This year, it will be 20 years since I joined policing, spurred on by two very different encounters. One was with a detective inspector in the Metropolitan police, who treated me with respect and courtesy, and suggested I sign up. The other was with some officers who behaved terribly, while I watched the people who challenged them being ignored. I realised that if you want to effect change, you can’t stay on the outside looking in. I’ve dedicated most of my service to speaking up and supporting my colleagues in the police.
As I approach my 20th anniversary, I can honestly say that working in the police service is more difficult than it has ever been. This is down to many different factors – including austerity, the pandemic, government policy and other world events – but being a Black serving police officer doesn’t seem to be getting any easier.
That’s despite a lot of promises of change. In 1981, the Scarman report on the Brixton riots criticised the heavy-handed use of stop and search. After Stephen Lawrence’s murder 30 years ago, the Macpherson report made 70 recommendations to tackle “institutional racism”. Now, the Casey review has found institutional racism, misogyny and homophobia in the Met, and action is promised yet again.
Change has happened, but clearly it has not been significant enough when, 30 years after Stephen’s death, the Met commissioner, Mark Rowley, is still debating the use of the word “institutional”, and Black families are still losing sons and daughters. It feels as though nobody is listening and our experiences are still being dismissed.
More recently, change has been promised with the recruitment of 20,000 new police officers through the government’s police uplift programme. Announced in 2019, the then policing minister presented this as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to change the face of policing and increase diverse representation. Unfortunately, due to the timeframe set by the government, the push to meet the overall numbers target superseded any other objective.
There is still an intention to increase representation through positive action. But “positive action” has become one of the most hated phrases in policing – nobody wants to be told that they need extra help and support to be good at their job.
We have been led to believe that people from Black, Black heritage and Asian communities do not want to join policing. That has not been my experience. In 2015, I was part of a team tasked with increasing representation within my force in Bedfordshire. The starkest observation I had was how many people from Black, Black heritage and Asian backgrounds had enquired and started an application but never finished it, or were sifted out at the very early stages. They were not given the impression that policing was for them.
The Our Black Workforce survey, published in December 2022, found that new recruits’ reasons for joining and staying in the force are positive, with “having the opportunity to help people” and “making change from within” the most popular. But it also found that Black, African and Caribbean employees felt more excluded at work and were more likely to hide elements of their culture from colleagues than those from mixed backgrounds. Respondents said that incidents of racial discrimination and harassment were common.
Despite all this, I do believe that change is possible. The police demonstrated their ability to change when Sarah Everard was murdered. As a call for action against violence against women and girls, they galvanised resources and implemented plans to get rid of the rotten apples. Rowley may not have accepted that his force is “institutionally” racist and misogynist, but he has promised to be “ruthless” in rooting out wrongdoing in the ranks.
Other recent appointments also suggest a move towards communicating better with communities who don’t feel supported or represented by the police. Gavin Stephens, stepping into his new role as the chair of the National Police Chiefs’ Council this month, announced his intention to support the Police Race Action Plan: “It’s my firm belief that those who trust policing the least should have the most opportunity to influence how we work,” he said. In March, Steve Hartshorn, the new chair of the Police Federation of England and Wales, made a similar commitment by acknowledging that the Met is institutionally racist.
The College of Policing, which represents everybody who works for the police in England and Wales, now needs to step up, be bold and create plans to develop the existing underrepresented workforce – to create a pipeline to leadership for those who have already shown their commitment and capability within policing. They need to stop creating more and more layers of assessment, which, to my mind, adversely impacts underrepresented groups and further cements the myth they are just not interested or not good enough.
We all want a workplace where we feel confident and safe. If that can be created, Black police officers will be the number one advocates, encouraging our friends and families to join us. Policing is still one of the best careers you can have. There are far more amazing, hard-working people than there are bad ones, and we are desperate for change.
Thirty years on from Stephen Lawrence’s murder and all the promises of change that followed, one thing is often forgotten: police officers are the public and the public are police, and we are all part of the same community. For Black officers like me, there is a twofold reason to make things better. And if we can believe in change, then everyone can.
Ruth Honegan is an acting police sergeant and general secretary of the National Black Police Association
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