The police's indoctrination problem

Anyone who has been paying attention to UK policing in the last five or six years will know that concerns are frequently voiced about the politicization of the institution and an apparent drift away from the principle of treating all citizens ‘without fear or favour’ toward activism rooted in identity-based grievances.

Examples of the police infringing the rights of some people while shielding others from criticism seem to be plentiful, but are we just hearing about a few silly isolated cases that happen to attract excessive attention? Are we talking about anomalous ill-judged investigations or a deep cultural problem within British policing?

It is easy to criticise the police from a position of ignorance. The public have scant legal knowledge. (No, a copy of the Magna Carta pinned to your door does not exempt you from statutory law.) Even journalists are prone to misinterpreting video footage and wailing inanely about ‘excessive force’ and ‘police brutality’.

Is my opinion any more valid? Well, as a former officer of twenty years’ experience, I have a lot to add to the conversation. I started on response shifts and completed my last two years as a 999 call-taker. The greater part of my service, though, was as a police trainer, which gave me a unique perspective on the profession.

I therefore have a certain amount of loyalty to the police. I am, however, a contrarian by nature, so my views come from a place of careful reflection. My goal with this essay is not to solve the question at hand, but to describe the recent history of the police to illustrate how we have arrived at this mistrustful moment.

Policing in the UK relies upon a number of illusions and falsehoods, foremost of which is the deliberately nebulous concept of policing by consent. But this is a contract to which citizens are bound without choice. Chief constables are not appointed democratically. The public have no discernible influence upon policy.

The narrative paints a very different picture. The British police, we are told, are respected throughout the world. The policing model, by virtue of its age and historical primacy, is supposedly unsurpassed by any other jurisdiction. As servants of the Crown, officers are the revered defenders of ancient customs.

This origin-story mythology conceals a prosaic reality. British policing has only ever been superficially adept at maintaining law and order, relying instead upon the fakery of tradition to fool the public. It is hobbled by its dreamy perception of the past, not empowered by it. It is essentially an enfeebled and timid institution.

When I began my police service in 1999, I presumed I was joining an efficient and reputable organization. It did not take long, however, for me to realise that the police relied on their favourable public image to mask poor leadership and ineffectualness. Even then, the police were out of their depth and bureaucratic.

I learned that British policing reminisced about a non-existent golden age of Victorian values and village bobbies while struggling to catch up with post-war development and a growing population. Uncertainty remained about policing ethnic communities in the wake of the London race riots and Scarman Report.

The Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 arrived after Scarman’s inquiry and introduced new powers to arrest, search, question and detain. The police undertook training with a focus on community relations. But today Scarman is largely forgotten; it was a later report that had a far greater and more damaging impact.

The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry by Sir William Macpherson had the effect of tarnishing the reputation of the police, even if the author did not intend that to happen. As a new recruit at the time of the report, I was very aware of the palpable panic among chief officers that the accusation of ‘institutional racism’ caused.

An objective reading of the report today reveals it was a highly political document. Many of Macpherson’s conclusions were wrong or exaggerated. The problems he identified most accurately, namely incompetent leadership and weak decision making, were ignored by chief officers. But they saw an opportunity.

The reaction was swift. Chief constables knew they had to be seen to respond, so they made all their staff endure ‘community race relations’ training. This expensive virtue-signalling project involved being lectured by training providers who spent the sessions making unfounded and ignorant slurs against the police.

That was the first step on the ‘diversity’ road – the police were uncharacteristically early practitioners – and it was a reckless act of flagellation to a false creed. But the timing of this capitulation is the key point to remember. The chiefs of today were the young constables and sergeants in those captive audiences.

That is why I refer to today’s chief officers as the Children of Macpherson. Doubting the message but astute enough to learn the rules of the new game, they imbibed a diversity-before-real-policing attitude that took them through promotion boards and up the ranks. The indoctrination is not, therefore, a new phenomenon.

It’s also worth mentioning that another racist murder of a young man took place a year after Lawrence was killed, but the incident received very little attention in the press and certainly no official inquiry. The reason? Richard Everitt was a white boy murdered by Bangladeshi youths. He was the wrong kind of victim.

Or, to be more accurate, his attackers were the wrong kind of perpetrators. The Everitt case was an early example of how policing fell into the trap of labelling certain groups as victims and others as oppressors. The police accepted this falsehood without question. I saw this in the training material they adopted.

So while the horrors of police officers prancing at Pride festivals and endorsing the malevolent ideologies of critical race theory and gender identity theory are of recent concern, it is important to remember that the groundwork for today’s woke culture took place decades ago and has been built upon ever since.

But there is a difference between the arguably good intentions of the past and the present environment. The police’s mission has swung away from the straightforward Statement of Common Purpose to a self-imposed ‘duty’ to promote equality and diversity. This moralistic activism is led by chief constables.

