Centrepiece

A policeman's lot

Colin Welch

If I were Sir Kenneth Newman, Com- missioner of the Metropolitan Police, I would not thank my predecessor, Sir David McNee, for his poisoned legacy to me. It is as if he had nailed a rotting and malodorous kipper to the underside of my desk, or sold me a house with a time bomb under it or with sewage about to burst irresistibly from its confines.

Sir Kenneth says he would not have com- missioned the report he has received from the Policy Studies Institute. Since he is a notably intelligent, thoughtful and respon- sible officer, I can well believe him. He would, he continues, on occasion have drawn conclusions different from the authors', which will make his well- conducted officers unhappy, will 'not be helpful to the police in race relations' and will 'be mined enthusiastically' by 'some people'. Foremost among these miners was of course the 'chairman of the London police committee', Mr Paul Boateng, who joyfully hails the report as calling into ques- tion 'the whole moral authority' of the Met.

Sir Kenneth must have scanned the newspaper headlines with the glum resigna- tion of one faced with the dire inevitable: 'All-day binges in the pub', 'Policemen in the dock', 'What the Rastas think', 'Por- trait of the Yard — warts and all' (i.e. warts), 'Racialist abuses fuel resentment', 'Officers lie to protect colleagues', 'Drink a hazard for detectives', 'Prejudice among London police "cause for concern" ', 'Bullying of suspects is not unusual', 'Lon- don police "racist and bullies" ', etc: ad nauseam. He must have ploughed on with mounting depression through the ensuing voluminous stories accusing his officers of racial and sexual prejudice, of drunken- ness, bullying and unnecessary violence, of stopping people without reason and of 'los- ing the confidence' of young whites and young West Indians to an extent respective- ly 'dangerous' and 'disastrous'. He may have noted with a shudder Scarfe's tasteless cartoon depicting a drunken policeman raucously parodying Gilbert in praise of his 'employment', which is 'bullying enjoy- ment . . . racialism, prejudice and drink'. He may even have wondered what number the editor of the Sunday Times would dial if robbed or mugged.

Nevertheless, poor man, he was compell- ed to bite the bullet, to praise Sir David's 'bold and courageous decision' to publish the report and 'welcome' it, generally to 'accept its findings and see merit in many of its recommendations, to hope that, if there is 'a hiccup in morale', it will be short-lived. Sir Kenneth's fortitude in gratuitous adversity does him credit. I doubt if in his

shoes I could have mustered such patience. Thinking the report very damaging, I would have been sorely tempted to say so. Damag- ing? Why is it damaging? Because it is all untrue? I don't suppose it is for a moment. Unbalanced and tendentious 1 suspect it is, yet some of the actual observation has a ring of truth about it. This must be how some policemen talk, how some policemen behave. How can we doubt it? Why should we? The Met is revealed to consist not en- tirely of saints and sages, of disciples of Newman, J.S. Mill or Bertrand Russell. Well, who thought it was? Who in his senses would wish it to be? It is after all a police force which is under scrutiny, not a religious order or a learned society. If the faults and limitations typical of a police force are revealed, why should we be amaz- ed or shocked? Most of us think we have to have a police force, and are grateful for what we've got, which might perhaps be a bit better, could easily be a lot worse. To us the report seems of obvious use only to those seeking to destroy the police or to turn it into something quite different, useless for or even hostile to its traditional purposes.

If the report is not on the whole untrue, how on earth then can it be damaging? Well, surely the mere commissioning of such an inquiry is an unfriendly act. 'You ought to have your head examined' — we don't in seriousness speak so to those we love or respect. In the same way, to launch such a prejudiced inquiry at the police force may well provoke anger and resentment. Prejudiced? The Police Studies Institute would angrily and in good faith deny that. Yet their director of research, Mr David Smith, is a battle-scarred veteran of the race relations industry, as skilled in sniffing out racial discrimination as a witch finder at fin- ding witches, an enthusiastic advocate of more laws, as of more funds and stronger agencies to enforce them, pour ecraser fame. One of his assistants is described as 'a

young black Liverpudlian' (the photographs do not show him to be black), who makes more than would appear war- ranted of his own arrest while taking part, for research purposes, in a disorderly and probably quite unjustified demonstration against alleged police failure to inquire pro- perly into the tragic New Cross fire, in which 13 black people died.

To accuse people like this of prejudice seems at first glance perverse indeed. A large part of their lives may be devoted to fighting prejudice, as they see it. Precisely: they have an unshakable and intellectually crippling prejudice against prejudice. They are resolutely opposed even to its justest claims, blind to whatever actuarial or other truths, often derived from long experience,

may be embedded in it. The result is no sort of conscious bias, but rather a deformation professionelle,

'Hereditary prejudice', wrote Taine, 'is a sort of reason operating unconsciously. It has claims as well as reason, but is unable to advance them . . . Careful investigation shows that, like science, it issues from a long accumulation of experience . . . The system or dogma now seeming arbitrary to us may be in fact a confirmed expedient of public safety.' I would not accuse the researchers of being unable to understand what Taine said or to acknowledge whatever force may lie in it. But surely they would regard it, if true, as an inconvenient truth, to be locked away strictly in the back of the mind, never to influence or modify serious matters like 'research'.

If a policeman is inclined to 'stop' this class of person rather than that, young rather than old, black rather than white, or if he thinks that men are better suited to certain police jobs than women, then that policeman appears to researchers of this sort to be hopelessly and irrationally pre- judiced. If it ever occurs to the researchers that the police might be right on such points or at least have a case, I have not seen it reported. If the researchers ever thought

they might have something to learn from the police, this possibility has not been em- phasised.

Yet ordinary people might concede that, if the police 'stop' more young Rastafarians than, say, elderly clergymen or widows, it is perhaps because experience has taught them that the former are more likely to be engag- ed in crime. If crime is reduced by such 'stops' (as it seems to be), we may even ap- plaud. And, if a riot breaks out in our street, we are comforted more by the arrival of a squad of burly traditional policemen with big boots than by the same number of

petite damsels. Moreover, if the researchers and I visited a country in which white peo- ple were in general hated and feared, I am

sure that none of us would rule out the possibility that some white people might have behaved very badly there. Would the researchers apply an equally open mind to

black people here? I doubt it (though I must emphasise that I am not implying that all

black people are hated and feared here, which they are not and don't derserve to be).

The researchers' prejudice against pre- judice takes at times slightly ludicrous

forms. For instance, the police are charged with regarding 'people who are dependent on drugs, people living in communes or squats, people with extreme or unusual political views and (possibly) people with unusual sexual habits' as 'slag'. The term is coarse and, I suppose, pejorative. But where in the world could we find a police force warmly favourable to all such people?

Perhaps the police by now view social researchers as 'slag'. If so, is it mad pre- judice or just experience which is to blame.