Police Shootings / Possible Abuse Threads [merged]

The leader of Britain’s police chiefs’ organisation has become the most senior serving leader to say that policing is institutionally racist, as he called for a fundamental redesign of national policies and practices to eliminate discrimination.

Gavin Stephens, the chair of the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC), said black people should no longer experience disproportionate use of force, and that too little progress had been made to reform policing, with some leaders slow to accept the size of the challenge.

Stephens – elected by his fellow chief constables to lead their representative body – emphasised it was his personal view that discrimination in policing operated at an “institutional level”.

In an interview with the Guardian, he said: “It’s a leadership responsibility for us to describe to them what it [institutional racism] means and what it doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean that all police officers are racist.

“The way our policies, procedures [and] training have been designed and implemented for many years have not had the voices of black people involved in the design, the implementation, of those practices. And as a consequence of that, we get disproportionate outcomes in places where there shouldn’t be disproportionate outcomes.

“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.”

Stephens’ remarks come as policing continues to wrestle with the issue of whether it should accept it suffers from institutional discrimination, a debate dating back more than 30 years.

His intervention will add to pressure on the heads of England’s biggest forces to adopt the idea – including the Metropolitan police commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley. Rowley refused to accept the terms “institutionally racist” and “institutionally misogynistic” after a damning report last year, with the Met commissioner claiming their meanings were unclear.…….

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news...-racist-gavin-stephens?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other