Met senior management’s warm, fuzzy, happy place - revellers and police officers at the Notting Hill Carnival.
According to the media hive mind, the Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DEI) industry is holed below the waterline. The world has awoken, like Keanu Reeves in ‘The Matrix’, realising the DEI worldview is in fact a cruel fantasy. A mysterious, four-dimensional game of postmodern chess.
I’m not sure. I sometimes wonder if DEI was a canny mutation whereby the HR / Consultancy industry sired a bastard child with left-wing academia. It certainly combined the profitability of the former with the craziness of the latter.
Millennial commentators seem to think the craze for intersectional re-education a recent phenomenon. Some date DEI’s transformation into an all-conquering Godzilla back to the ‘Great Awokening’ of the 2010s. As a Gen X fifty-something, I take a slightly different view. Remember, we had ‘Viz’ comic and Millie Tant.
An example; I took ‘A’ level Sociology during the 1980s. It was batshit, astroturfing, foaming-at-the-mouth, crazy. It was easily as bonkers as anything you might find at a Two-Spirit Drag Queens for Gaza story hour. Such views were viewed as an eccentricity and, in the spirit of the times, more or less tolerated in polite society. Incidentally, I am inordinately proud of my Sociology ‘X’ grade, for failing to attend the exam (there was a student bar on the campus of my technical college). As someone once astutely observed, ‘sociology is the study of people who don’t need to be studied, by people who most certainly do.’
Millie Tant in her pomp; Millie (She / Her) eventually founded a successful DEI consultancy, and is now a preferred Home Office contractor. She works from home (a Tuscan villa)
So, as we allegedly wave goodbye to the worst excesses of DEI (allegedly being the operative word), I’m writing about diversity training in the Metropolitan Police. Yes, London. A truly, dizzyingly, cosmopolitan World City. If any police service was a prime candidate for DEI, it was the Met. Mind you, how you’re meant to find an army of angels to police the place is beyond me. Excuse me for quoting myself, but;
Attending yet another finger-wagging diversity lecture, I’d sometimes wonder if part of the Met’s intractable problem with race was the sheer impossibility of wrapping your head around the mores and sensitivities of… absolutely everyone. You’d need a police force made up of cultural anthropologists.
I realise, given my ‘immutable characteristics,’ I’m not supposed to have much of an opinion on DEI. However, despite being a repressively heteronormative, CIS-gendered, toxically male avatar of white privilege, I do have an opinion. Of course I do. I have a Substack.
So, this is my candid take on 25 years of police diversity training. I hope you find it of passing interest. Even sociologists.
Brixton, 1981; Along with the 1984 Miner’s Strike, I grew up with this image of policing. And so the wheel turns; does a new generation now associate the police with rainbow flags and taking a knee?
My generation were taught what I suppose you’d call the Martin Luther King, colourblind, version of antiracism. You should judge people on their character as opposed to their skin-colour. Which, nowadays, is apparently racist. Anyhow, that was the world I was hatched into. And, as the Jesuits say, ‘give me the child until he is seven, and I will give you the man.’
I attended a very multiracial comprehensive school in south London. 1980s London undoubtedly had an ugly, racist side. There were jokes about black people and, especially, Pakistanis. I remember the National Front marching in Woolwich. Jim Davidson made jokes about ‘Chalky’ on the telly. You’d occasionally see skinheads with swastika tattoos. At school, when I mentioned my father was Jewish, kids would leave the gas taps on during science lessons. Then they’d make jokes about Auschwitz. My father’s Jewishness, perhaps, made me more aware of racism. I took a few slaps because my old man was a ‘Yid’. Suffice to say, back then we never had microaggressions. Just aggression.
Looking back on it, my biggest prejudice as a ten-year-old (growing up reading war comics, making Airfix Spitfires and watching re-runs of The Great Escape) was against Germans. Germans hated Jews. They had sinister accents, shot plucky British POWs and wore guilt-inducingly cool uniforms. I saw black kids, on the other hand, as people I went to school with. During the 80s, we were also taught Class was as equally a significant metric of discrimination as Race.
