Changing the face of London's police

The Head of the Metropolitan Police has announced his support for a temporary 50/50 recruitment programme to help increase the number of Black and minority ethnic (BME) officers.

Speaking to BBC London recently, Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe stated that as of right now, the police force was not representative of the London population. A 50-50 recruitment programme would require that half of all recruits be from the BME community.

I would argue, say for 5 years, make it fifty-fifty because sadly, even though we are recruiting now and we’re doing well, and I think about one in five of our recruits will be from a minority,”

the Police Chief said.

But at that rate we won’t get there.”

As of 2011, the date of the last census, about 40% of the London population identified as BME. Just a year before, only 9% of Metropolitan Police officers identified the same way. Though the percentage of BME police officers has probably increased since then, having a 50/50 requirement for recruitment would help reach levels representative of London’s population.

Hogan-Howe’s comments may come as a response to a poll conducted by ComRes this past July, in which 25% of the 1,000 respondents stated that they believe that the Metropolitan Police is institutionally racist. This poll was taken just days after it was revealed that a police officer may have been spying on the Lawrence family, during the investigation of their son Stephen’s murder. Almost 25% of the black respondents said they distrusted the Metropolitan Police, while only 9% of the white respondents agreed.

Increased representation in the police force might help ease the fears of the BME community, especially in light of recent issues such as stop and search. In a separate, but similar poll done by the BBC, 51% of 1,000 Londoners agreed that stop and search disproportionately targeted black men. In the same poll, 80% of the respondents also agreed that the Met Police force should be ethnically representative of the population.

Mayor Boris Johnson has agreed to consider implementing the recruitment, but he warns that there may be consequences, such as causing BME officers to wonder whether or not they had been hired because of their skill or because of quotas.

Johnson said:

You would be undermining his or her own confidence in his or her own success and achievement."

The idea for the 50-50 recruitment programme came from the Police Service of Northern Ireland, which instituted a similar programme to ensure a balance of both Catholic and Protestant police officers in the force. Mayor Johnson stated that he believed this method had worked for the PSNI, but was reluctant to implement it in London.

The potential of the idea is that it does seem to have worked in Northern Ireland,

stated Johnson.

The downside is … that whenever you have a positive discrimination move you are inevitably going to set up certain problems. You just need to reflect.”

Time will tell whether his reflections turn into actions...is what the passive citizen would say. But we OBV readers aren't known for being passive, are we?

Belinda Schwarz