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Britain’s largest police force must recruit 40% of new recruits from ethnic minorities, while officers will have to justify the arrest and search on community panels under new plans designed to quell the racial crisis plaguing Scotland Yard.
The Guardian learned the details of the new initiative on race and surveillance drawn up by the Mayor of London and the Metropolitan Police after months of negotiations.
Met Commissioner Cressida Dick is expected to accept that the force is not free from racism or discrimination, and wants to improve, when the racial action plan is released on Friday.
It comes after the massive Black Lives Matter protests over police racism following the murder of George Floyd in America.
Dick has come under pressure for a number of controversial incidents, including the arrests and searches of innocent black people who were handcuffed, leading to allegations of racial discrimination.
Official figures show that blacks are hit disproportionately by key police powers, tactics and the use of force, which the Met denies is due to racism or systemic prejudice.
New research for Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, finds that blacks in the capital are roughly six times more likely than whites to be pulled over while driving.
Those close to Khan believe the package of measures is the biggest police and race relations reforms in a generation, and the Met will commit to implementing them.
But the plan does not include the landmark 1999 Macpherson report finding that the Met was plagued by “institutional racism.” Dick has further denied that the finding applies.
The key challenge for both Khan and the Met is whether they can stem and then reverse the decline in trust among ethnic minority communities, and especially among blacks. Along with the Home Secretary, Khan oversees the Met.
The plan will set the Met a target for new recruits, with a 40% ethnic minority background by 2022, instead of the 19% target it had been planning.
The Met has the most Black, Asian and Ethnic Minority Officers (BAME) of any force – 5,000 out of 32,600. But it also has the largest racial gap of all the forces because London is 40% BAME, while the Met’s ranks are 15.4% BAME. In 2019, the Met estimated that it would take another 100 years to reach racial parity.
The new target also includes a campaign to recruit new officers from London rather than the surrounding areas, a policy that was first adopted when Boris Johnson was Mayor of London and later abandoned.
The Met is expected to respond to new community panels on a variety of controversial topics. It will review stops where the sole motive is cannabis “sniffing”, which is supposed to have stopped because it was thought to be a way to harass black communities, but is supposed to continue.
The community panels will also oversee the elite Territorial Support Group officers who parachuted to make stops, as well as the work of the Violent Crimes Task Force.
The key findings that inform the new plan are that 59% of black crime victims were satisfied with the way the Met handled their allegations compared to 68% of white victims.
In two recent cases, the police watchdog launched investigations into claims that the Met bungled an investigation into a racist attack on three black women in North West London. The police watchdog launched a criminal investigation into allegations that two officers took selfies at the scene where two black sisters were killed in a London park.
The Khan administration believes the action plan will lead to real change. A City Council source said: “This is generational, the most significant changes in police and black communities since the Macpherson report.”
Other key research findings that support the plans are that Caribbean blacks are 28 percentage points less confident in police use of arrest and search and more likely than whites to think it is unfair.
In the increase in the use of stops and searches by the Met in 2019, more black people, who represent around 13% of London’s population, were detained than whites, who are 60% of the population .
Targeting violent crime, especially knife crime, is the Met’s key justification for its level of arrests and the way it carries them out.
Between 2008 and 2018, black Londoners were “1.8 times more likely to be victims of knife crime than non-black Londoners, and five times more likely to be charged with knife crimes than non-black Londoners” , according to research.
Vehicle stops will be examined for evidence of discrimination. Vehicle stops were the focus of controversial incidents, including the search for champion athlete Bianca Williams and her partner, who were handcuffed while their baby was in the car, where nothing was found.
Khan said: “There is still a great deal of work to be done to eliminate the conscious and unconscious prejudice and systemic racism that still exists in our public institutions and our society as a whole. It is essential that we listen and respond to the frustrations expressed by black communities … about the racial and social injustice they see when they interact with our public institutions, from the police service to the educational system, the courts, the media and more .
National police chiefs are developing their own plans for the 43 forces in England and Wales, and the Independent Office for Police Conduct is investigating complaints of discrimination in the police force.