Finally, via a circuitous route, I ended up in higher education. I found myself surrounded by well-intentioned middle and upper-middle class people, many of whom I liked very much. Which is to say, by the time I joined the police, I held fairly mainstream, liberal-ish views on issues of race, gender and sexuality. Well, mainstream for the time, before the Overton Window was upended. I mention this to illustrate how, as a police recruit, I was hardly part of the bigoted white lumpenproletariat. Nor, as far as I could establish, were the majority of my Hendon contemporaries.
On the other hand, I had a nerdy interest in politics. I knew my Gramsci, my Marcuse and my Foucault. I’d been exposed to postmodernism, which I suspected was neo-Marxist bullshit. A Cold War child, I grew up instinctively loathing authoritarianism. In the 80s, that meant Soviet Communism. I slowly came to the conclusion how, after the USSR’s collapse, the political left fled to the ideological hills. They’d lost the big argument: economics. Like partisans, these hoary old Marxists sought a new front on which to fight. They chose culture. To my mind, this is why so much DEI is hectoring and bossy. Fruit of the poisoned tree.
Then I was posted to a police team in a grimy part of West London. The real world, which is granular and messy. Unsurprisingly, I soon forgot about Gramsci, Marcuse and Foucault.
The Marxist philosopher and postmodernist Michel Foucault, who I imagine would heartily approve of weaponised DEI; ‘Knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting’
A Hendon classroom, circa 1992. Twenty new police officers, only a few months into their training, sit in rows. They wear neatly ironed-uniforms and shiny shoes. At the front of the class stands a rakish, middle-aged black guy with dreadlocks. He wears a woolly hat, in red-gold-and-green, and a wry smile. The instructor explains how Dreadlock Guy is going to give us a perspective on police-community relations. The recruits look at each other and wonder where this might be going. Dreadlock Guy explains he’s a Rastafarian. He goes on to say he he smokes marijuana as part of his religion. At one point, he says, ‘you, the Babylon, can’t catch me and you won’t catch me.’
One of my fellow students, who’d been a volunteer special constable in East London for three years, puts his hand up. ‘Well, the Old Bill where you live aren’t very good, are they?’ he says. ‘I’d turn your pockets out now. You come to Hendon, stand up in front of a load of coppers and boast about taking drugs?’
Our instructor frowns. ‘That isn’t the point of the session,’ he says.
‘Then what is the point?’ says the ex-Special, looking riled.
I’m not sure anyone knows. Dreadlock Guy grins. He’s got himself a gig winding up rookie coppers. I wonder how much he’s paid. I find myself grudgingly respecting his business acumen.
The conversation moves onto the riots on the Broadwater Farm Estate, where Pc Keith Blakelock was brutally murdered in 1985. This, remember, happened only seven years previously. ‘The community on that estate won’t talk to the police,’ says Dreadlock Guy. ‘You wonder why? It’s because of your attitude and your actions. You need to change. Why should they speak to the police? They know the answers, but they won’t tell you.’
The ex-Special is getting into his stride now. ‘The community on that estate’s guilty too,’ he says. ‘They’re guilty of concealing a murder. But they don’t care, because he was a white copper.’ The instructor looks crestfallen, Dreadlock Guy has a ‘hold my beer’ expression on his face, and then it’s all off at Haydock.
This is my first experience of police diversity training. And, I suppose, set the tone for everything else that followed.
A year later, and I’m punting a panda car around a hardscrabble council estate. It’s about 70% Afro-Caribbean and everyone hates me. I have learned enough patois to know I’m a bambaclaat. Babylon. I am the state made flesh. An oppressor. It doesn’t feel great, to be honest, although a few of my sweatier colleagues seem to have accepted the stereotype.
The private residents living next-door to the estate are wealthy (and overwhelmingly white). I spend most of my shifts patrolling a henge of brutalist tower blocks. Sometimes, I feel my job’s simply preventing impoverished black people from taking stuff off rich white people. My slowly-returning political radar pings; what if Karl Marx was onto something? But life, like I said, is more granular, and much messier, than Das Kapital.
