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Bottom of Form / Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, April 2002 v28 i2 p327(15)
Behind the windowdressing: ethnic minority police perspectives on cultural diversity.Ellis Cashmore.
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2002 Carfax Publishing Co.
Abstract Bedrock assumptions about the benefits of recruiting more ethnic minority police officers and enhancing cultural diversity training for police are critically evaluated by black and Asian police officers in Britain. Neither policy finds favour among groups which articulate a previously concealed interpretation of such aims: that their value lies in presenting an outward image of action rather than furthering the public good. The research reported in this paper -- the first to have gained the cooperation of British police services -- involved unstructured interviews with officers from African Caribbean and South Asian backgrounds. The interviews took place in the 18 months following the publication of the Macpherson Report in February 1999 and reflected some of the policy recommendations made by the report, which was based on the inquiry into the death of Stephen Lawrence. Interviewees analyse the two central policy directives advanced by both the Macpherson Report and the Scarman Report, which had been published 18 years before. Both policies concern the enhancement of cultural diversity as a way of combating racism. Cynically regarded in some quarters as `window dressing', the policies are not seen as helpful, nor even harmless, but as pernicious in that they contrive to give the appearance of progress, while actually achieving little. Interviews were subject to strict confidentiality and conducted in circumstances of the officers' choice in the effort to minimise any inhibitions about expressing views candidly. The officers' perspective is revealed by extensive use of verbatim quotations which drive the narrative of the article. They indicate how far the viewpoints of ethnic minority officers contrast with official policy.
KEYWORDS: ETHNIC MINORITY POLICE; LAWRENCE CASE; MACPHERSON REPORT; RECRUITMENT TARGETS; CULTURAL DIVERSITY TRAINING
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For appearances
There is widespread agreement that the composition of our police forces
must reflect the make-up of the society they serve. In one important
respect at least, it does not do so: in the police, as in other important
areas of society, the ethnic minorities are very significantly
under-represented ... vigorous action is required if the police are to
become more representative of all the community they serve ... involving
more black people in the police will take time.
The training of police officers must prepare them for policing a
multi-racial society. Much of the evidence submitted to me has suggested
that the present training arrangements are inadequate ... more attention
should therefore be devoted ... to the training of police officers in, for
example, an understanding of the cultural background of ethnic minority
groups and in the stopping and questioning of people in the street.
While they have contemporary resonance, the above recommendations were made in 1981, by Lord Scarman in his submission to the British Parliament in the aftermath of civil unrest (1981: 122-3; 126-7). Two of the cardinal proposals of the Scarman Report were: that `vigorous action' was needed to boost the recruitment of police officers from ethnic minority backgrounds; and that specialist training designed to prepare the police `for policing a multi-racial society' should be introduced with alacrity.
Eighteen years after Scarman, a second major report, this time by Sir William Macpherson, issued another prescriptive on policing (1999). Macpherson's report was the result of an inquiry into the police's handling of the investigation into the murder of the black student, Stephen Lawrence, in London in 1993 (Cathcart 1999). Of the 70 proposals offered by Macpherson, the two that instigated the most immediate action from Britain's Home Secretary were very familiar: they were the ones that formed the cornerstone of Scarman's directives -- recruit more black and Asian officers and enhance training for what Scarman had called the `multi-racial' society, but which by the late 1990s had ingeniously become `cultural diversity'.
The two reports stood like the Pillars of Hercules in British race relations: both supported dire analyses on the character and condition of racism and of its influence on policing; both commanded the earnest attention of the nation's media; and both precipitated months of hand-wringing. The fact that Macpherson made essentially the same recommendations as Scarman suggests what little impact the original invocations had made. But reaction to the later report involved the Home Secretary's specifying `targets' for all police services, these being the numbers of ethnic minority recruits they should aim for. He also ordered the British police to fortify their training. Like Scarman before him, Macpherson identified inadequacies in police training, especially in the area known as `valuing cultural diversity'. `Racism awareness training was almost non-existent at every level', concluded Macpherson, adding that this matter should be addressed. Points 48 and 49 of the report urged:
That there should be an immediate review and revision of racism awareness
training within Police Services to ensure ... that there exists a
consistent strategy to deliver appropriate training within all Police
Services, based upon the value of our cultural diversity.
That all police officers, including CID and civilian staff, should be
trained in racism awareness and valuing cultural diversity.
