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Senior police chief calls out ‘institutional racism’


www.personneltoday.com | Jo Faragher

The leader of the National Police Chiefs’ Council, Gavin Stephens, has called policing in the UK institutionally racist.

Stephens is the latest in a string of senior leaders and chief constables to describe forces as such. In June, the chief constable of Avon and Somerset Police said she was “in no doubt” that racism was rife within systems across the force.

And in May last year, Sir Iain Livingstone, Police Scotland’s chief constable, admitted the force was institutionally racist and discriminatory following a review into its working culture.

In an interview with the Guardian newspaper, Stephens called for a fundamental redesign of national policies and practices within policing to eliminate discrimination.

He emphasised that this was his personal view, but that he felt discrimination in policing operated at an “institutional level”. He felt that too little progress had been made to reform policing, and that some leaders had been slow to acknowledge the challenge.

In March last year, Baroness Louise Casey published a damning review of behavioural standards and culture in the Metropolitan Police. Although Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley said the report had generated “anger, frustration and embarrassment”, he refused to believe the label of “institutional” racism and misogyny.

Stephens told the Guardian that it was up to leaders to clarify what institutional racism means and doesn’t mean, adding that “it doesn’t mean that all police officers…


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