For example, I begin noticing how a significant number of criminals (both black and white) are actually reasonably wealthy. They could leave ‘the life’ if they wanted to. They could go straight. But they don’t want to. They like their lives (the Chicago School of sociologists considered this a version of Anomie Theory, whereby parallel cultures develop their own status signifiers and values). They get out of bed when they like, do what they like, fuck who they like, assault who they like (including coppers) and there’s nobody giving them orders. When they’re caught, they only spend a few months in prison. It’s no big deal. It’s why postmodernists occasionally lionise criminals as noble savages, bravely surviving beyond the strictures of bourgeois capitalism.
And guess what else? I spend all day dealing with these guys. Yes, it’s an education. Most of them are more bigoted than Alf Garnett. Many white working-class criminals hate and fear blacks. A black and a white criminal working together is a rarity and known as a ‘salt and pepper team’. Working-class Afro-Caribbeans, to my genuine surprise, seem to harbour deeply-held grudges against Africans (especially West Africans). Some even kick off when Asian officers stop and search them - especially turbaned Sikhs. And everyone’s wary of the recently-arrived Somalis, who initially settled in west London before heading south and east.
I am, slowly, beginning to see the street through a police officer’s eyes. Everyone has feet of clay. Everyone hates everyone else, because they’re competition. The police are simply another tribe. I pick up the vibe. On the one hand, this makes me savvier when dealing with criminals. I also suspect it can cause a blind spot when it comes to the innocent. Am I stereotyping? Possibly. Am I aware of it? Yes. Do I like it? No. Are my hunches correct? Usually, which I simultaneously find depressing and cool. At this point, I find myself remembering the infamous (half-joking) copper’s line about equal opportunities. ‘We’re the police; we hate everyone equally.’
My answer: I try not to be a dick with people, if I can help it. I try to treat them with decency. It sometimes works. It’s probably why I end up working with human sources.
Policing isn’t, when you think about it, a ‘nice’ job. It really isn’t. You can’t expect the streets not to rub off on the people who police them. Then again, there’s only one thing worse than a police force full of savvy-but-cynical bastards, and that’s a police force full of wannabe social workers.
Then, some poor DEI person’s sent to put the average copper’s mind straight around modish notions of fairness and equality. Notions that fly directly in the face of their ‘lived experience.’
Good luck with that.
Stop and search continues to poison race relations. It’s become too emotive for reasoned debate, to the detriment of all (except, of course, weapon-carrying criminals)
It’s 2006, and I’m nearly midway through my police service. I’ve been around the track a few times. I’ve worked on specialist units, including investigating the worst excesses of racially-motivated crime. I’ve also been through the Stephen Lawrence-era diversity input. That consisted of a bollocking. I remember one inspector literally ranting about ‘our’ attitudes to race (not that he ever asked me about mine).
The delivery of diversity training seems to have mellowed, but the tone’s similar; we’re all incorrigibly racist. Well, that’s how it feels, but that’s probably the white fragility talking. Still, nothing much changes. I try to think of occasions I’ve been racist. I can’t think of any, albeit I’m probably stuck in Martin Luther King colourblind mode. And guess what? Nothing changes. The Diversity industry doesn’t have any answers. It’s all about vibes.
As time goes on, I notice the Met’s proclamations on DEI are becoming religious in their fervour. Officers begin forming staff associations and affinity groups on intersectional lines. Eventually, a cadre of highly-politicised and funded activists congeals inside the organisation, encouraged by the Home Office’s Blairite zeal. Powerful (white) senior officers realise their own advancement turns on keeping activists happy. Mindful of equality law, they use carefully-coded language to make it clear certain candidates for jobs or promotion schemes are more welcome than others.
A new divide develops, and not necessarily on intersectional lines. It’s between those who want to police, and those who’d rather be activists, or use the bandwagon to their advantage.
Still, the DEI activists are unhappy. Their budgets and influence relies on the golden geese of identity grievances. So more diversity training’s required. What do they say about the definition of madness? Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result? I notice how the discrimination my black and Asian colleagues mention originates primarily from our bosses, processes or the general public. Incidentally, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone over the rank of inspector at a diversity training session.
And nothing changes. Well, not operationally. The workplace simply becomes more divided and humourless. Diversity input’s like Sunday school; an onerous chore nobody really wants to do, and few believe in.
