Chief Constable John Robins, who heads up West Yorkshire Police, is campaigning for a change in the law. You might think that one of Britain’s most senior police officers would want more powers or greater legal protections for his officers, or perhaps he would like to see stiffer sentences for monsters who kidnap and rape children, but strangely, he is campaigning in favour of discrimination.
Positive discrimination is currently illegal, but JR wants to change all that so that he can give blatant advantages to police candidates who come from what he calls ‘underrepresented’ groups.
Twenty-three per cent of people who live in West Yorkshire come from minority communities, many of whom reside in places like Bradford, Leeds and Wakefield, but the number of people in his police service who come from these minorities is currently nine per cent. Perhaps policing is not an attractive proposition for the ethnic minority communities of this part of the UK, with the major group being Pakistani or British Pakistani.
Maybe JR would like to fast-track the application of an illiterate Pakistani, ahead of one from a white British candidate who could read and write? His force attracted a lot of negative publicity recently, after a former employee blew the whistle on practices that allowed applicants from ethnic minorities to submit their applications much earlier than white candidates.
Such practices are deemed as ‘positive action’, rather than discrimination, and are therefore not illegal. Sometimes the law is an ass.
A whistleblower from Greater Manchester Police attracted plenty of interest from the media this week when they disclosed some of the ‘positive action’ tactics deployed by that service in recent times. This included sending officers to supermarkets in places like Rusholme, in an effort to garner some interest from potential recruits.
Apparently, it didn’t matter if these prospective police candidates could read or write, or whether they had any GCSEs. The population in Rusholme is diverse, with over 44 per cent of people identifying as Asian or British Asian, and many more saying they were born in the Middle East.
While our police recruit illiterate officers in name of diversity, rapist monsters walk free - Peter BleksleyGetty Images
Maybe these police services are merely following the example of my former employer, The Metropolitan Police, for it was revealed in 2023 that they were recruiting people who were ‘barely literate’ in English, as they endeavoured to recruit more candidates from ethnic backgrounds.
Literacy in policing is extremely important. Police officers of all descriptions need to write faultlessly accurate statements about what they saw and heard, and what they did.
Crucially, they take what should be precise statements from victims of crime, which could well end up being minutely scrutinised by smart barristers in courts like The Old Bailey. Officers also compile reports for the Crown Prosecution Service, upon which decisions to charge people will be taken. I was talking to a very senior official just the other who spends every day of their working life dealing with victims of appalling crimes like rape and kidnap, and this person told me that one of the major obstacles to raising conviction rates for these offences was the appalling quality of files that are submitted by police to prosecutors.
But hey-ho, so long as idiotic police chiefs continue to lower standards in their short-sighted efforts to recruit more candidates from ethnic minorities, then modern policing’s race to the bottom will continue to gather pace, and as a consequence, we will all be a bit less safe as criminals continue to rule the streets.
Sigh.
