I've chosen to ask advice from Barbelith on the following crosspost from my blog because I've got some difficult issues that need to be faced at work over the next week. Please, anything you can offer would be appreciated.
Probably my main downfall as a communicator is my tendency to overstate my case, and this is probably emblematic of one of my main failures as a human being, which is an instinctive longing for absolute certainties. I'm struggling to deal with this aspect of myself, mainly by trying to undermine many of these certainties when I realise them. I'm finding it really hard. I like to feel secure, but so much security is based on fantasy or prematurely believing you have complete information. It's an unreal, impoverished security. This post is an attempt to navigate a particularly thorny road that I've decided to travel at work over the next week, to try and do justice to all sides so that when I have to act it won't be from a position of reaction or false conclusions.
Here's the scenario: I'm currently one of several members of staff involved in training and tutoring a group of five new recruits. Today we received a talk from our department's representative of the Hampshire Black Police Officers Association (HBPO), whose ethnic remit is much broader than their name indicates. One of my colleagues who isn't involved in the training fronted the presentation, a woman of Bengali ethnicity who I respect a huge amount (despite the two of us often having passionate differences of opinion on some issues, we also share a lot of principles in common. I can't speak for her, but I both admire her and am irritated by her in equal measure). Her presentation was excellent, a mix of complex procedural knowledge and right-on diversity politics. She's my go-to person for race and cultural issues when I'm at work. She's aware that current hate speech laws are extremely contentious and she shares my discomfort with them, but like myself will uphold them during her work and trains their application well. She knows she's in a difficult position because opinions on these issues are held so passionately, and she's rightly uncomfortable at times with the manner in which she often finds herself in roles as a representative or figurehead purely based on her ethnicity. While I respect those concerns it's clear that that her role is also based on her formidable intelligence and understanding of the issues.
After providing space for questions at the end of her presentation she left the room, and one of the new trainees spoke up almost the exact instant that she was out of sight with the door safely closed. He mentioned the time he applied to become a police officer with the Metropolitan and accidentally ticked the wrong ethnicity box on the forms, declaring himself as Black African rather than White British. He claimed to have subsequently received a package in the post inviting him to a specially catered opening evening for applicants from ethnic minorities, in which he claims that senior officers were offering to coach said applicants in the upcoming assessment process to ensure a higher success rate (the repetition of "claim" is only to underscore that I haven't seen or judged this package yet myself, I don't necessarily disbelieve him). When he contacted recruitment in order to correct his mistake he asked if he could still attend this workshop and received an initial refusal followed by a second telephone call in which he was told that he wouldn't usually be invited to such an open evening but that they had decided to allow it based on his request. A number of trainees remarked that they found the idea of such an open evening to be racist against those of white ethnicity, and so I made a point in front of the group of withholding judgement until I could personally read through the package that the trainee had been sent, which he kindly offered to bring in for me.
After the trainees had gone home for the day I went back to my colleague who fronted the HBPO presentation privately and spoke to her for nearly an hour in order air my thoughts and seek advice. The following half-considered musings are the product of that discussion.
Firstly, my respect for her is considerably higher after everything that happened today. I had known for a while that she came to deliver each and every HBPO from a position of some nervousness, and I had naively assumed that it was because of performance anxiety. Now I know better. Every time she acts in her role she knowingly puts herself on the line, because she is in a situation where she can potentially be confronted with all sorts of prejudices about both her and the work she does. She is frequently asked to appear at police open days and while she recognises that she makes a unique and important contribution to changing perceptions of the police she has difficulty with being used as a diversity figurehead purely because of her ethnicity.
In today's instance one of the trainees deliberately waited until she was out of the room and they were once again surrounded by a room full of White British to deliver an anecdote that seemed intended to undermine the training she had given while removing her right to reply in the process. I strongly doubt that they would have said it had she remained there. The anecdote was of the type that seems to indicate that respect for diversity has gone too far, and that it was broadly greeted with agreement meant that I felt I had no choice but to act to try and act in some way.
Most thinking people who work for the police will encounter at least once in their careers instances in which their personal beliefs run counter to police policy and legislation. This is a difficult thing when it arises and can often lead to an enormous amount of soul-searching before action can be taken, if one cares at all about the potential consequences of such an action for both oneself and the people that any decisions will effect. While there is room for personally disagreeing with policy and law, when at work and implementing them with the public you have to uphold them to the best of your understanding and ability, and its essential that you reach a measure of peace with that. Outside of your public role you can voice dissent to managers and officers, to your MP, be an activist as much as you can and try to effect change. It's even acceptable to sympathise with the public about the effects of legislation as long as you also uphold it. The reality is more complex than this simplification allows for, and there are many more frequent examples of flexibility and leniency than you might expect. But that is the general principle.
In short, one of my concerns here is that if my trainees are as uncomfortable with diversity legislation as was hinted at by today's events, then their personal beliefs may lead to situations in which hate crime is downplayed and disregarded because they feel the law is disproportionate and biased in favour of minorities. This leaves me with a task that I can't shirk, because I am in a position in which I understand this and have a mandated role as an educator in the situation. I have to somehow educate without judging, to help reconcile them to their role and the scenarios they will have to deal with every working day, without stepping over the line and reinforcing any prejudice through disrespecting any of them. I'm quite nervous about this.
The way in which I'm currently thinking of framing the debate is that it is primarily about a conflict between two principles, both of which are fundamentally good and both of which I wholeheartedly believe in and would be surprised if, when it came down to it, they didn't also believe in.
