Forces missing targets for ethnic minority recruitment

Almost two-thirds of police forces, including the four biggest, will miss the ethnic minority recruitment targets they were set nine years ago following the Macpherson inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence.

The Government gave the 43 forces in England and Wales 10 years to meet the target that each should have the same percentage of ethnic minority officers as in the populations they served.

But the Metropolitan police has conceded it will miss its target, as will the three next biggest forces – Greater Manchester, West Midlands and West Yorkshire. But 16 – mostly smaller – forces with ethnic minority populations of just a few per cent have or will have met their target by the deadline.

Last week, Thames Valley Police Chief Constable Sara Thornton revealed her force had changed the way it deals with ethnic minority applicants after it emerged they may have been unfairly rejected if they admit to visiting countries like Pakistan.

Metropolitan Police Commander Ali Dizaei recently told the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee that applicants from ethnic minorities had been rejected from the Met Police for visiting countries, including Pakistan.

The Iranian-born officer, who is the National Black Police Association president, said his own trips to see family there were the kind of thing that might now rule out a candidate because of worries over national security.

Commander Dizaei, told the committee: “In my opinion it would take 120 years for the police service to look like a community, and we have not achieved targets set in 1999.”

Ms Thornton set up a review in January and the new policy was brought in after a Muslim member of the Thames Valley Police Authority said similar claims to the ones made by Commander Dizaei were circulating in Reading`s Asian community.

She said: “I’ve taken the view it is really important we find out whether these claims are true or not. Since the beginning of the year, my deputy chief constable has been looking at all the vetting decisions of prospective officers from black and ethnic minority backgrounds to try to ensure utter fairness.”

Scotland Yard Deputy Assistant Commissioner Steve Roberts accepted that the Met would miss its targets by a considerable margin, but said meeting them had never been a possibility. The Met was supposed to have 25 per cent of its officers from ethnic minorities by next year. The current total is eight per cent. He said the last two years had seen 25 per cent of new recruits coming from ethnic minorities, but it would be “some years yet” before the force looked like the population of the capital.

“The Home Office has accepted the difficulty… of meeting the target,” he said.

Sir William Macpherson’s public inquiry into the 1993 murder found that police errors had helped Lawrence`s killers to escape justice and concluded that institutional racism was in part to blame for police failures.

It also urged police forces to recruit far more ethnic minority officers so that the police would more closely resemble the communities they served.

This week sees the 15th anniversary of Lawrence`s murder in London by a racist gang who are still free.

In the case of West Midlands, only 7.1 per cent of the force’s officers came from ethnic minority backgrounds, according to Home Office 2006-7 statistics.

The number of officers from diverse ethnic groups should represent the proportion found in the population they serve, which is 16 per cent in the Midlands.

A spokesperson for West Midlands Police said: “Our recent recruitment campaigns have been extremely successful in encouraging more women and minority ethnic people, from all walks of life, to see the police force as a career of choice for anyone regardless of their ethnicity.

“We will continue to look at new and innovative ways of attracting recruits so we can strive towards our goal of creating a more diverse workforce to reflect the communities we serve across the West Midlands.”