and then, “Diversity almost doesn’t exist anymore.” I think people are trying to hide behind, “We don’t have any problems, so there’s nothing to report”. If you look at exclusion in schools, especially of young black boys, it is high. We have stuff in society now where so many kids are out of school in pupil referral units and there is no way of educating those kids. We have this vicious cycle going on with our children, and no one within the Government or even within society sees it as a problem. They are beginning to see it as a problem now, because of the amount of deaths that are happening, but when it first started, nobody was thinking, “What do we do here? How do we change how we look at our young people within schools?” I am sure that schools could keep those young people within schools, whatever the behaviour problem. They could try to deal with the problem there and then get them back in the classroom. Schools don’t do that, though; they quickly move them out because when Ofsted goes around, they want their stats to reflect something completely different.
Q3 Chair: Do you think the failure to do so is about leadership, or do you think it is about attitudes within the organisations?
Baroness Lawrence: It is a bit of both. You need good leadership, and where within society you have leadership that does not represent the community, you don’t have that. Young people in schools need to see people who reflect them and, coming back to the history, if they are not being taught the true history, they believe that whatever is being taught in school does not reflect on them. Young people need to see people who look like them.
Q4 Chair: If you were thinking about writing the report today, what would be the top issues that you would focus on?
Baroness Lawrence: Education, for one, because that is so important. We need to teach our young people. Then there is the police force and how they police. Without consent, they cannot police the community. There is how young black people are labelled—that needs to change. Opportunities in jobs need to change. I was speaking to someone about young people going to university. Whether you are white or black, you need to have the qualifications to get into university, but by the time they leave, they do not get a first or a 2:1, but a lower grade. Why is that? Those are the sorts of things we need to look at in our society. Young people have the qualifications to get in, but they are denied that, so opportunities are not there for them. That is what needs to change.
Q5 Alex Norris: Good morning, Baroness Lawrence. I want to ask a couple of questions regarding spying and corruption, relating to both the inquiry and also the period after, which I am quite interested in. The Ellison review obviously found that there were corrupt acts involved in the investigation, but also subsequently. There is a reference to mass shredding in 2003. There is a reference to inadequate reporting by the IPCC in 2006. There is the Met’s own review in 2012. Do those things surprise you? Even subsequently after the report was published, does it surprise you that culturally those sorts of things continue to happen?
Baroness Lawrence: I have always had a problem with how the police and the justice system dealt with us a family and how they continue to do so. Nothing surprises me, because during the investigation we were told all different things. There was the wall of silence and all sorts of things going on, but in reality that was not true. Even just after we had the two convictions, we had a meeting with senior officers and they wanted to just draw a line. Something was telling me that there was more to find out. I said at the time that I did not believe we had heard the whole truth, even though we had the inquiry. An officer asked me, “What do you know?” I did not know anything. You can tell by the way people talk to you and how they act that something is still being hidden. It was when Theresa May was Home Secretary. There was the corruption that was happening at that time, and we just needed to find out exactly what was going on from 1993, leading up to 2012. Mark Ellison’s review came back to say that they were. The police always try to cover themselves, and if there is information that they do not want the public to see—hence the shredding. I didn’t know until after the two were convicted that there were undercover police around our family. Then you begin to start to question who was in our house at the time. There were loads of people, and people I didn’t know, who had come to lend their support. So there was spying happening them, and rather than investigating the murder as they should, they were looking to find ways to discredit us because we were challenging and asking too many questions. So nothing surprises me anymore.
Q6 Alex Norris: Do you feel now that there is genuine candour from the police, that there is a real and honest commitment to giving you the full details, if there are further things to be found?
Baroness Lawrence: No. The undercover inquiry is happening now and the police are doing all they can not to give the true facts of what happened. The first judge sadly passed away and I don’t think the new judge understands the level of what a police officer would go through to deny and secrete whatever they are doing. This has been going for three years now, and he still hasn’t taken evidence. They are still going through paperwork and stuff. It is 25 years coming up to 26 and this is still going on. It is unbelievable that any family should have to go through this.
Q7 Alex Norris: Having been the subject of such intrusion, what are your reflections on spying and covert surveillance to develop intelligence in that way?
Baroness Lawrence: I understand that around terrorism or whatever you need to have that sort of thing but, at the end of the day, when you look at an ordinary family like mine, do we need that level of scrutiny? I don’t think so.
Q8 Alex Norris: Do you think there could be a greater level of accountability? When I was preparing for this morning, I was thinking about the number of times, even in the last couple of weeks, that I have seen on the television or glamorised in the media that sort of covert intelligence. It is done in a very exciting way and at the end the person just about gets away with it and they foil the plot. We see that all the time but I suspect that it isn’t the case all the time. In cases where it has been used and has not developed intelligence, do you think that individuals ought to know it has happened, and the extent to which it has happened?
Baroness Lawrence: Around security, I presume that there is a level that you can probably keep back, but when you have ordinary families trying to understand what has happened, especially if they have lost their son or whoever, they expect a level of truth to come out. If in a case they need to apologise and say, “We are sorry”, that needs to happen. We are not talking about all the terrorism stuff that you hear on the news; we are talking about something completely around individual families. During our time of having a family liaison officer, they should have given us support, but we didn’t get that. They still see us as part of the problem and we were treated in that way. Even up to 2012, when they were giving evidence, that level of distrust and the feeling that we were the problem still existed.
Q9 Stuart C. McDonald: Good morning, Baroness Lawrence. Thank you for coming to give evidence. You have already spoken a little about how difficult you find it to even find figures and facts about progress against the Macpherson report’s recommendations, but do you have any feeling or evidence yourself that progress—significant progress, little progress or no progress at all—is being made in making those recommendations a reality?
Baroness Lawrence: I have always said that senior officers understand how to conduct and how they speak to people, but I still feel that the police on the beat do not get it. I will drive past or walk past and see one individual—a young black man—with probably about six officers around him. Do you need that amount of officers—that intimidation? No, you do not. It is the level of how they speak to young people. Young people do not get the respect that they should, and that is part of what comes out as a recommendation. Officers expect to get respect from the public, but if you do not show that respect, how do you expect to get it back yourself? I do not think that has changed very much.
Q10 Stuart C. McDonald: Is that why you mentioned police training as one of the most important things that could be taken forward—one of the most important recommendations from Macpherson?
Baroness Lawrence: Definitely, but has it worked? I do not know.
Q11 Stuart C. McDonald: What about some of the other things that Macpherson spoke about, such as career progression, disciplinary proceedings and stop and search? Do you sense in any way that there has been progress in those areas or is it impossible for you to tell?
Baroness Lawrence: The sense I have is that black officers stand more chance of being disciplined than their white counterparts. I was trying to find out about the progression of officers, but it is difficult for me personally to find. If you look around, when you see the top table, how many people of colour do you see there? Not many.
Q12 Stuart C. McDonald: Obviously Macpherson introduced us to the concept of institutional racism. Do you think that the police force in England and Wales is still institutionally racist? Do you feel able to come to a conclusion on that?
Baroness Lawrence: I think in some respects they still are. I was trying to search, but I could not find any information. Nobody wants to be labelled as that, but at the same time, it is undercover that it still exists. I am sure, when you speak to some of the officers here, they will be able to tell you a lot more. Okay, I am not a police officer, so I am not there in the canteen to know what goes on, but I think when you speak to some of these officers, they will be able to tell you.
Q13 Stuart C. McDonald: Do you think the term “institutional racism” was a helpful term to describe the police force? Has that helped our understanding of the issues?
Baroness Lawrence: Definitely, because our experience up until the report showed that, and continued to show that. Even after the report came out, when the individuals were still at large, nobody was really interested. The fact that they had information to start off with, within 24 hours, made no difference. It took a single officer, who took it on himself to look and delve deeper into how the investigation was taking place at that time, for us to get two convictions.
Q14 Stuart C. McDonald: The vast majority of folk would agree that the term “institutional racism” has been helpful for the discussion around the issue, but a potential problem is that, by talking about collective responsibility, individual responsibility is not focused on enough. Do you think that is right?
Baroness Lawrence: Could you say the question again?
Stuart C. McDonald: If we are talking about institutional racism and, essentially, collective responsibility for failure, is there a danger that we are not speaking enough about individuals who should be responsible for tackling those problems? We just say, “The police force as a whole has a problem,” rather than, “That senior officer should be doing more.”
Baroness Lawrence: It is a bit of both. If an officer is institutionally racist around his colleagues, they have a right to call him out for that and then that individual should be answerable to that. It is a bit of both. Collectively, for the officers who know that their peer is, they need to call him out. I do not think that is done enough.
Q15 Stuart C. McDonald: This is my final question. To return to Macpherson and his recommendations, which particular recommendation do we need to prioritise and see faster progress on?
Baroness Lawrence: Out of the 70—there are so many. It comes down to those in public life, so with the police it should be education. Unless we start educating our young people to live their best lives, let’s say, we will have the same thing going around. If after 20 years we are still talking about this, it shows that things have not moved on that much.
Q16 Kate Green: Thank you very much for coming this morning, Baroness Lawrence. You have talked quite a bit in response to Stuart McDonald and the Chair about education. You have also mentioned the wider justice system and the need for reform across not just the police but the whole of the public sector landscape. Do you think the Government are giving enough leadership across the whole picture or is there more that you would like to see Government doing?
Baroness Lawrence: In the past couple of years, I have not heard the Government mention the Stephen Lawrence inquiry or the Macpherson report—none of that has been mentioned. If this Committee had not decided to look at it to mark the 20 years coming up on 24 February, then no. I think it is business as usual, and, at the same time, people in the public are still suffering from what we as a family went through back in ’93.
Q17 Kate Green: The Government have, for example, begun to undertake a race disparity audit across a whole range of different aspects of the public sector. Do you think that is effective? Have you seen any evidence of how that audit is working and whether it is proving a modern way of addressing some of the issues that were first highlighted in the Macpherson report?
Baroness Lawrence: I think, like most reports and most situations when things happen, they take on a life that is saying, “Yes, we are actually doing something,” and people feel really positive about the way forward, and then once that report is published, it goes and sits on a shelf and we find ourselves back in the same position, many years on. Initiative and everything is great, but we need to act. It is a bit like with the recommendations. As I said, I was trying to find out what has been implemented and where we are today, and that is really difficult. Macpherson is talked about sometimes, and it depends on where you are when it is talked about it, but what does it mean now? How much have the police moved on? How much has education moved on? How much has the employment sector moved on? So, we talk about these things, and I think it is easier to talk about them, but the reality is sometimes completely different.
Q18 Kate Green: Were you involved in the work of the Stephen Lawrence Steering Group, which the Government have now disbanded?