The injunctions shared by Scarman and Macpherson have acquired an almost canonical status: it is almost unthinkable for any politician, senior police officer, member of the clergy or any other party publicly concerned with the issues of policing and racism to query them. Ideas about cultural diversity as part of a vision of the public good were forged in the early 1980s and owed much to Scarman's inquiry. By the time of Macpherson, the ideas had made their way into the mainstream, advancing a specific conception of public morality. Between them, the reports made the desirability of more ethnic minority police and greater racism awareness or cultural diversity training appear self-evident. A question arises: what do serving black and Asian police officers in Britain think? After all, they are uniquely placed, being officers of an institution decried officially by Macpherson as racist and members of groups historically selected for unfavourable treatment by the police (a fact well-documented by several sources, for example, Cooper 1995; Fryer 1994).
The answers supplied in this article suggest that there is a broadly felt skepticism about both central directives, which have been imposed rather than explored and appraised. There is also a sense of trepidation: increased recruitment and valuing cultural diversity training, far from being the near-panaceas many accept them to be, may actually have detrimental effects. In 2000, an African Caribbean police officer, when asked to make plain his thoughts on the overall impact of the Macpherson Report, including its policy initiatives, declared to me: `It's just better for appearances.'
The remainder of the paper will concern itself with the accounts of ethnic minority police officers from three police forces in Britain: the West Midlands, which is a large service in an urban area of high ethnic minority density; Norfolk, which serves a predominantly white rural population in the east of Britain; and Derbyshire, a force in an area that comprises both urban areas with principally ethnic minority neighbourhoods, and largely white rural districts. Unstructured interviews were conducted with black and Asian officers of all ranks (though the vast majority was constables, which reflects the national situation) at venues of their own choosing. The interviews with 100 officers mixed one-on-one with focus-group formats. They were conducted by the author under conditions of strict confidentiality and tape-recorded (the tapes were later destroyed according to the agreement reached at the outset of the research).
The research project was unique in that it was the first independent research ever to gain the cooperation of British police services. It was not commissioned or funded by any organisation connected with the police or the Home Office and the report of its full findings was published by Staffordshire University Press (Cashmore 2000). The present article will distill the beliefs, opinions, analyses and critiques of the subjects in the study. As such, the accounts will be subjective: they reflect the ways in which officers themselves interpret the issues. There is no attempt to engage with the long-running arguments, particularly about racism awareness training. For this, the reader is directed to Holdaway (1996: 125-8), Oakley (1993), Solomos and Back (1996: 116-20) and Thompson (1988: 120-1, 187-8) for pre-Macpherson discussions; and Loveday (2000: 23-4) for more recent debates. These are but samples of a considerable literature on racism awareness and recruitment policies.
While previous research, including my own, has revealed the scale and nature of racism in the British police as experienced and understood by ethnic minority officers, this paper centres specifically on the perspectives of black and Asian officers on the two main policy issues raised by Macpherson; readers interested in the reasons for racism in today's police may see Bland et al. (1999), Holdaway (1996), Holdaway and Barron (1997) and, for a contrasting perspective, Cashmore (2001).
No attempt is made to quantify responses: the extracts are chosen to convey the mixture of sometimes contradictory and occasionally confused thoughts and feelings on issues that touch the lives not only of all police officers but, ultimately, of all citizens.
Myth and reality
It is not always fair to criticise a policy because of the views of a few interested parties. Yet, in the case of the police's efforts to boost the recruitment of ethnic minority candidates, special relevance should be given to the views of one group: ethnic minorities who have already been recruited. While many black and Asian police officers publicly applaud Home Office initiatives, their private thoughts are quite different. The doubts over the central policy objective concern inter alia the unstated purpose it serves: ostensibly an instrument to fight racism both in the police service and beyond, the recruitment of black and Asian officers may have other, less obvious functions, according to some officers.
A male African Caribbean officer with 16 years' service referred to `the myth' of under-recruitment, his suggestion being that a long and durable fiction had developed around what has become an inviolable policy objective.
I'm old enough to remember Scarman and I can remember all the talk at the
time about how we needed more black bobbies. I can't say I joined because
of the campaign after Scarman, but it was a time when they really wanted
black people in the force.
`It just shows you how far we've come', observed the officer ironically. `We're still saying the same things. I think it's become a myth that recruiting more black officers is the solution to all our problems.'
