Racial profiling- Insp Charles Ehikioya

[SmileEachDay]

BBC link

A black police inspector is suing the Met for racial harassment after being stopped in his car.

AIBU to wonder how many ways some posters will twist this to try and prove it’s not a race issue.

And my serious point - what can the police do to rid the force of racism on an individual and systemic basis? Asking police officers especially.

Good question. The police force is still institutionally racist. This needs to be acknowledged from the top, Commissioner Cressida Dick.

50% (only of 4, admittedly) think AIBU - what about, though?

The issue is unconscious bias is exactly that - unconscious

It takes a lot of training to get people to be more aware of their natural tendency to display bias, which in some roles and jobs causes more issues than most.

My husband used to train CCTV operators in combating bias and it takes months if not years depending on the age and base level of those being trained. Everyone has bias, but it really does vary in severity

It is like climate change. Hard to prove any individual storm is due to climate change but the whole pattern proves it. Yanbu.

what can the police do to rid the force of racism on an individual and systemic basis?
Maybe embed this in training right from the beginning, using facts and statistics, like the ones on the government's own web pages.

more stats here.
The government publishes this data, everyone has access to it, and still nothing is done to address systemic racism.

I expect the people who think OP is BU are people who can't or won't confront the reality of their own unconscious bias.

The usual excuses will be put out conveniently ignoring the fact that the vast majority of white people have never been stopped by the police regardless of where they are driving. I have a black male friend who I grew up with, we live in the same area, similar educational backgrounds and professional jobs, frequent similar areas. He is stopped regularly by the police while driving (several times every year), me and my DP have never been stopped once. He has made complaints, they go nowhere and no-one is will to look at the long-term patterns only discuss each individual incident in isolation coming up with the same excuses.

Solutions, lots of training, improved transparency, continual reviews, removal of grey areas currently used to justify racially motivated stop and search activity.

I also think some kind of regular stop and search and traffic stop audit needs to be done, with actual repercussions for those who cannot explain why certain stops were done.

In this particular case there was an investigation so I'm cautious to say the outcome of that was wrong as they get a lot more evidence and information than we do. But there have definitely been cases of clear racial bias which haven't been addressed in previous cases or punished accordingly