Baroness Lawrence: Yes, I was.
Q19 Kate Green: What did you think of that and what do you feel about it now having been disbanded?
Baroness Lawrence: When the steering group existed, for me, it was the fact that you had senior civil servants and Ministers who were answerable for what was happening within their Departments, so you could question them and see what they were doing or what they hadn’t done. That had never happened before and it has never happened since. That was a way of holding Government to account—you can speak to them, and say, this is what I believe is what is happening outside. Somebody like me doesn’t always know what is happening on the ground, so you need community people coming in and talking to you and saying how you can help. It was disbanded and that was it. Nothing. I was disappointed in that.
Q20 Kate Green: Why was it disbanded, do you think?
Baroness Lawrence: The Home Secretary at the time and whoever his advisers were decided that that was it and they didn’t feel that they needed to do it anymore. They had these little spin-off groups, like racist incidents, and stop and search, and a few others, and those petered out also.
Q21 Kate Green: Is there something you would like to see created to enable you to have that engagement and accountability?
Baroness Lawrence: Where the Government are answerable to the public, that is good. If you don’t have that, there is no way of having that dialogue and that communication—it is always this thing from the top and you don’t know what is happening at the bottom, and that would inform and help with the policies as well.
Q22 Kate Green: Can I ask about another aspect of the information you have given us this morning? It is particularly about the service that your family received at the time of Stephen’s death and all the way through the investigations right up to quite recently. You indicated some dissatisfaction with the family liaison officer. Could you say a bit more about what was wrong?
Baroness Lawrence: I think empathy. We had just lost our son. When they came to the house, which was quite regularly, they were not interested in giving us information about how the investigation was happening. That was what we wanted to know, but it was just about the information that we were giving them. People just turned up and said, “We know who these individuals are—this is where they are, and this is where they live.” I would know that information, and we would pass it on, so I expected them to come back and tell us, “Yes, it was helpful” or “No, it wasn’t helpful”. But they were just interested in asking, “Who is in your house? What is their name? Where are they from?” That is not giving me the information that I need.
Q23 Kate Green: Did the relationship that your family had with police officers change or develop over the years and become more or less empathetic?
Baroness Lawrence: No.
Kate Green: Not at all?
Baroness Lawrence: No, because from ’93 until about 2006, that level of trust was never there. Initially, I wanted to trust and I wanted to believe, because I thought that they would see Stephen’s death as something so horrendous that they would want to do something to solve it, but they weren’t interested. All our meetings and our visits did not give me any hope that they really understood what we were going through. We were more or less treated as if we were the criminals, not the victims of Stephen’s murder. That carried on over the years.
The senior officers know how to speak to you, but the trust wasn’t there. It took a while for the trust to develop, and when it did, they got rid of the only officer I really trusted, where we got the two convictions. They made him retire when he did not want to.
Q24 Kate Green: How important is it to have more black officers on the force in building and maintaining that trust?
Baroness Lawrence: It is not so much having more black officers. Black officers is good, but it is about making sure that those black officers have the level of understanding and respect that they need to do their job.
I can remember the first time I saw a black officer after Stephen’s death. At the time, the rumour—whether or not it was true—was that if a black and a white officer were out together, the black officer felt that he needed to be whatever his colleague was like. He never felt confident in himself to do the job that he was supposed to do. That is the question that I remember asking when I first saw a black officer, and he did not deny that that was what was happening. At the time, they needed to have that level of working together, so they had to behave like the white officer. Hence, people within the black community did not trust the black officers either.
Q25 Kate Green: As far as you know, coming right up to the present day—we have received and heard evidence from other families who have lost children to violence—do you think that families are now getting a better and more empathetic service from the police?
Baroness Lawrence: That is really difficult. When Anthony Walker was murdered and I went to see his family, what I saw was that because the police were getting such bad press, this time they were trying to make it better. They isolated the family, so nobody from outside could come in and no other organisation could come in and support them. I remember speaking to Anthony’s mum; she was very complimentary about the police and she felt that they were very supportive, but she would not have known any different because she did not have anything else to compare it with.
Q26 Tim Loughton: Good morning, Baroness Lawrence. I want to touch on stop and search, but first may I come back to a couple of comments that you made earlier that I was interested in? On education, I think you said that there was evidence that black graduates were more likely to get a lesser degree; I think that was the indication, but I do not know the stats. What I do know is that there was recently a study of Oxbridge, and criticism of the lack of diversity of its undergraduates, but then looking at the data, the number of black students achieving three As at A-level—which is usually a qualification for Oxbridge—exactly matched the proportion of black students who got into Oxbridge, and there was no indication that the level of degree they got was any less.
The problem, as I think we would all agree, is that not enough black students are doing well enough at school to be able to compete with non-black students to get into university and succeed there. Do you think that is the bigger problem? Do you think that universities are institutionally less positive towards black students and more likely to mark them down, or is it because when you positively discriminate, you are potentially therefore getting more students with lower qualifications into university, and academically they are less likely to get those top degrees? Do you get the point I am making there?
Baroness Lawrence: I would disagree with you, because I have been to events at which I have seen black students who have however many GCSEs and however many A-levels. I would disagree that they don’t get the level they need in order to get them into Oxford or to a Russell Group university—a vast amount of young black people do—but I am not certain exactly why they don’t get to the Russell Group. Perhaps they feel that if they were to apply to those groups, they would not get in. If you go to other universities, you will find that students do, and I have seen so many young black people—especially young black boys—who have achieved the level of A-levels that they need to get into university, so I would disagree with that.
I think it is about a lack of confidence, as well. When they get to university and they see their peers around them, they need the right support, and sometimes they seem to go back into their shell rather than take the opportunities, because they don’t feel comfortable. The university needs to help those young people when they come in, and sometimes that help is not there. I am the chancellor for De Montfort University, and that is one of the things I spoke to the V-C about. We had a meeting with our young people to try to understand from them what it is—why they lack the confidence to actually speak out during a lecture, which they don’t—and also for the lecturers themselves to ask “If a student is failing, how do we help support them to get there?” There is stuff that can be done in order to help them, but I would disagree about the kids not having the right qualifications, because the majority of them would have had them before they applied.
Q27 Tim Loughton: Okay, but do you think that lack of confidence—I completely agree with that—is not exclusively among black students? Would you say that applies to students from deprived backgrounds as well, who lack the confidence to say “University is the place for me”, and once they are there feel almost like second-class citizens? Is it exclusively a BME phenomenon, or can it be to do with deprivation and people from different backgrounds?
Baroness Lawrence: I would disagree with that. I just feel—
Tim Loughton: I am asking. I am not making a statement; I am just asking a question.
Baroness Lawrence: The problem sometimes is that the kids who find themselves out of education do not see anybody like themselves, so they can say, “I too can get there”. It is about having a proper role model, and they do not see themselves in that position. They lack the confidence that would help them get there, and when they’re not within school while they’re doing their GCSEs or their A-levels, the level of support they may need is not always there. You find that some parents actually end up paying for tutors for their children to make sure that they get the grades that they need to go to university. Okay, university is not for everybody, but for those who want to get there, parents work extremely hard trying to make sure their children have that support in order to get to university.
Sometimes when they get there—I went to university as a mature student, and you felt that the lecturers didn’t give you the same amount of time because you didn’t come through the A-level route. You don’t have to get A-levels—you can go through another route to get to university; there is always another route to get there—but sometimes the lecturers look down on you as if to say, “You can’t be that good, because you didn’t come through the A-level route”.
Q28 Tim Loughton: I will get to stop and search, but the other point you made, which I thought was really interesting but also depressing, was your comment that a black officer almost feels that he or she has to emulate the white officer to be treated as an equal, and that society’s view of that black officer is almost that he or she has joined a white man’s or a white woman’s institution—the police. I think that is the suggestion you are making. Has that changed at all over the last 20 years?
Baroness Lawrence: I think you will have to ask the officers who are here. I was referring to the time when I met the officer, back in ’93. We are talking about 25, nearly 26, years ago, so I couldn’t tell you what it’s like now; I can only tell you about the experience I felt when I spoke to an officer then.
Q29 Tim Loughton: Okay. Stop and search: was it a good thing or a bad thing when the now Prime Minister when she was Home Secretary changed the rules of stop and search, which led to a reduction, certainly in London, in stop and search?
Baroness Lawrence: Intelligence-led is always what you want. I felt that at the time she spoke. The black community has been over-policed. You only have to walk down the street, and some young person is a bit loud and all of a sudden they have an officer talking to them. Why? If that was a group of white kids being loud they would just carry on driving, but because it is a group of young blacks, maybe just sitting on a wall, it’s “What are you doing?” So intelligence-led is what is needed.
I remember saying to the previous Home Secretary that the number of young black boys murdered on the streets seems to have escalated since the report came out. I think that, before, it was racist killing that was happening to a lot of young black kids. Back in ’99, when my son and other young persons were murdered, who was protecting them? I believed this then and probably still believe it: they had nobody to protect them, so they felt they needed to protect themselves and it became this black-on-black crime. They had Trident set up. I used to sit on quite a few committees, and the question I would ask an officer would be: how many convictions have you had since you set up this separate group? Nobody could tell me, because it is like they have put it in a box and closed the box: these black kids have been killing each other, why should we worry? And they are continuing. I said to the Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, “If as many white kids were being murdered on our streets as black kids, society would not have sat back and allowed it to happen”. But it is allowed to happen to our kids.
A crime is a crime. It doesn’t matter who commits the crime. That is what the police should investigate. Now they begin to talk about it, and what is really worrying is that the Home Secretary has announced, talking about 12-year-olds carrying knives—these kids are going to have a criminal record from the age of 12—that they are going to be locked up. I am sure there are other ways of dealing with that. If you are going into schools you need to start educating our kids—all children. All children need to be educated as to what could happen. Kids who have been in prison and youth offenders have come out with a completely different way of dealing with it. Get those kids in to talk to them. The older generation talking to young people doesn’t reach them, so you need their peers to go in and speak to those kids and let them know what the reality is. But the fact is that you are going to start criminalising kids at the age of 12.
Q30 Tim Loughton: That is a whole different subject, which we will probably be looking at here as well. I completely agree with you that it needs to be evidence-based. I chair the all-party group for children. We did some work on the relationship between the police and children. The number of young children who were being stopped and searched, of BME or other backgrounds, without going through the proper procedures, particularly 10 year olds and younger, was really concerning. There are specific procedures that were not being followed. As the result of that, there were some changes.