Subordinate officers find themselves caught in this unfortunate maze. Their oath of attestation requires them to uphold ‘fundamental human rights’, but when they are told that certain opinions should not be expressed, they end up unlawfully interfering with freedom of speech and participating in cancel culture.

It is hard to believe, but police training in the UK has never included detailed study of the common law and human rights law in any College of Policing syllabus. Officers are not taught that there is no legal right to be offended or shielded from offence. Nor are they allowed to exercise common sense and discretion.

And while a ‘victim hierarchy’ might not be formally defined, the practice of consulting ‘community leaders’ has led to procedures being shaped by those with the loudest voices and vested interests. More recently, activist staff networks have been given free rein over internal policies, including the searching of prisoners.

One of the latest headline projects is tackling violence against women and girls. This sounds promising, but if you scrutinised the details you would find the category definition includes men who ‘identify’ as women. No wonder officers end up interrogating people who express their legally protected belief in biology.

It is not entirely the police’s fault that Jews are terrified to walk the streets of Great Britain after the dreadful Hamas terror attacks in Israel on October 7th, but we are seeing the shameful consequences of the State’s capitulation strategy, and the police have played no small part in this failure to contain a rising threat.

We can connect the dots from the grooming gangs scandal – callously ignored for fear of offending Muslim communities – to the shrieking calls for genocide on London’s streets. There is no easy way to police protests, but claims of selective policing are understandable. Police chiefs dread accusations of racism.

A pattern always emerges in moments like these. The actions of the perpetrators are downplayed and propagandized in far less hostile terms. A threat from the ‘far right’ – which seems to be anyone with conservative values or a St George’s flag – is invented or grossly exaggerated by the usual culprits.

And so, despite the fanaticism with which police leaders push their diversity agenda, nothing good ever comes of it. By claiming the police should ‘represent’ communities, chief constables are taking on the role of the politician. This is how policing ‘without fear or favour’ collapses and bias becomes the norm.

Critical race theory is now embedded in police culture. I have been told how, within days of joining, student officers from ethnic minorities are asked if they would be photographed for recruitment posters because of their skin colour. Unsurprisingly, many young officers feel aggrieved at being approached in that fashion.

Every single chief constable signed up to the draft Race Action Plan published jointly by the National Police Chiefs’ Council and the College of Policing. Thankfully this overtly political and CRT-inspired document ran aground after a damning public consultation and allegations of bullying and racism by its lead officer.

Oddly, the report by the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities (the ‘Sewell Report’), which found no evidence that Great Britain is an institutionally racist society, didn’t get a mention in the Race Action Plan, probably because it did not support the simplistic narrative that diversity is good and criticism of it is bad.

Gender identity ideology is equally entrenched but represents a much greater threat to freedom of speech. You are unlikely to be arrested by the police for discussing the successes or failures of multiculturalism, but say that men cannot become women, and you may well end up being questioned under police caution.

To give chief constables a degree of latitude here, it must be said that the College of Policing is to blame for the egregious concept of the ‘non-crime hate incident’. But this practice was deemed unlawful by the Court of Appeal following the Miller judicial review and drastically restructured by statute in June 2023.

As far as I am aware, not one chief constable has put steps in place to train officers on the new law, and this seems to be evidenced by the ongoing interferences with citizens’ freedom of expression. So much for swearing to uphold fundamental human rights. Even the College of Policing has not yet conceded defeat.

I will discuss the College of Policing in more detail in the next article because it gets mentioned often (at least since the Miller case) but its structure and nature are not well understood. Training is not entirely dependent on the College of Policing though, so chief constables can provide material to their staff.

But they don’t, unless it promotes their ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ agenda. I’ve been in the room when a chief constable defied Suella Braveman’s laudable efforts to depoliticize the police in words of barely concealed contempt. It’s difficult to convince adherents of a religious ideology that they are in the wrong.

I’m aware that I risk making generalisations when writing on this subject, but there are enough documented reports to suggest that ideology and political activism are present in all the UK’s police forces. As a person with a long association with the police, it saddens me to say that the situation is worse now than ever.

I’ll conclude with a few points. Don’t be too eager to blame subordinate officers for mistakes around free speech. They do not receive the training they deserve. Parliamentarians have failed to impose a course correction. Over sixty years have passed since the last royal commission into policing. Reform is needed.

Here’s one last detail I should mention. I wrote a thorough training package on human rights, freedom of speech and the new NCHI code. I offered it to my home force but they never accepted. The ‘hate crime’ superintendent was nominated to contact me but she did not bother. It did not fit her woke agenda.

So, if you were wondering why the police still record NCHIs unlawfully, defy judicial reviews and persist with interfering with free speech, it is because they want to, not because of the lack of training material. Understand this and you understand the heart of the problem. Next post: the College of Policing.