Met Officer: Black people ‘Look like Monkeys’

Two Metropolitan Police officers are on trial for allegedly making racist comments about members of the public and fellow officers, hot on the heels from another infamous case of alleged racism in the Met.

PC Kevin Hughes, who serves in Newham, are alleged to have said that a group of Black people ‘looked like monkeys’ while his colleague David Hair is accused of telling a Black colleague that he thought she was going to rant about overtime and say she was "going home to cook bananas", The pair are also accused of routinely mocking Asian culture to the distress of some colleagues.

In the trial, the accused said that their actions were not racist. PC Hughes claimed that his monkeys comment was in fact a comment about someone’s gait when walking, which he claimed resembled a monkey, while PC Hair claims that his comment regarding bananas was not racist as he ‘could have named any other food’.

Such denials are similar to those who remember the case of PC Alex MacFarlane, the police officer who explained away saying that a suspect ‘will always be a n****r’ by claiming to be only trying to help is victim feel positive about his race and ended up walking free after the jury returned without a verdict.

The trial is ongoing, and it will be interesting to see what this result will be with the MacFarlane case still very fresh in the memory.

While the trial is still ongoing, it is still worrying that despite all the problems that the Metropolitan Police has had with BME communities in the past and attempts to remedy that, cases like this still crop up, making people further distrust the institution designed to protect all Londoners.

Whatever the result, the Metropolitian Police must continue to work to prevent it from becoming a by-word for institutionalised racism, damaging its reputation amongst BME communities in the process.

Robert Austin