But where is the trade-off here? You know and we all know that young black boys are disproportionately the victims of knife crime at the moment. If the police did follow evidence-based practices on stop and search against whoever, properly, and were seen to do that, and were inevitably, because of the population of London, say, going to be stopping and searching more black boys, would that still be viewed as disproportionate and in some way racist, or would it be respected because it were seen as a necessary preventative measure, because that is where most of the victims and most of the perpetrators happen to be coming from?
Baroness Lawrence: You still come back to intelligence. You have enough CCTV around the place to know who is actually committing these crimes. You wouldn’t need to be stopping all the kids. A crime is a crime. Everybody—all families—would agree that it doesn’t matter what race you are, if you commit a crime, you need to be locked up for it.
My point is about the amount of young kids who are caught up in this. There are enough CCTV cameras around the place to identify the perpetrators, which is what we all want—to identify them—and to take them off the streets. Regardless of who they are, black or white or whatever, that is what you deal with. But to randomly stop an individual because you think he might be—that is where we need to draw the line.
Q31 Chair: To follow up on the education issue, the figures show that black graduates are significantly less likely to achieve firsts or 2:1s than white graduates, even when you take account of prior attainment and A-levels and so on, and also are more likely to drop out. That sounds like a pretty big problem for universities. Why do you think that is happening?
Baroness Lawrence: I don’t know if it’s the level of support when they get there. Young people all go off to different parts of the country to study. I am not certain exactly. I can’t put my finger on it and say this is one thing that it is caused by. Once they get to university, they need that support there, either from their peers or the lecturers or so on. University is nothing like schools, particularly the independent learning. That is something that probably people don’t understand—there is nobody chasing you to go to lectures and there is nobody telling you to get your essays done. It is something that you need to do yourself. Those are the sorts of things that maybe that sort of information needs to be addressed to those young people before they get to university—that independent learning is what you do when you are at university. You don’t have lecturers saying to you, “Oh, you haven't done your essay.”
Q32 Douglas Ross: Thank you, Baroness Lawrence, for being here this morning. I was at primary school when Stephen was murdered and I don’t remember the news coverage of the immediate murder, but I feel like I have grown up with the subsequent news coverage of his death and the several investigations. How difficult was it for you as a family to always be in the spotlight and have that public interest? Or did you find it useful as a way of driving forward getting some justice for Stephen?
Baroness Lawrence: It is a bit of both. At times, I did feel exposed. The perpetrators could walk around and nobody knew who they were. I had two other children who I needed to protect, but at the same time, I had a son who was murdered and I needed to be his voice. I needed to make sure that individuals were held to account for what they had done to him. So it was a bit of both. I was forced into doing that, because if I didn’t, nothing would have happened.
Q33 Douglas Ross: Last year, there was an extremely compelling documentary over three episodes, “Stephen: The Murder that Changed a Nation.” It struck me as I was watching it that there were so many events that were almost by chance—if it wasn’t for the fact that you were so determined that something was going wrong in the police force, if you hadn’t met Nelson Mandela and increased the publicity, if it wasn’t for Clive Driscoll being told to shred files but actually looking into them, if it wasn’t for the Daily Mail headline in February 1997—do you think you would ever have got justice for Stephen if it wasn’t for key points along the process that in many cases were luck rather than an effort by the police?
Baroness Lawrence: That is true. Even before we met Nelson Mandela, all the information that was given to us we passed straight on to the police. Meeting him, being who he was, when he said that he knew that in South Africa black lives were cheap, but he did not expect it here, that was when people woke up to watch. We had to be determined, because nobody wanted to know.
I remember the MP for Eltham, Peter Bottomley, came to our house a few days after Stephen was killed. The question I asked him was, did the Prime Minister know about my son, and he could not answer me. Why didn’t he know about my son? There had been publicity, but Stephen was a black boy; nobody wanted to know. That was happening before Stephen, and even after Stephen. Nobody wanted to know. He was a black boy and he must be a criminal. He cannot be somebody who is doing his A-levels. He cannot be that. The family—they have to be doing some criminality, there was no way that his family is law abiding. Straightaway, if that is how they portray you, nobody wants to know.
Q34 Douglas Ross: I assume your beliefs and thoughts about the police were positive until that point. You had no reason to think that if a crime was committed, it would not be properly investigated. That would be my assumption. Many families must feel the same. If something happens, the police are there to protect them and to investigate that crime and see it through to fruition. Did you have concerns, both in 1993 and since, that if a similar incident happened to a similar family who were overcome by the grief—as everyone would expect—who did not take no for an answer and continue to campaign for 25 or 26 years, that when people have been murdered in racist crimes the perpetrators have got away with it, because families have been so consumed with their own grief that they have not been able to campaign and challenge the police in the way that you have?
Baroness Lawrence: Before Stephen was killed, the rumour was always about what would happen to a young black boy being stopped by the police—thrown into a police van, beaten up, and all the rest of it. We always heard that. Yes, the distrust was there. One of my things was always trying to say to Stephen, “When you’re out, you have to be very careful”. His thing was, “I’m not doing anything”. “I’m not doing anything.” But I thought the level of how Stephen was murdered would shock the police and they would want to do something because of what happened to him, regardless of whether he was black or whatever. But it wasn’t, it was like it was trivial. One officer said to me, when I was questioning him about it, “Oh, they’re just thugs”. That was their attitude and that carried on.
When there was a public prosecution, the officers who were there at the time said, “I can’t believe that this has happened” and how these officers missed that and didn’t do this. That carried on all the way through. Then, when we were at the Old Bailey, they said that as far as they were concerned, even at the inquest, the first investigation went well. I just thought, all that time, they were telling us one story and something else was happening. That is why, at the inquest, when Ian Johnston, the assistant commissioner, came down to try to pacify me, I saw red. The officer stood up and lied. After all that time they were telling me how badly the first investigation went, then all of a sudden, everything was fine. You can understand where my distrust—and I continue to distrust—comes from, because if you think about the undercover police work that’s happening now, and officers trying to cover their backs and not speak the truth—“Oh, my family will be so upset. My family will be targeted”—well, we were targeted, but that made no difference. We have had a tyre slashed; we have had people standing, watching. All of those things were happening, and when you report them, it’s “What people? Nothing’s happening.”
Q35 Douglas Ross: I want to come on to a couple of points that you raise in your evidence, but can you also understand how if this didn’t happen to your family and you were reading about this, you would think, “That can’t be right. It can’t be as bad as that”?
Baroness Lawrence: You can’t make it up, can you?
Douglas Ross: You can’t believe that police officers, who have taken an oath to uphold the law in this country, would lie in the way they did and try to cover up their tracks in the way they did, and even get in the way of other officers who wanted to find the truth. It is deeply damaging that in this country, in this day and age, we still have to have concerns about that going on.
I want to ask about two points that you raised. You said in answer to an earlier question that we need to change the way black people are labelled, and I just wondered “labelled by who?” Do you think there is potentially a problem with labelling within the black community itself, and that it is almost seen by some young people as a mark of pride and respect if they are labelled as “not to be approached”?
Baroness Lawrence: I don’t think so.
Q36 Douglas Ross: I am just asking whether there is a mentality among younger black people where they use that, but you don’t believe that is the case.
Baroness Lawrence: No, because I think the majority of people are law abiding and want to be treated with respect. To think that a label—no, I don’t believe that.
Q37 Douglas Ross: So who were you directing the comment about labelling towards? You said “change the way young black people are labelled”.
Baroness Lawrence: Because society has put a label on them that they are always up to no good and they don’t achieve anything, but that is not the case. Our young people feel that that is what is happening to them. If they were to see, on the other hand, how many young people have gone off to university and how many people have achieved certain roles in their life—but that never happens, because whenever the newspapers and public stuff is done, it never shows the positive side of what young people can achieve. It is always the negative, so they themselves believe that: “I can’t do any better, because this is what society is telling me. This is my life.” They never see the positive side, and we need to be able to show that a lot more.
Even in this place, Diane Abbott used to have an event at which she was giving awards to young black men for achieving however many GCSEs or A-levels and going off to university. My thing was always, “There’s never a reporter there to report this stuff. There’s nothing shown on TV, so you never see all the positive things that these young people are doing.” That is the bit that I think needs to change: they need to see people like them achieving things so that they say, “Okay, I can do this. If I work hard enough, I can go to university. I can get a good job.” At the same time, whoever is there as the leadership wants to make sure that when those people get there, they are not discriminated against and can actually climb the ladder.
Q38 Douglas Ross: You mentioned in your opening remarks the difficulty you found in seeking any update on the 70 recommendations of the Macpherson report. When that report was published, you didn’t think that it was the final element of what you would have to do, but did you think at the time that those 70 recommendations would be acted on and you wouldn’t have to worry about them again, or even at that time, did you think, “How are we going to monitor this going forward”? It is an issue I have with any Government report, or any report: we focus on the recommendations at the time, and then we lose sight of them.
We did have a reminder 10 years on with the report from the adviser to this Committee, but now another 10 years on from that, what has happened with that follow-up? Was that a worry you had at the time, or is that a worry you have had since then?
Baroness Lawrence: At the time when the report came out, I felt it tried to cover as much as it could, bring in different elements of society—looking at education, looking at health—and bring those things together. I felt that more still could have been done around the recommendations. When things are not made mandatory it allows people either to accept or not to accept. It allows people to take what they want to take out of it, and leave other bits out, so 20 years on, I am trying to find out how much of it has been implemented, and where we are within society. I am finding it difficult.
Q39 Douglas Ross: Finally, we now have the Stephen Lawrence Memorial Day, which Stephen’s father described at the time as something that the family had been calling for throughout these years. His memory is now enshrined in history. What do you think Stephen’s legacy will be? What should we think of every year when we come to Stephen Lawrence Memorial Day?
Baroness Lawrence: Positives. Stephen’s name has helped to change society in a way that I do not think anything has done in a long time. I would see the Stephen Lawrence Day as not just one day—it is about working in schools across the curriculum. From key stage 1 up to 5 is what we have done. We have had support from the Government, from different Departments, to help us to get there. We have been working extremely hard to make sure that that is a positive element out of Stephen.
Stephen was somebody who loved being at school. That is part of his life that was all positive. That is what we want to see young people trying to embrace—all the positive stuff. Okay, law has been changed because of his name, but if we as a family had not pushed, none of that would have happened. As young people grow up, they need to see what you can do, and what difference you can make within society. That is what we are trying to do, and not just in schools but right across the community as well.
Q40 Chair: If you had one thing, of all the many things that you would still like to see change, what would be at the top of your list?
Baroness Lawrence: How we treat our young people, because they are the future, and we need to start looking at what we do with them in order to make them understand, so they can have a change in their life, to live their life the best way that they can, and take all the opportunities that are there for them. Society needs to make sure that the opportunities are there, rather than them trying to reach something that is not there. Society needs to change in order to give them the opportunity.
