I write this not as a 30-year serving police officer, an assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan police service, a board member of the race and policing action plan group, or the chief constables’ non-executive director on the board of the College of Policing. I write this as the most senior police officer of colour in the UK. I write this as Neil Basu.
More accurately, I write this as Anil Kanti Basu – the mixed-race son of a white Welsh woman and a Bengali Hindu immigrant, invited to the UK on a medical scholarship in 1961 to help build our glorious NHS, Their subsequent treatment would have been entirely recognised by a post-Windrush community that still doesn’t trust the police. I write this with 54 years of lived experience of racism. I understand how they feel.
