Minority Madness

I am getting a little fed up with people saying the police service should look like the public it serves, because I don’t particularly like the look of many of the people we come into contact with.

I do understand the desire to be representative, I am not a dinosaur really, but there are those who use phrases that grate. We have certainly managed to drag more of the female section of the population into the force but black people and those from our Asian communities are stubbornly resistant to joining us. Not that we have recruited a huge number of any background in the past few years.

But what seems to be the biggest problem for politicians is the lack of senior officers who are from any diverse community. Hence the proposal to change the law so they can be recruited straight in as superintendents.

Given the recent news and review of the lack of applications to the process to become chief officers, which showed that many police officers from minority backgrounds don’t have the confidence to apply for senior office, I would have thought there was one thing that would lead to a lack of confidence and that is having just a couple of years in the job before you are managing some of the most serious and complex policing issues.

Fuel to the politicians’ fire this week, though, has been the fact that only one person applied for both chief constable posts in Cleveland and Durham, and they were the officers already doing the job.

I had to smile when I saw the media headlines last week over a potential campaign to replace David Cameron with Adam Afriyie as the Tories’ leader and potentially the first black prime minister. He has served as a backbench MP, but never been a minister in government. Now that is what I call direct entry.

The UK is certainly getting more diverse; soon Romanians and Bulgarians will have greater freedom to stay here, adding to the hundreds of thousands of Eastern Europeans who have come since joining the EU. As we heard this week from Sir Peter Fahy, it takes so long to change the make-up of a force that perhaps we should be already thinking more about recruiting from Eastern Europeans than Asian communities if the immigration trend continues.

Rather ironic that this week saw Capita hauled before Parliament over its texts to people who should have left the country, plus a few who shouldn’t, while Tony Blair won a high award from Poland for allowing so many of them to come to the UK. I am not surprised he didn’t turn up in person to collect it.

Northamptonshire Police is not helping as it has created an iPhone app that includes a game in which users drive a Czech car (the police Skoda) all the way around its HQ, adding justification to the argument the Eastern Europeans are already running rings around the police.