Q41 Chair: Do you think the leaders and senior figures of all our organisations, whether in education, policing, the Home Office or in Parliament, are sufficiently seized of that at the moment?
Baroness Lawrence: No, especially not now. Everybody is so gripped by this Brexit stuff, ordinary stuff is just left to one side. I am hoping that what we are doing with the Stephen Lawrence Day, and what the trust has done over the years, is showing young people how to live their best lives. We have had really positive stuff that we have done in the past 20 years with the Stephen Lawrence Trust, where architecture students have graduated, and they are practising and running their own businesses. That is what Stephen’s name has done for society. With the day coming, it is about building on that—all the positive things that we can do to help and support young people as they grow up.
Q42 Chair: Do you think that those leaders and senior figures across all the organisations, including Parliament and policing, are as aware of the risks of unwitting racism and prejudice, and the risks of institutional racism, as they should be?
Baroness Lawrence: Not really, because it does not affect their lives. If it affected them, things would be different. It does not touch them. Every now and again something might raise its head that makes them think about it and look at it, but it does not really touch them. When it does, that is when we will have the change.
Chair: Thank you. Baroness Lawrence, we are very grateful for your time today. No family should have to go through what your family went through, both in terms of the loss of your son in a racist murder, and the way in which the police responded at the time and all the things that have happened since. We are very grateful for your time and your continual campaign to challenge racism and all these institutions. It is clear that the experiences that you and your family went through should still be a lesson to all of us and that is what I hope our inquiry will continue to pursue, 20 years on from the Stephen Lawrence inquiry. Thank you very much for your time.
Baroness Lawrence: Thank you.
Examination of witnesses
Witnesses: Detective Sergeant Janet Hills, Inspector Mustafa Mohammed, Police Sergeant Tola Munro, Bevan Powell.
Q43 Chair: I welcome our second panel to give evidence. Please introduce yourselves, starting with Mr Powell.
Bevan Powell: I am Bevan Powell. I have retired from the police service, but I was one of the founding members of the National Black Police Association. I gave evidence at the original inquiry into the death of Stephen Lawrence and I was also chair of the Metropolitan Black Police Association.
Detective Sergeant Hills: Good morning. My name is Janet Hills. I am the chair of the Metropolitan Black Police Association, former president of the National Black Police Association and a police officer with 28 years of service.
Sergeant Munro: Good morning. I am Tola Munro. I am a sergeant at Gwent police. I am the current president of the National Black Police Association and I represent about 13,000 members spread across about 45 forces.
Inspector Mohammed: Good morning. I am Inspector Mustafa Mohammed. I am from West Midlands police. I have got 30 years of service and I am the chair of the National Association of Muslim Police, representing about 3,000 members.
Q44 Chair: Thank you very much. We are conscious of the need for all organisations, including education as we were covering earlier and Parliament and Committees, to address issues around racism and diversity as well. As a start, in terms of your experiences in policing and in police forces across the country, what progress do you think has been made over the last 20 years since the Stephen Lawrence inquiry? Where have the biggest barriers to progress been?
Bevan Powell: I think, quite clearly, stemming from the inquiry was the introduction of family liaison officers, a complete overhaul of homicide investigations and the introduction of the term “institutional racism”, which, at the time, the Black Police Association supported and still does. When we gave evidence, we spoke of the disproportionality and under-representation of officers and staff in specialist operations; the slow progress in terms of progress through the ranks and through the various grades within the organisation; and also our concern that members of black and ethnic minority communities were not receiving the same level of service as the majority white community. While I believe a lot has changed, I think, to a certain extent, a lot has gone backwards. I think that is due to leadership; it is because the police and the Government have taken their eye off the ball on race.
Diversity is key—we have to understand and embrace difference, and that is one of the fantastic things about our country. However, understanding what that diversity means for how we provide services and how individuals from various communities experience and access them is still a challenge in the 21st century.
Detective Sergeant Hills: Operationally, I think we have improved, if you think about the recommendations and what they gave us. We have improved our detection rate in murder investigations, we have developed the role of the family liaison officer, we have statutory training in first aid—those are all things that we did not have before and that have basically made the force a better place operationally.
When it comes to diversity, my feeling is that we have gone backwards because we have boxed it in a way that has not allowed it to change with society. The example I would give is gender. Clearly I sit within the gender strand, but I also sit within the race strand, the disability strand and the age strand. There are quite a few strands that are encompassed in who I am as a person, but the organisation still silos the strands and therefore gaps develop.
The gap that has developed in policing at the moment is the lack of policewomen from an African, Asian or Caribbean background. Even though we have seen such a rise for gender—currently, we are at 29%, so we are at a tipping point for cultural change within the organisation—when you look at the success of women of African, Caribbean and Asian heritage within that, we are nowhere to be seen. Added to that, we have become invisible to the organisation. You can have police services up and down the country that do not have any black females in them. If you turned that on its head and said that we had constabularies without any women in them, there would be a public outcry, but because we have become invisible to the organisation, we are being missed. We are not being progressed or targeted around representing our communities within the police service.
Sergeant Munro: Thank you for having us here. I wrote down a couple of words when you asked that question, and I have to concur with my colleagues: it feels stilted, at times it feels like it has stagnated, and it is frustrating.
I have been in the service since 2006; I joined because I was aware of some of the issues in policing and I wanted to make a change in that regard, but although I was born here, it feels at times as if I am in an alien land. At times, policing is not really comfortable with having black people in it. Historically, we know that there have been black people in policing for almost 200 years, yet we find ourselves still at 6% of the police service. We also know that when the work is done properly and positive action is applied, forces will progress—I can name you five or six forces in which that is happening. They are clearly doing well, but the fact that I can name five or six out of 40-odd is an indication that this is not being done as well as it should be.
I will talk a bit more about institutional racism later if I am asked specifically about it, but we are here and we want to make a change. We are the change—to quote Barack Obama—and we are going to stay.
Inspector Mohammed: In terms of progress, I echo what colleagues have said, including what Janet said about family liaison and operational policing. There has been a concerted effort on recruitment work since I gave evidence here two years ago on police diversity. The results sometimes do not reflect that concerted effort, but that is about systematic failures that we can talk about later.
The biggest barriers still appear to be in the areas of progression and under-representation. The data shows that BME employees are under-represented in progression and recruitment but over-represented in misconduct and grievance cases, dismissals and retention rates. To me, that is not just coincidental—it is not a roll of the dice. There is some sort of failure at some point that, in my humble opinion, has to be attributed to the leadership of the service.
Q45 Chair: Can you give us any examples of the kind of thing that would encapsulate some of the challenges or some of the problems that you think are embedded in forces or in attitudes that still cause problems?
Sergeant Munro: Most significant, as Mustafa has just mentioned, is progression. I frequently say to chief constables—I meet with them and encourage them to engage with us—that recruitment is not really our issue. There has been some losing in terms of that, but our issue is existing members not being progressed. I think the oft-quoted figure is that about 2% of chief officers are from a BAME background. We can all name the only black or Asian chief constable there has been and he has been retired for over 10 years. As you go further up the rank structure, it is clear that there is a lack of representation.
As Mustafa just said as well, there is a lack of representation in specific areas where you would hope to see BAME officers, where it would be quite useful—in special branch, for example, and across traffic and dog handlers and other areas like that. Even when we do join the service, there is a feeling that we are kept at that level. It does feel like that at times. Personally, I was on a high potential development scheme. Of my cohort of 60, I was one of only two who were not promoted during that period. My force might argue some of the reasons why that was the case, but it did very much feel, and we discussed it with others, that my race was a factor. If you go up and down my colleagues here, and my cabinet that is behind me as well, you will hear story after story of people’s experiences that are exactly the same.
Detective Sergeant Hills: Again, I think misconduct, and the lens through which the organisation looks at and sees racism. There needs to be an embracing of that. Potentially, the label of institutional racism hasn’t really done policing any favours, but it is the resistance to own the fact, and therefore progress from it—we are not seeing that. We have a disproportionate number of people who are in misconduct, and therefore we have a really high dismissal rate. All the good work that is being done to recruit then comes into a culture that is still not embracing diversity, race and difference, which then has people either dismissed or deciding to leave voluntarily, which again makes it disproportionate. We are constantly having to work and pedal really hard to keep what we’ve got. People are being recruited but they are not staying because they are not being progressed. It is all about that lens through which they see diversity, and race in particular.
Bevan Powell: There is an issue around institutional memory. Why have all these changes come about? It was interesting when Baroness Lawrence was giving her evidence that she said she was finding it hard to find any progress reports and so on. That is one of the fundamental issues. The only time the police seem to respond to the recommendations and the associated issues that came out of Macpherson is when there is a Home Affairs Committee or a public inquiry of some sort. That cannot be the case. We have to embed that learning. We have to understand how that change came about. It came about because of the courage of the Lawrences. The changes we see in homicide: why do we see those changes? That needs to be embedded. It cannot be left aside. For me, there is something about the corporate memory, and that needs to be addressed.
Detective Sergeant Hills: Just on that point, you have young officers in service in the Met—in their early 20s, just over 20—who, if you asked them who Stephen Lawrence was, would not know. They would not know the impact of the recommendations of Macpherson. Again, it is the reluctance of the organisation to embrace some of the positives that have come out, around operational policing, and also to not box diversity separately. Actually, that diversity has improved the quality of service we give to our communities. That corporate memory that Bevan talks about is key for us in the long term to understand and recognise how far we have come and where we still need to go.
Inspector Mohammed: Earlier I mentioned systematic failures—for example, I will give the example of progression. How is selection designed in the police service in terms of getting promoted or trying to go for lateral development? It is designed by a group of people who are not representative. The assessors are not representative; the interviews are not representative. You get a churning cycle of what I would call a cloning of leadership. For years, we kind of get the same type of leadership, and there is very little diversity and cultural competence built into those systems to see a different outcome.
We are 20 years on, and where forces have adapted a new way of selection, and where they are running assessment centres and removing subjectivities and bias, they are getting better results than some of the forces that are staying with the old way of application forms and line manager support. When we did an internal piece in the West Midlands on where the greatest attrition regarding progression was for BME staff, it was at the first hurdle of line manager support. We were not getting enough people through to enter the race. We then put a business case around changing that and having a different selection process. There are systematic failures. When I am looking at where the policies and procedures mainly lie, they lie within the world of human resources. HR is a body of people who are not representative, and they do not understand the cultural competence that is required. It is difficult to try to build that in and change that around, because the churning and recruitment into those areas are few and far between. It is very scarce.
Chair: I want to keep the focus on some of those recruitment and retention issues. Kate Green.
