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”.
The same thing was said in 1999 at the publication of the Macpherson report in the aftermath of the death of Stephen Lawrence. So why has nothing changed in the past 25 years?
That was a report on The Met. This is the chair of the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) on, presumably England’s police as a whole.