Britain’s police chiefs head calls forces institutionally racist
Police have a long way to go to make necessary changes, Gavin Stephens told The Guardian.
The head of Britain’s police chiefs council called policing “institutionally racist,” and he admits police reform progress has been slow.
Gavin Stephens, who chairs the National Police Chiefs’ Council, told The Guardian some leaders in Britain have been slow to make changes and says Black Brits shouldn’t suffer disproportionate use of force from constables.
But his remarks come after a report last year that called police “institutionally racist, misogynistic and homophobic.” Some of Britain’s most significant forces refused to accept the report’s conclusion, though others agreed.
Stephens was asked to clarify whether his view personally was that “police are institutionally racist,” The Guardian reported, and he replied “Yes.” He said he agrees with the report’s conclusion.
“The problems that we need to solve across policing are at the institutional level,” he noted, “and they need institutional changes.”
Black people haven’t been involved in shaping police policies and procedures, “and as a consequence of that, we get disproportionate outcomes in places where there shouldn’t be disproportionate outcomes,” Stephens said. “The most helpful discussion for policing to have in the future is how we redesign the policies, the practices, the implementation, of policing to remove that discrimination.”
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George Floyd’s 2020 murder in America and the resulting Black Lives Matter protests prompted the council to prepare a race action plan that showed the depth of racial issues in policing. The Guardian reported the plan’s first version, released in 2022, said that “Black people are seven times more likely to be stopped and searched than white people and five times more likely to be subjected to the use of force … 10% of our recorded searches, 27% of use-of-force incidents and 35% of Taser incidents involved someone from a Black ethnic group. The latest estimates suggest that only 3.5% of the population is Black.”
Stephens, in the interview, pointed to some progress, though he said it’s been slow.
“I’d be the first to accept that we haven’t made progress at the rate that we would want to,” he told The Guardian. “To get acceptance of the scale of that challenge took longer than we’d anticipated.”
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