Q46 Kate Green: I am very interested in what you are saying about this. You seem to be suggesting a lack of knowledge about recruiting for a diverse force among those who are responsible for recruitment. How would you change that?
Inspector Mohammed: I would draw the analogy with some of the best practice. Bedfordshire had some fantastic results in its last recruiting campaign. What did it do? What was the template for success? There was a chief who made race a priority within a positive action programme. It is clear—I am sure my colleagues will agree—that there is a backlash from the other protected strands against giving race priority. So there is a backlash and tension going on as we speak. That was the first key thing. We had a chief who openly said, “I’m going to make race a priority for a positive action programme”. The second part, for me, was that the practitioners and the people who made the decisions and selections—the assessors—were culturally competent enough to be able to attract, interview, retain and support the very people we were trying to bring into the organisation. Thirdly, there was a continuous adverse impact analysis of processes to see whether those processes at every stage were disadvantaging any of the people who we were told to bring in. That is the good practice, but when you see the disparity in how forces are doing what they are doing, clearly in some forces the demography shows that there is a significant BME community, yet the chiefs are still not happy to prioritise race because of the internal backlash.
Q47 Kate Green: There are examples of forces doing this well. There is a National Police Chiefs Council, which is an opportunity for best practice to be replicated. What is going on across forces sharing good practice and raising standards across the whole country?
Inspector Mohammed: What is going on? Jon Boutcher is the lead in the National Police Chiefs Council, and a toolkit has been designed for forces to embrace and deliver, but ultimately the discretion in how they deliver and implement that is down to the forces. The sharing of best practice takes place, but the implementation and delivery looks very different on the ground, and that is where the disparity comes in terms of results.
Q48 Kate Green: So what needs to happen to change that?
Inspector Mohammed: There needs to be a consensus among the chiefs. One chief is probably too nervous to tell the other chiefs what to do. There is this hierarchical struggle going on and it needs to be put to one side for the greater good for the community and the service. Rather than put guidance as best practice, there needs to be some sort of mandate for it, rather than having the option to use it or not to use it.
Q49 Kate Green: What is the responsibility of the Home Office in all of this, or what should it be?
Inspector Mohammed: That’s a good question. The Home Office can play a greater part in holding chiefs to account. I have something written down here: who actually holds the chiefs to account? I really don’t know the answer to that. We have HMIC that come and do an inspection. We have the College of Policing, which provides the gold standard in terms of what should and should not be done. But when the chiefs do not meet the goals and the criteria that are set out in their strategies, then who holds them responsible? I think that is probably a role that the Home Office can play.
Q50 Kate Green: Do the police and crime commissioners have a role? Are they discharging it effectively?
Inspector Mohammed: They obviously sit with their chiefs and agree the crime plans and understand the diversity statements, but year after year we don’t meet the targets and year after year we have the same outcome. So are they carrying out their role and responsibilities effectively? From where I sit, no.
Sergeant Munro: There is a phrase: whatever gets measured gets done. It has obviously not been measured enough.
We have been making a strong argument and our position as the National Black Police Association is for positive discrimination. That is not something that we say lightly. We are aware that it can be controversial and that it would require a change in legislation. We are obviously also aware that it was used with some degree of success in Northern Ireland. They would say that it not only affected the sectarian issues over there, it also affected race and sexual orientation as well. They felt that the Police Service was now welcome to them in that regard.
I think if you looked about 20 years ago most people would have said, “No, we want to be progressed on our merits rather than the colour of our skin,” but we have gone down the path to where we have seen that that progress is still not being made. In 2013 or 2014, the College of Policing did a survey of all officers. They asked this specific question. It was only done of officers—it was not done of staff, and that is a separate issue, as staff are not being progressed either. They asked officers and it came back with about a third saying they were against positive discrimination, a third were in favour and a third were undecided.
Q51 Kate Green: Was that all officers?
Sergeant Munro: That was all officers; all BAME officers. Following on from that, I know that Janet presented in front of yourselves in 2016, and we debated that as an association. At the end of that we came to the view that we believed that it was the route we needed to take. We didn’t make that particularly public, apart from among ourselves, but last October we had our conference in Belfast, because of the issues that there are at the moment, and during the conference there was a vote. You have to realise that it wasn’t just our members there, there were also members of the public there and politicians, members of the press and other people like that. I was surprised. I thought it might be 60% in favour. It actually came back as 80%. Four out of five of those there felt it was the time for positive discrimination. That was based on all the evidence that they heard during the conference. That is the position that we now take and I have publicised that. That is on our website. That is what we are looking at.
We are aware that it will come with some difficulties, but otherwise, we are looking at current rates of BAME representation in the UK population of 14% and less than half of that for officers—The Guardian estimated recently that it would be 2052 before those two match up. Of course, by the time we get to 2052, the population will have moved on from that—the estimates are that it could be as high as 40%—so that the estimates are that it would take us into the next century before we even get close to there being representation within forces.
I would say that it is down to a lack of leadership. I know you have mentioned the Home Office. It hasn’t helped that we have had a change in that regard.
Q52 Kate Green: I’m sorry—which change do you mean?
Sergeant Munro: In terms of Home Secretary. It does seem that whenever we start to make progress, there has been a bit of a change and that is beyond our—
Q53 Kate Green: How recently has that change occurred?
Sergeant Munro: I would say that we did see some progress when Theresa May was Home Secretary, in terms of certain views, but obviously the whole hostile environment that she also introduced did not help communities believe there was a change—[Interruption.]
Kate Green: I’m sorry, you were interrupted and distracted.
Chair: Ringing bells are an occupational hazard here.
Sergeant Munro: I understand. In the past, there has also been, I believe, a lack of leadership in the college. I believe that that has changed. Mike Cunningham has taken over, but that takes time to work its way through in that regard.
Everybody talks about HMIC, and it is seen to be the inspectors, but they are not actually watchdogs and not the ones who would hold the PCCs or chiefs to account in that way. There is nothing to force the chiefs to adhere to the toolkit that Mustafa has just mentioned.
Although we have agreed to work with that toolkit, we feel that the only way we can do so is for us to be that watchdog. We feel that we are the ones providing the leadership in that regard and, at the moment, we are working on asking for that to be put on a statutory footing, because we do not want to be here in another 20 years’ time—nor whoever replaces me to be here in 30 years’ time, on the 50th anniversary—still saying the same sorts of things. We believe that the change should come from us, and so we are calling for that statutory footing.
Detective Sergeant Hills: In the Met, recruitment is not really a problem. We have been recruiting consistently for a good number of years now. What I will say about the improvement process is that certain barriers within it have us not make it through the whole process. That would be down to vetting—where we come from, our families and that kind of thing—and the search, the two-day assessment process that we have, which needs tweaking constantly to ensure that we do not have bias within the process. So for us, in London, recruitment is not really our problem.
Tola talks about the whole statutory footing piece. One of the big things for me is that, after 28 days of being in the police service, I have paid my union fees to the Police Federation, which is the statutory body. My expectation of it is that it should have been putting in a submission to the Home Office, or the Home Affairs Committee, on the issues that we non-statutory bodies are having to drive forward. The federation is still made up of men primarily, in that space. However, I am aware of a paper that it introduced about trying to increase diversity among its union reps.
From my perspective, on reading that paper, I felt that positive discrimination had been used when safeguarding positions for those of African, Caribbean and Asian-heritage people and officers to be injected into the federation’s infrastructure. From that perspective, if it is able to use positive discrimination in that way, I can see no reason why it should not be used in similar promotion processes in policing, in particular when we look at how we police our communities.
The Met often says we want to look and feel like our communities. However, when we are promoted—our most visible ranks are those of sergeant and inspector, who are out there operationally—you do not find that it looks at the demographic of the area that is being policed and therefore safeguards those leadership roles within. So the message to our communities—about that visibility, the role model and the leadership that we offer—is not being delivered. We get areas of dense population by ethnic minority communities that have no leadership in a sergeant or inspector who comes from a similar community. From a Met perspective, the issue is not recruitment; it is the other part of how we think and apply our diversity around policing for London.
Q54 Stuart C. McDonald: The MBPA said in its written evidence, I think, that the reform of discipline and complaints procedures is key to tackling stubborn lack of progression. Why is that, Detective Sergeant Hills? You spoke a little about that earlier. Would you like to expand?
Detective Sergeant Hills: I think that the barriers that Mustafa talked about, in relation to a line manager giving you permission to go for the next rank, should be taken away. If people are prepared to put in the work—because no one gives you your promotion—they have to spend a good number of months studying, a good number of hours in an exam room in order to qualify, and then they have their part 1 qualification. Then, you are not allowed to take the next part of it because people still feel that you are not ready. In that time—as I said, the dismissal rate for the Metropolitan Police Service is about 40% for African, Caribbean and Asian officers, which is quite high. Part of the issue around that is that racism and discrimination come with a mental health tag, so people are actually suffering in silence without asking for help or saying that it is racism. Racism does not come in the forms that we expect it to. It is not name-calling anymore; it is quite covert and undercurrent.
Part of the issue is that the organisation cannot define it and so cannot address those issues. Officers go through it alone. Then, there is the mental health issue—they make a mistake, it leads into misconduct, when it is actually a mistake. There should be something at the midway point that identifies that as a mistake rather than misconduct. A lot of the misconducts for African, Caribbean and Asian officers are put in as gross, so that they are looking at dismissal at the top end, and no further action at the bottom end. But we get put in at gross, and therefore the option is on the table for dismissal. I feel that there needs to be a lot more of a lens around appropriate authorities that look at race cases, and that they understand what it is that they are looking at.
On the reverse of that, if I make a complaint that someone has been racist towards me, that complaint is not understood. It is not understood that I am saying that that is exactly what I feel has happened, so it is not therefore acted upon. It does not work like that. It is seen as a nothing, and is therefore not actioned.
Q55 Stuart C. McDonald: And you have had direct experience of that, if I understand correctly? Did you not speak to The Guardian at one point about an incident in which you had been stopped off-duty?
Detective Sergeant Hills: Yes.
Q56 Stuart C. McDonald: Would you say a little bit more about that?
Detective Sergeant Hills: I said I have been in 28 years—and it was a long time ago, when driving a nice car would have you stopped. I guess that is part of our push around the stop-and-search aspect of traffic stops, which we feel should be incorporated into that. It is really difficult to raise your head and talk about racism for fear that it will be turned on you for raising—
Q57 Stuart C. McDonald: Because you’re seen as a troublemaker?
Detective Sergeant Hills: Absolutely, and therefore, the moment that you raise your head above the parapet, it will be shot down. That is why we do not have as many complaints as we see, but we do have as many dismissals, because there is an imbalance of understanding there.
