9 The continuing legacy of historical police practices
While the decades from 2000 are still ‘the past’, they are also part of the working life of many police officers. The early 2000s were a period when policing in Britain tried genuinely to restore trust with Black and minority ethnic communities, but racism on the part of some individual officers and perceived systemic issues were still manifest.
Activity 6 The Secret Policeman undercover film
As an example of the challenges still faced by policing in the early 2000s, consider the video clip below, which was filmed by an undercover reporter for the BBC’s Panorama programme in 2003. The secret nature of the filming, which demonstrated significant racism among new police recruits, caused controversy at the time and the reporter was arrested (although the Crown Prosecution Service declined to prosecute).
In this extract, a constable in a Welsh force makes racially abusive comments about Stephen Lawrence and his family, demonstrating the persistence of attitudes we might have thought were consigned to the past.
As you watch this clip, consider the following question:
How do you think such views impacted those individuals who had lived through the 1980s and 1990s?
Discussion
The police officer is disrespectful about the brutal murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993; of the impact on his family and their years of campaigning for justice. He discounts the Macpherson report as an insult to ‘white men’ and suggests that the perpetrators were somehow heroes. Such views would have impacted on trust in the police, particularly from Black and Asian communities.
Alongside individual racism, which was undoubtedly becoming considerably rarer, statistics which could indicate over-policing by ethnicity (particularly around stop and search) remained stubbornly high (albeit contested). There were also periodic, high-profile failures of policing in cases involving citizens of Black or Asian heritage. Notable examples of this were the deaths of Sean Rigg (2008), Mark Duggan (2011) and Dalian Atkinson (2016).
Sean Rigg died of a heart attack while in prolonged restraint after being arrested during a mental health crisis. The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) found no evidence of wrongdoing in 2008, but five officers subsequently faced charges of gross misconduct before being cleared.
Mark Duggan was shot by armed police in 2011. This was another hugely fraught situation but conflicting accounts of events were given by the officers involved initially and by the IPCC. Many in the local area saw the death as yet another death in police custody and, following a demonstration march, widespread rioting, arson and looting ensued across England.
Dalian Atkinson was tasered by police who had been called due to his erratic behaviour in public (later linked to renal failure). While on the floor he was also kicked in the head and went into cardiac arrest. The officer who kicked him was convicted of manslaughter and given an eight-year prison sentence.
Fig 12: Three examples of high-profile failures of policing in cases involving citizens of Black or Asian heritage: the deaths of Sean Rigg (2008), Mark Duggan (2011) and Dalian Atkinson (2016). [Description: Three photographs showing protest marches. The first is black and white and shows two Black men carrying a banner reading ‘Justice for Sean Rigg’; the second shows banners and boards reading, for example, ‘Justice for Mark Duggan’; the third a large banner reading ‘Justice for Dalian Atkinson.’] Sources: https://www.thejusticegap.com/police-accused-of-cover-up-over-death-of-sean-rigg; https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/doves-are-released-by-members-of-mark-duggans-family-news-photo/461799177?adppopup=true; https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-37379373
The strong public reaction to deaths such as these can only really be understood against the historic background of policing you have been learning about. The policing of Black and Asian people is contentious and emotive in part because of the memory of longstanding, historic police practices from the latter half of the twentieth century.
As a 2021 House of Commons Home Affairs Committee report noted:
… there have been important improvements in policing [...] but our inquiry has also identified persistent, deep rooted and unjustified racial disparities in key areas including a confidence gap for BME communities, lack of progress on BME recruitment, problems in misconduct proceedings and unjustified racial disparities in stop and search.
Progress against this agenda has been made, particularly in recent years, but there are problems yet to be solved. It is striking that the problems identified in 2022 are those which policing has been wrestling with since the 1950s.