The officer is far from alone in his belief that the myth perpetrated for two decades owes more to public relations than substantive attempts to change the character of the police. It was endorsed by a South Asian colleague:
We shouldn't even try to boost recruitment. Why? It will happen eventually;
we'll get more black bobbies. If I was white, I'd be insulted to think so
much money was being spent on trying to recruit. The posters show us like a
happy family -- it's not like that. It's just better for appearances. But
it won't make any difference except for the image of the police.
Both officers questioned not only the validity of trying to increase ethnic minority police recruits, but of the motives behind the policy. Phrases such as `myth' and `image' betray a cynical perspective and it is one shared in many respects by a great many black and Asian officers (in this sample, a majority held reservations of some order about the policy goal). The view offered by several officers is that, having laboured since the days of Scarman in trying to increase interest from ethnic minorities, the police has failed to discover a replacement. Rather than admit the failure of every attempt to recruit blacks and Asians in any number, the police repeat its aim mantra-like.
It's a way of getting themselves off the hook ... They're [the police are]
saying, `Look, if you won't come and join us, you can't keep complaining
about us.' But, it's not like that. These kids out there are not impressed
by posters and all that stuff, you know.
The promise to recruit more ethnic minority candidates is seen, from this perspective, as a ritualistic response, its purpose more to present the image of positive action than to effect any significant change. On this account, the aim is not harmless, but pernicious, contriving to provide the appearance of action and progress while actually achieving nothing -- apart from the image of seeking a solution to the enduring problem of racism. Many officers also hold a similarly suspicious interpretation of training initiatives, as we will see below.
Another collection of doubts concerns the practicability of recruitment goals. In the aftermath of the Macpherson Report, the Home Secretary announced that more ethnic minority officers should be resolutely pursued. The composition of every police service should accurately reflect the demography of the surrounding population. In July 1999, targets for recruitment were set and these were to be achieved within ten years (Home Office 1999). The targets were not quotas, in the North American sense: they did not carry penalties if they were not met; they were simply guidelines for recruitment rather than mandates.
The targets are a joke. They haven't a hope in hell of being met. Well,
maybe in places like Cumbria or places where there are hardly any blacks.
But, in places like this [West Midlands], you can forget it. We're just
wasting our time.
Several officers interviewed entertained suspicions about the long-term consequences of recruiting more ethnic minorities. Two questions arise: what impact will more black officers have on the ways in which policing is conducted, and what effect will this have on the overall quality of officers in the force? A female constable answers this first question from an African Caribbean background:
I can't see the point in getting in more ethnic minorities if all they're
going to be is like the station cat. That's what some of them are like; you
wonder what they're doing in the police. We [ethnic minority officers] have
all had this `you only got this job because you're black' at some time in
our lives. But, looking at some of the recruits nowadays, you begin to
wonder about it.
Another female officer, also African Caribbean, feared that any increase in the number of ethnic minority groups that came as a result of advertising campaigns would lead to more `coathangers', meaning `bobbies that have no ambition apart from doing their thirty years service and picking up their pension ... they're content to stay a constable all their life'. Her impression was that the ethnic minority officers presently in post are highly motivated, ambitious careerists: `You have to be motivated to be a bobby if you're black because you're going to have to take so much stick ... from your colleagues and civilians.'
An abiding consideration was that the difficulties encountered by ethnic minority officers have `case-hardened' them; in other words, they have become tougher, more resolute and determined to endure the racism they habitually encounter. That form of racism was not the `unwitting' institutional racism that Macpherson identified as a feature of the Metropolitan Police, but a deliberate, malicious, personal racism (Macpherson's application of the concept of institutional racism has been criticised in many quarters; see, for example, Anthias 1999; Cashmore 2001; Dennis et al. 2000; Singh 2000). Although it seemed improbable that advertising and recruitment campaigns would result in any significant increase in ethnic minority applications, some young people might be persuaded. This concerned several officers. `There aren't many of us [ethnic minority officers], but we're good professionals.' The problem, as many saw it, is that anyone who is persuaded by marketing is not going to be cut from the same cloth as officers who have endured the vexing application procedure, a frequently distressing probationary period and an initial posting that may be potentially destructive (all new officers are subject to raillery, taunting and pranks, though many black and Asian officers believe that they are forced to withstand often vicious treatment because of their ethnic identities).
One South Asian officer, himself fortified, in his estimation, by what he described as a `gruelling' first three years in the service, scoffed at the idea of advertising for new recruits: