Racism in police still endemic

Can Fahy really be surprised if people from ethnic minorities are reluctant to join a service whose employees seem to view them as subhuman?

In London alone, Metropolitan Police officers gunned down Mark Duggan and Jean Charles de Menezes without legal consequence. Smiley Culture died in a police raid on his home in circumstances the force have gone out of their way to obscure. Sean Rigg died in custody at Brixton police station after being handcuffed and pinned to the floor - when what he needed was treatment for his paranoid schizophrenia.

And those four are only the top of a list of killings which is itself part of a catalogue of abuse by police in London and across Britain.

Internal complaints by Met officers of racist abuse by their colleagues trebled over the five years to 2012. And the force had to publicly declare a crackdown after the shocking treatment of one young man - sworn at and called a "nigger" by police following his arrest during the London riots - opened the doors to a host of further allegations.

----

Met officers were accused of racially abusing members of the public, of mishandling calls and of assaulting a teenager. Members of the notoriously thuggish Territorial Support Group allegedly attacked a group of ethnic-minority youngsters in Hyde Park.

It all suggests that nothing has changed even since 2008 - when the Metropolitan Black Police Association urged members of ethnic minorities not to join the force in protest at "institutional racism" - let alone 1999 when the Macpherson report on Stephen Lawrence's murder first applied the term to the Met.

Nationwide, complaints of police racism soared from 74 to 167 a year between 2002 and 2011. Since the Macpherson report, 293 police officers have been disciplined for racism - but just five were sacked and seven forced to resign.

And all of those statistics, damning as they are, represent only the documented cases. They do not include the daily police harassment of ethnic minorities - particularly young black men - who know there's no point reporting the abuse.

----

People who took part in the 2011 riots have repeatedly pointed to this harassment as a major reason why the violence flared up in London, Birmingham, Manchester and elsewhere.

Fully 85 per cent of rioters in a survey later that year said policing was an important cause of the riots and 73 per cent said they themselves had been stopped and searched in the previous 12 months.

Time and again they spoke of the police as being just another gang, swaggering around the streets intimidating, beating up and even killing black and Asian youths with total impunity.

In light of all this the surprise is not so much that the police service is struggling to recruit ethnic-minority officers but that it has any at all.

Fahy suggests using positive discrimination but it's hard to see how that can make a dent in deep-seated racism at all levels of the service.

Root and branch reform is needed. And that has to start with ending police officers' freedom to abuse, assault and kill members of ethnic minorities with impunity.