Q58 Stuart C. McDonald: That brings us back to what Baroness Lawrence said in her evidence. She was talking about the early ‘90s and the idea that a black officer needed to be like or to behave as if they were a white officer. Is that essentially what you are getting at?
Detective Sergeant Hills: It is difficult for officers to come to work with their authentic selves—it almost feels like you have to leave who you are. Within the organisation, I have many a time been mistaken for the prisoner in the custody suite, as I stand alongside the prisoner who I have arrested. What is perceived of me internally is perceived of me externally. When I am off-duty, you would not necessarily know that I was a police officer doing the role that I do. You have that, so it is difficult to bring your authentic self to work and be who you are, because it is different. It is not in line with the culture—the male, pale, stale attitude in policing. Policing is still very male-orientated.
Q59 Stuart C. McDonald: In terms of misconduct cases, our old friend we have been speaking about—the inspectorate of constabulary—prepared a report on this in 2015, which raised concerns about fairness and consistency. It called for chief constables to review complaints and misconduct arrangements within six months and take action to address any bias. What were the result of that exercise, if any? Has it had any impact on misconduct cases, or is another report that is just gathering dust?
Sergeant Munro: I will answer in a second. To make it clear, a couple of years ago, you were twice as likely to be dismissed if you were a black, Asian or mixed-race officer in the UK. Last year, it went up to three times as likely to be dismissed. That is from Home Office statistics.
The HMIC reported on that, and it is quite a similar report. They did a legitimacy report back in 2015, and we have done some work since then. One of my colleagues, who is sat behind me, has done some work in that regard. We found in the end that forces were not going to give us information, although we asked for it, so we did a freedom of information request. If they had done what was recommended—the recommendation was that they record disciplinary processes by gender and race—it should have been relatively easy for them to respond to that. At least a couple of the forces, including South Yorkshire and Dorset, gave a section 12 referral, which effectively means that it is too much work. That suggests that it has not done what was recommended.
We were finally able to get most of those in. It took over a year to get some of those freedom of information requests in—as I am sure you know, that is quite a long time—and we have gone back to some forces with that. I am repeating that process at the moment, but we are still getting some forces saying that that is very difficult. Some forces are ready to provide that information within the period, as you would expect if it is easy to churn out and they provide it to the Home Office, but others are saying that they cannot do that.
It feels like there is resistance from some forces to provide that sort of information. We are not asking for a lot. We are asking how many people are going through a disciplinary process and how many people have been served with papers at reg 15 or 16, which is where you go to a panel, and what the comparisons are, in terms of race. Some are still saying, “We can’t provide that information.”
It is a shame that HMIC hasn’t taken up the bat and done that. Therefore, we are forced to come here and say that there are forces that aren’t answering. I would be more than willing, once we have finished that survey, to provide that information to the Committee. We can also provide the information from two years ago, when we did that. That is the work we are doing. Again, it falls to us to do that.
Q60 Stuart C. McDonald: That is very helpful. Thank you. Touching again on the idea of people who are perceived to be troublemakers if they raise issues relating to racism and so on, I understand that one or two cases have been taken to an employment tribunal. Essentially, those whistleblowers have eventually become subject to disciplinary action. How widespread a problem is that, and how do we stop it?
Detective Sergeant Hills: The thing is that it is not recorded. Ultimately, we have got a really high dismissal rate, but why those people are being dismissed is not recorded. It could be that that is the problem. Without understanding what the problem is around people raising their heads and then being dismissed, we can’t address it. There needs to be a bit of work around dismissals and why they are happening to understand how we can deal with the problem.
Q61 Stuart C. McDonald: Finally from me, what would be the most important change to these procedures to ensure fairness in the system?
Sergeant Munro: It is difficult, because sometimes it starts with poor supervision. Sometimes it is a performance issue that should be dealt with by a supervisor, but the supervisor doesn’t feel able to deal with it or thinks, “I’ve got a black member of staff, and this might get difficult. They might go to the National Black Police Association or the federation.” The supervisors then build up a little package of what are still performance issues, which still shouldn’t go to a professional standards department. They might throw in a little bit of something that might seem to be misconduct, and then it goes to a professional standards department. In the past, pretty much once it’s gone, it’s not coming back. I know that the Police Superintendents’ Association has taken the same view.
Once it has gone, the professional standards departments will look into things and might well find something more. If you investigate most cops, there might be something they are not doing right. They might not be wearing the right uniform or they might be turning up late, but it gets built up into something it shouldn’t. Not only are we going into that process in larger numbers and percentages, but obviously we are more likely to be dismissed. Those are the figures I have talked about.
This is not a new thing, as you are aware from the HMIC report. It has having an effect on the barred list. The barred list has something like 10% Asian officers, which does not reflect the number of Asian officers in the service. It includes those who have obviously resigned before it has gone to that stage. People have just given up and gone. The reality is that, at times, it feels like people use this as a way of getting us out of the service.
If I can talk briefly about my own experience, I did go through a misconduct panel and when we got to a certain stage—there was no further action, you will be pleased to know—the barrister drew myself and my police friend into a room and started to talk about his own experiences of race, and stuff like that. Then he said, “I think this is all about race”. That was a barrister’s view. My fed friend said, “I can tell intolerance all the way through”. I didn’t want to believe it, but the evidence was that it was motivated by race.
Detective Sergeant Hills: You do need greater oversight. You need external oversight, you need people with a lens around the issue to advise and help policing to understand what it is dealing with. We don’t have that in the Met. We just have people in that space, applying what they perceive or feel is racism, not ever having experienced it before.
Inspector Mohammed: If I could add some context to that, in the misconduct world, you have appropriate authorities. There are individuals who have the sole responsibility for making decisions on which route matters are going, whether gross misconduct or just misconduct and when you look at how representative that will be in terms of cultural competence, in one of the cases where there was an allegation of Islamophobia, my question was, “How are you going to make a decision on this?” and there was silence. That cultural competence or understanding what you are going to investigate and what you are going to make a decision on needs to be with that full understanding. The system is occupied by individuals who are not representative and do not have the cultural competence to be able to deliver against that agenda.
Secondly, it is too insular and closed. It is behind confidential doors. If we ask questions as champions, we are told, “Sorry, it’s data protection, we can’t tell you”. Even numbers are very hard to ascertain, as Tola said. If we can change rates of independency, openness, transparency and scrutiny to that world to get people to understand that somebody is watching over their decisions—at the moment, it is too insular and nobody can ask them any questions.
Detective Sergeant Hills: On that point, if I made an allegation or complaint that somebody had been racist towards me and a report was written, and I wanted to see it to ask, “How have you come to a conclusion that there is no case to answer?”, it is not available to you. You cannot get it. I cannot see why you shouldn’t be allowed to have that information, because it is based on you.
Stuart C. McDonald: Thank you.
Q62 Douglas Ross: Apologies, I have a question to ask in the Chamber, so I will have to go after this, but I would be grateful for further evidence. On Stuart McDonald’s point, are you saying that if you are on a panel that says black and ethnic minorities are over-represented in grievances and dismissals, there is no way—if there is that over-representation, as something is clearly going wrong and the process is going wrong—to look at these cases individually, either through the federation or your representative bodies to say, “Here is a case that shouldn’t have got to grievance, that shouldn’t have been marked as gross misconduct” and to feed back that way? Is that not happening?
Sergeant Munro: I don’t think that feedback has been happening. Usually where it comes out is in employment tribunals. If I can quote—it is in the public sphere— an officer down in Kent who was dealt with. His name was Angus Bowler, and he was an officer who was looking to progress and suddenly found himself in a mire of these things. When he submitted his grievance about what had happened and it went to an employment tribunal, the judge found that some of the evidence provided was “wholly unbelievable”—I think that was the quote.
The force’s reaction to that finding of race discrimination by a judge and tribunal was that it was a matter of perception. The judge found race discrimination, but the force’s professional standards department has a better view on that. Forces are not doing that. Our only recourse other than that is to the IOPC. I know they have been very busy in Cleveland in that regard, but this is five or 10 years on from the issues in Cleveland and it still has not been resolved. It should not have to go to the IOPC. Ideally it should go to the PCCs. The PCCs should be the ones to do that. If you can make it to the PCCs they will acknowledge the fact that only one PCC is from a BAME background. Most of them are male, and in terms of their own monitoring and accountability, there is little to lose. Really it depends on whether the PCC is interested. Unfortunately most of them do not give any indication that they are.
Detective Sergeant Hills: Again, even with the overwhelming evidence that you can have, when you read the reports they will say that they are looking into misconduct from officers from an ethnic background. The evidence is there. I have just said: 40% are being dismissed and another high percentage are voluntarily leaving. The problem is there, but when you read the reports you would never know. You absolutely would not know that there was a problem, because it is about the way it is written. It is similar to any of the strategies put in place around diversity, and actually I have read it all before. I have been here for 28 years, and it is the same repetitive stuff that gets churned over with no action and no real measurable outcomes, and therefore no change.
Bevan Powell: Can I just add to that? There is something fundamental here, which is, linking it back to institutional racism. We bandy that label around, but we do not fully understand or make use of how that helps us to problem solve the issues. If we did, we would recognise that if a force area was labelled institutionally racist, then we would have to take into account issues of progression—that we just spoke about—along with issues of disproportionality, and issues of conduct. But we don’t. That is institutional racism over here, and all these other observations, whether it be disproportionality in stop and search or under-representation in terms of leadership—there is an absence. The two are never brought together.
I dare say there are questions around institutional racism, but I would like to bring one thing to the table now about bringing institutional racism under the Equalities Act. Should a public body or the police be found to be institutionally racist, that should spark an instant action plan—over a three-year period we are going to start to address these indicators, whether it is disproportionality in terms of conduct, disproportionality in terms of stop and search, a slow rate of progression, or lack of representation in specialist departments. That should all be taken into account. It should bring about consequences. From that, HMIC should then inspect that force annually to see that there is indeed some progress being made in these areas. At the moment, the term itself does not have any teeth.
I know that questions were asked of Baroness Lawrence about whether it was a useful term. Absolutely, it was a useful term. That is why the National Black Police Association supported it, as did many in the communities. It encapsulated our day-to-day experiences. If you looked into the back office of any police force, they were all scurrying around to find out where we are with these issues when they heard that there was going to be a Home Affairs Select Committee. It cannot be acceptable. The only way you address that is by putting it under the Equalities Act, giving a mandate to the inspectorate body to inspect that force area. Should there be disproportionality or over-representation, that should then be taken as a factor to be looked into.
