Police should be fighting crime, not the culture wars

It’s unfashionable to say so, but disparity in workforce demographics is rarely a consequence of discrimination and prejudice

You probably won’t agree with all of Mr Embery’s policy prescriptions, but he will force you to think outside your usual political grooves — Wall Street Journal

Photo: Andy Thornley, via Wikimedia Commons

HERE we go again. Another week, another ‘major recruitment campaign’ designed to attract ‘under-represented groups’ into one of our public service organisations.

This time it’s the Metropolitan police, whose commissioner, Mark Rowley, has announced that his service will be launching a drive to increase the number of ‘people of colour’ in its ranks.

Call me cynical, but I suspect that Commissioner Rowley’s crusade will not be a runaway success. Most attempts at this type of social engineering in the workplace – including those launched over many years in my own industry, the fire service – tend to hit the buffers.

That’s because such initiatives generally start from the belief that any disparities in the demographics of the existing workforce must be the consequence of systemic or societal discrimination. Everything else is discounted.

It goes without saying that skin colour or ethnicity should not be a reason for someone to be blocked from pursuing their chosen career. But there are all sorts of reasons – cultural, practical and more – why particular groups might be drawn to, or away from, certain jobs or industries.

Should it trouble us that midwives, nursery nurses and primary schoolteachers are overwhelmingly women? Or that most refuse collectors, immigration enforcement officers and train drivers are men? That black workers are over-represented in health and social care? Asians in dentistry? White folk in the civil service?

Could we say hand on heart that we receive an inferior service because of these disparities? Should those responsible for running these industries and services be forced to launch recruitment drives to even things up?

After all, if it’s right for police, fire service and armed forces’ bosses to be chivvied – as they constantly are – into making their workforces more ‘representative of the communities they serve’, why not apply the principle to literally every role in every public sector organisation? Why shouldn’t we expect our local council to ensure that on half of all occasions our wheelie bins are emptied by a woman? Or the NHS to insist dental practices guarantee that eight times out of ten a white Briton will see to our root canal work?

We all know why not, of course. It’s because that wouldn’t be real life. There simply aren’t enough women willing to be refuse collectors or white Britons dentists to justify setting a target which would see these roles populated in a way that strictly reflects the demographic make-up of the country.

There will always be individual exceptions – and good luck to those who buck the trend. But, as much as organisations have a moral as well as a legal duty to ensure that their recruitment processes are open to anyone capable of doing the relevant job, we should not pretend that there aren’t legitimate explanations for why most industries and services are not demographic microcosms of the country at large.

Human beings are equal, but different. We are products of our environment as well as our genes. For all manner of reasons, certain groups will gravitate towards particular jobs and away from others. More often than not this is the consequence of such factors as culture, upbringing, relationships, class, education and social mores. It isn’t always because of plain old prejudice, and we get ourselves into all sorts of tangles when we assume otherwise.

Tangles such as the RAF admitting that its diversity targets led to it discriminating against white males; Cheshire police being found by an employment tribunal to have unlawfully denied employment to an applicant because he was a white heterosexual male; and our spy agencies facing fierce criticism for restricting their summer internships to candidates from ethnic minority backgrounds.

Which brings me back to Commissioner Rowley and the Met. The commissioner argued, when announcing his recent recruitment campaign, that his intentions were practical, not ideological. ‘Effective policing depends on inclusivity,’ he asserted. ‘We cannot provide an equally good response to all victims if our understanding of some Londoners is weaker than others.’

It’s a seductive argument, but I don’t buy it. Leaving aside that the number of ethnic minority officers in London is not desperately low to begin with (currently around one in five), why do public service leaders seem to target only the most fashionable causes with these types of initiative – not only ethnic minorities, but campaigns such as Pride, which has become a particular favourite? As an old Catholic friend said to me, the day he sees a uniformed police officer bearing a candle on a Eucharistic procession, he will know that service chiefs are genuinely interested in reaching out to all sections of the community.

Rowley goes on to argue that Londoners from minority backgrounds would be more willing to assist the police in the fight against crime - including the use of such powers as stop and search - if the Met looked more like them. Is he suggesting here that, despite concerted efforts over many years to bring them on board, certain communities will only support the police if they see more of their own tribe in the ranks. That those communities are otherwise effectively unpoliceable?

Again, I’m not convinced that we should indulge the argument. After all, there are very few Jewish officers in the Metropolitan police. Yet I’d be willing to bet that Jews are mostly perfectly supportive of the police and, when it comes to crime figures, among the most law-abiding groups.

And for all his claims that his initiative was not driven by ideology, it was interesting that Rowley chose to announce it with a column in the pages of the Guardian – the house magazine of the liberal left.

All things considered, then, it is rather hard to avoid the conclusion that Rowley sees the whole exercise as an opportunity to burnish his own, and the Met’s, progressive credentials. He claims to have no interest in the politics of the ‘culture wars’, without realising that he is acting every bit the culture warrior.

Rowley opines that the Met ‘cannot police London effectively without the trust and confidence of the communities we serve’. I tell you what would restore trust, Commissioner Rowley. Effective, intelligence-led policing. Officers on the beat on our streets rather than behind desks or in cars. Taking seriously the kind of wrongdoing that causes real misery to individuals, communities and businesses: burglaries, graffiti, anti-social behaviour, shoplifting, fare evasion, illegal drug use, car theft, knife crime, assault and the like. Genuine zero tolerance policing – the type that worked in New York. And abandoning the institutional drift which has seen the average police officer become a social worker cum social activist.

An institution doesn’t win public trust just by looking a bit different. What matters is how good it is at doing the job it is tasked with. Take the House of Commons. It is more diverse than ever. But there was never a time when the public had such little faith in it.

Returning the police to their historical mission of effectively preventing crime and disorder would increase their standing in the eyes of the public more than any attempt at social engineering ever will. Commissioner Rowley needs to grasp that fact.

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A reminder that you can also follow me on ‘X’: @PaulEmbery

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An edited version of the above piece first appeared on the GB News website.