Head of Britain’s police chiefs says force ‘institutionally racist’

US police force:

“The way our policies, procedures [and] training have been designed and implemented for many years have not had the voices of black people involved in the design, the implementation, of those practices. And as a consequence of that, we get disproportionate outcomes in places where there shouldn’t be disproportionate outcomes.

I was curious about specific examples of institutional racism so I started scouring the main report: https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5802/cmselect/cmhaff/139/13911.htm

I didn't dig very deep yet, but so far I found that the forces had been trying to train away individual unconscious biases in response to the Macpherson report, and watered down the process in favor of other priorities. (See paragraphs 505 and 506).

?

The phrase “institutionally racist” was coined by Sir William Macpherson, the retired Judge who was asked to write a report about the Metropolitan Police investigation into the murder of Stephen Lawrence. (The Macpherson Report)

It was published 25 years ago, In February 1999.

So it’s easy to understand why people might be upset at hearing this fucking pig bastard say it today.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Stephens – elected by his fellow chief constables to lead their representative body – emphasised it was his personal view that discrimination in policing operated at an “institutional level”.

Stephens’ remarks come as policing continues to wrestle with the issue of whether it should accept it suffers from institutional discrimination, a debate dating back more than 30 years.

His intervention will add to pressure on the heads of England’s biggest forces to adopt the idea – including the Metropolitan police commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley.

Asked for clarity on whether his personal view was that “police are institutionally racist”, Stephens replied “yes”, while emphasising that his reasoning for reaching that conclusion was important.

After the murder of George Floyd in the US and the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, the NPCC promised reform and launched a race action plan – which critics say has done little or nothing after three years.

The scale of the racial disparity in the use of force in England and Wales was laid out by police leaders in 2022, when they launched the first written version of their race plan.

The original article contains 920 words, the summary contains 186 words. Saved 80%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Of course policing is "institutionaly racist." I have news for you. The Catholic church is "institutionally racist." You local high school is "insititutionally racist." The YMCA down the street is "institutionally racaist." The restroom at mcDonald's is "institutionally racsist."

What does it take to make people see that ALL Humans and ALL institutions practice some form of racist discrimination? It's part and parcel of human existence. We are not wired to be accepting of all people and all ideas. If Islam allowed heretics to be murdered, that seems like extremism to us in the West. We can't embrace all ideologies all at once and accept every idea as being equal. That simply is not going to happen.

It's not wonderful, but it's no worse in the police than it is in higher education, or in churches, or in shopping malls, or in candy factories. Discrimination is always going to be present in every walk of life. That is just a fact of existence.

That doesn't mean we wallow in racism and allow it to flourish, it just means we accept there's always going to be some of it present. That's the first step to acting as better people - to recognize what the flaws and biases are in ourselves and then use that energy to help instead of trying to hurt others. But we'll never all fully embrace every contradictory idea or set of behaviors out there, it just is not in our natures to do so.