Inspector Mohammed: I want to add to that and say that is absolutely right. As to institutional racism 20 years ago and what it looks like today: to sum it up, when you are looking at the actual terminology, what does it mean in terms of experience? That is inequality of opportunity. We have a lack of general dedicated support for BAME individuals, procedural injustices and the disproportionality that we talked about. The data supports all of that.
On being a victim of racism, how that is dealt with and actually being subject of an allegation generally of misconduct as a BAME person, victims of racism have found that there is a real defensive attitude from forces, because there is reputational damage if it goes public. There is a defensive attitude by the practitioners to safeguard the reputation of the organisation. They do not really want it to go public, so you see a lot of out-of-court settlements before they go to ET. Very few actually make headline cases. If you have BAME individuals and dismissals around misconduct, those cases gather momentum and people are rooted out because of misconduct or certain types of behaviour. There seems to be a two-tier system, but there is a defensive attitude that if the race card is played and that racism allegation is upheld, there is huge risk to the organisation of reputational damage.
Sergeant Munro: I know you have already spoken quite a bit about this, but I have been asked quite a bit about issues of racism since I have taken over. As Bevan said, it is about the indicators that we would see that would indicate that a force is being institutionally racist. There may be certain areas in certain forces, but there are particular areas we see, and I have just jotted them down. They include: where the representation of the officers does not represent the local community by a significant factor; where there is no representation in specialist positions or in senior ranks; where there is disproportionality in grievances, employment tribunals and disciplinary and performance procedures; where there is a failure to implement your own concerns about urgent and radical action; where we see people concerned and frightened to report racial discrimination; where we see racial discrimination in the community; where stop and search is disproportionate; where, most significantly, chief officer teams in certain places are quite resistant towards that; where, when we try to put forward black culture and black policing history, there is no celebration of that; and, concerningly, where there is a professional standards department that is obstructive and a police federation that is not supportive of the work being done.
I think a number of those points are quite appropriate for certain cases, and we have talked about Cleveland significantly. Janet spoke about it when she was president. Franstine Jones, who is behind me, talked about Cleveland when she was president. It is quite clear that Cleveland has had some significant issues with regards to race, which is why there is a significant IOPC inquiry going on at the moment.
My disappointment is that I would have liked to have said that it does not exist or it that it exists in pockets. It clearly exists in pockets in the Met and places. [Interruption.] Don’t be surprised. I am sad to say that having tried to work with one of the forces—I have tried to put it off every time I have been asked—I can see that most of the areas I mentioned are being met in Leicestershire police. I met the chief constable last week. It was almost a last chance saloon. We went there last year as a cabinet because we were so concerned by what was going on. They currently have about five ET cases going on for grievances and the like. It is unprecedented across the UK for one force to have four or five race-related discrimination cases.
Sadly, it is almost as if Leicestershire wants to move the conversation on to how well they are doing with recruitment. That is fine, but it is not all about that. How are my members progressing? Do they feel able to come to the workplace? Do they feel that they are being discriminated against in the workplace? There are clearly huge issues in Leicestershire.
I can give one example, which relates to Baroness Lawrence being here. Last year, about the time of the anniversary of Stephen Lawrence’s murder—it was 25 years ago in April—the chair said, “Let us plant a tree to commemorate Stephen Lawrence.” It was not going to cause anyone any issues. It is a campus headquarters, so there is plenty of room to plant a tree. There was feedback from what we would call white privilege about this tree being planted in their garden. It was not planted in the memorial garden; it was a separate area. Sadly, that tree has now been damaged, and that is by your own colleagues. I could go through a whole range of things that I have encountered and seen, but I am just saying today that I believe that Leicestershire police is institutionally racist. I will be speaking to the IOPC about that. I would welcome you to continue to work with us. At the moment, they have not been doing that.
Chair: That is extremely disturbing evidence.
Q63 Douglas Ross: It is shocking evidence, and I think the Committee will want to look into that further. Other colleagues will want to develop the issue of institutional racism further with the panel. I want to come to two points. Sergeant Munro, you talked about positive discrimination and how you push that forward. What do you think are the potential downfalls, even though there has been success in other areas?
My wife is a police sergeant in Scotland, and she had to go through the exact same process as a male colleague. I have not spoken to her about this, but the worry with positive discrimination would be not that you would not get the post, but that you would not have respect of the colleagues you would have to oversee, because they may have felt they should have got that post if it had been an equal playing field. They may think that the individual has got the post only because of their ethnicity. How do you overcome that problem if you push ahead with positive discrimination?
Sergeant Munro: We are not talking about any other gateway into policing than currently exists on a national basis: you fill out an application form, and we are not talking about changing that at all. There is a national search assessment centre. We know there is an adverse impact ratio for black people in particular. We are not talking about changing that process, so we are asking that once people have gone through that process, if there are people of BAME heritage, that the forces recruit them first and foremost.
I believe the way we did it in Northern Ireland was that there were two pots. If you declared as Catholic, you went into one pot; if you were Protestant or anything else, you went into another pot. They would take an officer from the Catholic pot and one from the Protestant pot until the Catholic one was empty. That is how they did that, and they very quickly got up to 35%. I can envisage something similar here. I know it comes with some issues and not everyone is in favour of it. In terms of legislation time, you are quite busy with a thing called Brexit.
You called for urgent radical action two years ago, and that has not happened. The increase in BAME officers was about 2% in 1999, just after the Macpherson report came out. Last year, it was 6.6%. We have seen an increase of about 4% over that period of time. Most significantly for black female officers, which Janet mentioned, in the last 10 years numerically they went up from 359 to 393, which is an increase of 34 black females over 10 years. That is less than one per force across the whole of the United Kingdom. Nobody I have spoken to believes that is acceptable—clearly, it is not acceptable. We need to understand why we are failing to recruit black females.
We accept the fact that, when they come to the service, the service will be hostile to some of them, because they will say, “You’ve come in and it has not been fair because it is positive discrimination.” We get it anyway if you progress at all. A few years ago, I was told, “Nobody likes it when those people get promoted on the basis of their colour.” You get told, “You’ve only got this position because you are black, or a woman, or gay.” It applies to all those things.
I looked up this phrase to make sure I got it right: you might as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb. If we are going to be told that we are being progressed on the basis of our skin colour, let’s do it above board. Let’s make it very clear: if a talented black person comes through—most of them who come through have degrees—let’s make sure they are progressed into recruitment, promotion and stuff like that. Forces are rapidly hunting around and looking for BAME senior officers.
Direct entry did not do it and has not done it. I am sure you will be told the figures in that regard. There were three in the first two years in 2013-14. Since then, none has come through at all. I believe that only one force has signed up. The Met, which was the big driver, dropped out a couple of years ago. I am happy that we can grow our own, but it needs to be done in a way that recognises that we have an issue here. It has not been dealt with in the last 20 years, and unless we do something urgent and radical, which you have asked for, it will not be done. There are different ways of doing that.
Q64 Douglas Ross: You said in an earlier response that your association, the National Black Police Association, has agreed to campaign for positive discrimination, but I think what you described in the examples you gave that have worked in the past were more positive action. Is that correct? Which do you argue can do more? Is it positive action to be done properly, or would you seek to have a change in legislation for positive discrimination, which, as you know, is not legal, whereas positive action is?
Sergeant Munro: In an ideal world, positive action should do it, but it is not on the statute book. When I joined, I was given some positive action help through an awareness session. This is not new to policing. Policing has not done it; it has been patchy. You will not get that progress unless you get a Jon Boutcher from Bedfordshire police, a Dave Thompson from West Midlands, an Ian Hopkins, who has done sterling work in Greater Manchester, an Andy Marsh, or the chief constables of Derbyshire and other places. Positive action is not sufficient to give us that change. As I said, I am calling for positive discrimination to get representation in Northern Ireland to increase rapidly to 30% or 35%—they are using it for a period of time, and I would not advocate it forever—and to progress those people and hold those forces and their officers to account.
Detective Sergeant Hills: On that point—you talked about the problems we foresee—the problem I foresee is that when I or my colleagues talk about positive discrimination, it becomes an issue. It becomes, “Oh, well!”—people become affronted by it. As I said, the federation has implemented a process that is positive discrimination, or bordering on it, with regard to safeguarding elected positions for women and officers of African, Caribbean and Asian heritage, which no one has batted an eyelid at. However, I have been approached by a number of federation reps locally who say, “This is unfair, because it has allowed people to be”—how they see it—“in positions to which they have not necessarily been elected.”
That paper has been submitted and is there; it was supported by the Home Office in order for it to be delivered, yet no one has seen that as an issue, other than the people who are now being impacted on. When officers have got elected positions based on the fact that they have been safeguarded for them, people will undermine them. It has been done, but I think there need to be greater checks and balances on how it has gone and on what that looks like in the future, which the Committee probably needs to look at.
Bevan Powell: Can I just say that when you look at the pattern in the report and at how the 50:50 rule was implemented, it certainly was not about giving advantage to one group or another; it was about saying that we needed operationally to have more Catholics. You therefore ensured that you found suitably qualified candidates. At that point, you would start to recruit candidates who are Protestant. Given Brexit and the whole range of legislation that will be looked at—as Tola said, we don’t know the period of time that this would be applied—this is one tool in the toolbox that we might want to apply. I think this is an ideal opportunity to have another look at the legislation.
Inspector Mohammed: I want to talk about how you manage the stigma and labelling around positive discrimination—the idea that you have got a job because of your colour. When I joined back in the ’80s, a label given to me was that I got in because of my colour. When people get promoted, you hear that all the time. I have heard that throughout my service. People have reported cases to me that were the subject of grievances. As we speak, positive action attracts that sort of conversation—we have staff blogs that say this is actually unfair. You just live with it and hope the traction continues. It is an experience that you get accustomed to and continue to live through. The leadership knows this is happening, but any further safeguarding is left to us to do.
There is a second point on positive discrimination. I sat here two years ago and said that positive action, if done properly, can still yield results. Doing it properly is exactly what you mentioned. I am running out of ideas, and thinking, “How is it going to get done properly?”, because two years on we are still in this ad hoc place where we have one really good chief who drives the business and it gets done, and then we have similar demography in other forces, with a strong business case and an operational imperative, but the results are not there and the chief is not doing that. There is a disparity in approach to it, and I am running out of ideas. Is positive discrimination now the only option—because it is getting into compliance, isn’t it? How do you get compliance and get people to do that? It seems it is by default, because there is nothing else left.
Q65 Douglas Ross: My final question was on training, and then I will have to run. The Macpherson report obviously called for better training, and there was mention that that has improved at the college with recent appointments and suchlike. Is there still an issue that some officers take the training element on racism as just a tick-box exercise that they do, and therefore, despite the report and its recommendations and everything we have heard, people do not take it seriously? I want to use a quote that was in the 2004 report. One training officer reported that an instructor at a police training college told the class, “You’ve done the diversity. That's a load of”—expletive—“Now let’s get on with the real stuff.” Is that still a fair representation?