It’s 2018. I’m washed-up and jaded. My time’s nearly up. I’m reading the Met’s intranet forum, which I find deeply amusing. Passive-aggressive back-and-forth exchanges between older and younger officers expose generational differences. Staff associations of every stripe tout for business, shamelessly partisan in an organisation supposed to police without ‘fear or favour’. I’m lucky. I’m in an intelligence role, mainly with older officers and police staff. Most of us roll our eyes at the intranet, like parents watching toddlers misbehaving in a soft play area.
There is one key difference, though. Diversity training has increasingly moved online. Now it’s possible to indoctrinate yourself via distance learning! I was quoted in this article about how the police ended up misusing academic research from the 1950s to inform DEI and, ultimately, NCHI policy.
I once took a spectacularly insensitive online diversity package. It used Allport’s ‘The Nature of Prejudice’ to show how (I’m genuinely not making this up) cracking a sexist joke was but five steps away from genocide. It was also, incidentally, a gross misrepresentation of what Allport actually said. I remember the kids putting on the gas taps in my science class circa 1981. Those stupid boys probably grew up. I let it go. There I go again, being reasonable. Forgiving those who trespassed against me. It’ll never catch on.
And the worst thing I remember about the end of my service? A climate of, if not fear, then tension. Anxiety, even. People wondering what they could and couldn’t say, in case it was written down and used against them. There were so many semantic tripwires for us to tread on. A subsection of younger officers seemed to view words as valuable weapons in a wider intersectional struggle. Have you ever read ‘The Midwich Cuckoos’? A load of mysterious kids, all born on the same day, take over a village using a mysterious type of mind control. The adults are terrified of them.
That, occasionally, was what it felt like.
The Midwich Cuckoos; ‘Inspector, I would like to report an instance of inappropriate language’
And guess what? Nothing changed. The more people were chided or disciplined or sacked for inappropriate behaviour, the more the DEI lobby complained. The beatings will continue until morale improves. In fact, over the past 25 years, police misbehaviour simply worsened. Operational performance is woeful. Morale is lamentable. You might argue the resources wasted on DEI would be better spent on vetting potential officers. That, however, would be dangerously subversive.
The DEI revolution was insatiable. It needed to feed. Half-Dracula, half-Hungry Caterpillar. The police, being hierarchical and bureaucratic, was an ideal host. Are we really meant to believe the Diversity industry is going to disappear in a puff of smoke?
Who knows? I do know that, for the 25 years I was a policeman, diversity training achieved little. Possible answers to our problems, such as a new iteration of vetting processes, residential training, effective complaints and discipline systems and an esprit de corps (whereby officers accept they’re part of something bigger than themselves and change accordingly) doesn’t fit in with the DEI industry’s agenda.
Meanwhile, we’re losing the streets. Arguing about defunding the police. Still regulating opinions. Rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic. Reaching the civilizational endgame those post-1989 activists wanted all along.
I think Michel Foucault would approve.
Great stuff as ever Dom. I think the mistake we all make is to assume that the purpose of DEI training is to cut down on racism and prejudice. It isn’t. It is to use public/private resources to grow the DEI industry, and create a new power structure and hierarchy within the institution where it has taken root. One not based on any measurable performance in relation to the goals of that organisation.
So you can become a top copper without being any good at police work, or a top academic, perhaps THE top academic, I’m thinking Claudine Gay, while being a demonstrably crap academic. There are countless examples.
No wonder it doesn’t ‘work’. It isn’t meant to. Thanks again.
I can remember a BBC documentary on Hendon recruits in the late 90s called Raw Blues. The Hendon trainers had brought in an "Advisor on Stop and Search" to lecture the recruits on Stop and Search. The tone was hostile and the practical scenario involved him being as provocative and aggressive as possible. I remember wondering what this was meant to achieve. One of the class challenged the Advisor and got spoken to by the trainers- almost backclassed in fact.
Nowadays no one engages in police diversity training. You nod along or play on your phone. No ones criticises or challenges the input for fear of being reported. The trainers then complain about non engagement.