Chair: Before you answer that, I must ask everyone to give very swift answers. I apologise in advance that, because we have an urgent question on the Windrush cases that we all want to get to, we may end up having to accelerate or shorten some of your answers, but do carry on.
Sergeant Munro: It is still the case, and what we have found, sadly, is that even when forces have applied positive action and got a good representation of BAME officers coming to the door, lots of training schools are populated by people coming to the end of their service, so they are what I would classify as dinosaurs with regard to some of these areas. If I can cite one of the probationers—I will not say which force this was—he decided to leave because he was told he had to wear a cap badge on his turban. He felt that religiously that was unacceptable. He was told, “You have to wear a cap badge on your turban; it’s part of our policy.” He was about to go out of the door in his particular force, but fortunately the chief constable was prepared to go and have a look at why this guy was going. There was nothing in the policy; sadly, they had just made this thing up. We have seen elsewhere that people have been disproportionately failed on driving tests or other things, and it is clear from conversations that that is based on their race. There is an issue with some training schools regarding the people who are there and their understanding of the issue.
Personally, I have a big issue with unconscious bias; it is a good way of describing a situation, but a comparison might be that it is a good way of describing a miasma, if you want to go back to the history of cholera or the like, but it will not deal with the cholera epidemic. You have to go beneath that. Somebody might come back and say, “Yeah, I understand that my unconscious bias is that I don’t like Gypsies or I don’t like people who wear turbans.” You have to go on to that next stage and ensure that you actually deal with that issue with that particular person.
We have heard recently of somebody saying, “I can’t be racist.” “Why not?” “Well, I did my unconscious bias training and it came back that I’m not racist.” Obviously, that gives you a clean bill of health—you can’t be racist or sexist or homophobic if it comes back like that. That is not sufficient. Forces are hiding behind that. That is the first stage; you need to go on to what those issues are. That is part of the training and development, and we feel that that needs to be a conversation with our white colleagues as well, because we need to go forward together.
Detective Sergeant Hills: In the Met, for me, there is no excuse, from the moment you walk into training school, that you are not reminded about Stephen Lawrence and the Macpherson recommendations that have had an operational impact on policing. There is no reason why everyone walking into that building should not be reminded of that, but we are not, because there is no corporate memory. It has been reduced to a tick-box exercise on diversity, which can cover maybe half a page, when actually it threads through everything. If you go to training school to be a detective, you will learn about your crime scenes, and all that has been implemented because of the murder and the fact that we got it so badly wrong. There should not be a reason within the Met that everyone is not reminded of the operational impact that Stephen Lawrence, his murder and the Macpherson recommendations have had.
Q66 Tim Loughton: We have spoken exclusively about staffing so far, so can we talk about the public and get on to stop and search, and the still hugely disproportionate figures that you are nine and a half times more likely to be stopped and searched if you are a black teenager? I asked Baroness Lawrence where the balance is between better implementation of the procedures and that still meaning black boys being disproportionately stopped. If we know that that is in the interests of stopping knife crime, of which we know black boys are the biggest victims, when does that become acceptable? Where is the balance? Or is the lack of trust—with stop and search becoming an almost totemic issue—as bad as it was 10 years ago, before the previous Home Secretary, now the Prime Minister, made those changes?
Detective Sergeant Hills: Looking in the blandest way possible at the Met figures on stop and search, 54% of stops by the Met are currently for drugs. As a community, there has been an increase in violent crime, and we are being told that stop and search is being used to try to prevent that. I want to see that the 17% of searches for weapons increase. Instead of seeing 54% of searches for drugs, which impacts on black men in a particular age group being stopped, I want to see weapons stops at that level, which would actually show that the power is being used in the way it is supposed to be. However, we do not see that. The statistics on the reasons for stopping are still at 54% for drugs, even though we know that a white person is more likely to be in possession of drugs.
Sergeant Munro: I believe a Committee member’s constituency is in Dorset. I cannot understand why a black person in Dorset is 25 times more likely than a white person to be stopped and searched. The figures for Asian, Chinese and other race groups in that area are about the same proportion; they are about twice as likely to be stopped. The evidence from HMIC, based on data given to it by forces, is that it is more likely that items will be found—whether drugs in particular, or other things—on white people if they are stopped. However, most forces disproportionately stop more black people than white people.
The overall number of stops and searches has come down over the last few years, since the best use of stop and search scheme was introduced. It has been more targeted, which makes us more likely to find things. As police officers, we welcome that; it is a great tool. However, it is a tool used to allay suspicions of an offence. It is not a crime prevention tool. Deputy Chief Constable Adrian Hanstock from the British Transport Police, who is the National Police Chiefs Council lead on this, was very clear at the roundtable with Amber Rudd, when she was Home Secretary, that significantly increasing stop and search does not bring crime down. It is not a crime prevention tool.
There needs to be a community response, which I think is what you are looking towards. We believe that there needs to be an overall community response, which needs the confidence and trust of the communities most significantly impacted by knife crime. We are aware that, in certain areas of London, specific communities are affected.
Q67 Tim Loughton: So what is the point of stop and search?
Sergeant Munro: Operationally, I may be given information that somebody has stolen an item and is in an area. We will be given a description, but there might be a number of people in that area, so we will go and stop all the people in that area who match that description. It is clear in our PACE regulations that I cannot do that based on race alone. There needs to be something more than the suspect being a person of colour.
Even in Gwent, where I come from, we have seen the community respond. People have said that their grandchild has been stopped 10 or 12 times because he is black, even though he has never been arrested for any offence. Officers get instructions that there need to be more stops and searches, so they go for the easy things. They may think that black people are more likely to carry drugs—that is not true; it is a stereotype, a myth—so they turn over some black people hoping to come up with some cannabis, or they might be able to smell cannabis around black people, so they turn them over.
I will give the example of the BBC research. I believe the journalist’s name was Noel Phillips. He was with two white friends in the Metropolitan area. The police came up and said they could smell cannabis. The friends said they did not have cannabis, but the police said they had the grounds to search them because they could smell cannabis. The police only turned over one of them—the black person, which speaks for itself. It was clearly a stop that was based on his colour. We would call it a fishing expedition. I agree with Janet: we absolutely want more stops based on weapons, stolen items, prohibited articles or anything like that. But we seem to have got lost, in dealing with knife crime, which is what we really want to do, in this argument about stop and search—it is not the best tool to do that.
Q68 Tim Loughton: What is the incentive for an officer to do that, given that it has become such a totemic thing? There is such a spotlight on the hugely disproportionate number of black teenage boys who are being stopped and searched. Why do they continue to play up to that?
Sergeant Munro: I think there is still an element of performance. We are told what we shouldn’t be dealing with performance, but you’ve still got some senior officers in particular who grew up with the performance thing saying, “Oh well, back in my day we always did so many stop and searches in such a period of time, so we are expecting you to do the same number of things.” Actually, you may have done all of those back in the past but they may not have yielded much. Let’s use it as a tool for what it is.
Q69 Tim Loughton: But why use it against black boys rather than white boys?
Sergeant Munro: My perception is that they are stopping them because they believe they are more likely to find items on them. So you get—
Q70 Tim Loughton: But statistically, that is not the case for drugs, which form over half of stop and search. They are barking up the wrong tree, aren’t they?
Sergeant Munro: Yes, they are barking up the wrong tree. Statistically, you are more likely to find drugs on white people than you are on black people. The find rate on white people is about 33%; on black people it is about 25%.
Q71 Tim Loughton: Okay, and you said that 54% of stop and search is drug-related. Logically, statistically, in order to make stop and search more effective and less controversial—and certainly racially sensitive—you do more stop and search on those white boys, men and women who are more likely to have the drugs. Why is that not happening?
Sergeant Munro: You have said exactly what I have said. I have said, logically, you should do more stops on white people. I am sure that there are a few gangs out there at the moment with a mixture of races who will give their drugs to people who are less likely to be found in possession of them, particularly white females, who are less likely to be stopped and searched. They are not stupid people. They know that and they recognise it. Yes, more could be done. It should be targeted. We want a community that is trustful and confident of policing to give us that information so we can do targeted stop and search.
Detective Sergeant Hills: That right there is the problem, insomuch that the overuse of stop and search actually disenfranchises communities and therefore the confidence to use the police in that way and to tell them. Without their intelligence—we are saying we should be intelligence-led but the intelligence we need is coming from the very same people we are stopping and disenfranchising through the use of the power. It then makes it difficult to have the intelligence to go out and identify the individual who we are saying is carrying that knife or who has hidden that knife.
That is the bit of work from that perspective—building the confidence around the use of the power, around getting the outcomes that we want to see around the knife crime being reflected in the data. Part of that and part of the recommendations for that has come from Macpherson, insomuch that we should be having external scrutiny of this coming from the communities that are most impacted by it. Again, even that has fallen off—your introduction of IAGs and of the scrutiny groups to look at stop and search is, again, ineffective. I read a report by the Criminal Justice Alliance last week that talks about that. It has done research into young people and the feelings they go through when they are being stopped in this way.
It takes external scrutiny from communities to hold the police to account for not delivering on the whole stop and search piece. At the minute, it is all falling by the wayside and we don’t have the communities coming forward for that.
Chair: Unfortunately we are about to run out of time because the urgent question is due to start at 12.30 pm. I am just going to ask Alex Norris to refer to some issues about which it might be helpful for you to give us some further written evidence.
Alex Norris: My particular interest was around the Macpherson recommendation on encouraging the increase in the reporting of racist hate crime. We know that has doubled over the last six or seven years. I am really keen to know how good an experience you think that individual receives, once they have made the decision to call the police. Does that make them more likely to do it again in the future or to recommend doing so to a friend or family member? To what extent is that experience uniform across all forces, or is it different in Nottinghamshire from somewhere else?
Chair: We were also interested, Mr Powell, in the points that you were making earlier about whether you could include institutional racism as part of the Equality Act framework, so any further thoughts or evidence that you have on that would be helpful as well.
The final question I was going to ask was simply what your top priority would be. If there was one thing that you could change to make a difference—thinking back to the Stephen Lawrence inquiry and its legacy, the challenges it posed around institutional racism and the progress that we ought to be seeing—what would your top recommendation or the top thing be?
I apologise for not being able to take the time to hear your answers to those final questions. In the urgent question process, we can never predict what questions will be called, so we did not know until after we had started the evidence session this morning. We are very grateful for your time and for the evidence that you have given us.