The first of these principles is that discrimination based on perceived differences in race, culture, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, class and age is wrong, even positive discrimination. I want to do justice to this principle by stating explicitly that I know that each of the trainees will have very recently gone through an application and assessment procedure at which they will have had to have worked extremely hard to be successful, and that it is not wrong to believe that it is unfair that some people will receive additional assistance in this application procedure based purely on their ethnic, cultural or religious demographic (I suspect that the extra help may extend to include sexual orientation and gender identity, although I cannot be sure without seeing the package the trainee was sent).
I will continue from this with information that I've learned from my HBPO colleague, which is that while current government legislation states that negative discrimination is illegal, positive discrimination is legal. I will attend to define both positive and negative discrimination simply and adequately, and I will mention that the implementation of this is not that of a broad consensus across every constabulary, and that Hampshire does not adopt the same approach to recruitment as the Metropolitan.
I will then give them the second of these principles, which is that the demographic of any given constabulary has to aim to be a reflection of the demographic of the geographical area in which it operates. It is not possible to successfully act as police if you are not capable of understanding the demands of the culture in which you are operating, because the police are dependent upon a relationship with that culture. Attempting to operate without this understanding is invariably disastrous. However, historically there has been a disproportionately smaller intake of recruits from minority backgrounds which has led to a police force that is ill equipped to carry out its role. This is an enormous problem, the symptoms of which include many well known examples, and it has particularly been a problem for the Metropolitan Police.
I will then attempt to delineate why this problem of under-representation exists. A large proportion of immigration into Britain is that of persecuted minorities from an extremely wide range of countries across the world. They may have fled regimes that use torture, slavery or ethnic cleansing, and one of the primary tools that the ruling regime will have used to enact these atrocities upon them will have been that country's police. Even in countries that do not have such overt records of human rights violations police may well be corrupt, or prejudiced, or too forceful and authoritarian, or too lazy, or just too plain armed. The point is that for a huge number of people living in Britain today the police are terrifying, because they have had horrific personal experiences of legal authority used in the wrong hands and in the wrong ways. One recent well-known example of this is Jean Charles De Menzies, a Brazilian man who fled from London armed police because his personal experiences of police in his own country made him believe that he would not be treated with any degree of justice if he stopped to give account. That he was shot several times at point blank range has been taken as evidence by many that the police in England are just as frightening as that of many other countries.
I will then talk about the relationship between crime and poverty, that historically the primary statistic that has always closely matched crime rates has been that of wealth. People born into ethnic minority groups are statistically far more likely to earn significantly less that those who are white and British due to reasons of access to opportunities, language barriers and cultural differences. I will state emphatically that I am not drawing a connection between crime and ethnicity, only crime and poverty. However, because of the way in which recent immigrants are housed there are a number large number of urban areas that are populated by a disproportionately high number of people from minority groups in low value housing, and that the resultant experience of these minorities is that they experience a disproportionate amount of crime, either as the aggrieved parties, by being suspects or by knowing people who are involved in crime. They will experience it in some form or other most days of their lives, and they suffer the most because of the way in which it is policed. Many of these urban areas are effectively unpoliceable, because the investment and societal change required to have a lasting impact on poverty is extremely unlikely. Because of this they will again be less likely to want an involvement with police, let alone become a member of the constabulary.
I will then mention that employment diversity policies can only exist if there also exists equal access to those job roles in the first place. Many people's access to work is restricted by many reasons including housing, adequate transportation, language and the time, money and effort required to land a job. It is one thing to offer additional assistance to people in their assessments to join the police. But what if people are in a cultural position where they cannot know that this is offered, will have to choose financially between buying a meal and buying a recruitment paper, will not be able to afford to attend the opening evening, either in terms of the cost of transportation or lost earnings? These are the main reasons that I can currently think of regarding why fewer people from minority groups seek roles with the police.
After having done this I will aim to tie the two principles together. The reason that positive discrimination is legal, while being ethically questionable, is that it is to allow attempts to redress societal imbalances that favour some groups more than others. It is these societal imbalances that have led the Metropolitan Police to actively seek out people from minority groups, because in today's world co-operation between the police and people of all races, cultures and religion is arguably more essential than it has ever been before. The Metropolitan cannot operate without being made up of a diversity of people that accurately reflects modern London. Its policing requirements are too demanding for it to not adopt a policy of active targeted recruitment of specific people who have a unique understand the society within which it operates. There have been too many recent examples of when it has failed in this respect. Throughout all this I hope to touch upon the fact that as people who are white and British we have a privileged existence that we rarely, if ever appreciate.
I'm hoping to do all this while not insulting anyone's intelligence or disrespecting the views of any member of the group. I can understand why my trainee waited until the representative of the HBPO was out of the room before speaking. He was afraid. He might have been afraid that he would hurt or offend her, he might have been afraid that he would start an argument, he might have been afraid that he would be punished or disciplined for voicing his experience. I think a number of the trainees are afraid of the implications of hate crime legislation, because they are concerned that it is there to catch them out and that they will have to censor certain things that they might say when it comes to topics they may recognise themselves that they don't really understand. If they don't understand what racism is and how it can manifest then there must be a constant undercurrent of fear that that when at work they might implicate themselves or expose themselves to a disciplinary without even realising how it was they got there in the first place. I consider myself to be reasonably well self educated about this stuff and I'm often alarmed by my own attitudes, the things I catch myself thinking or saying. It's not surprising that some of them are choosing to react out of anger as a defence against this fear. I might address this by attempting to reframe their understanding of the current legislation, by framing it as an evolving attempt to protect people in vulnerable positions from the hurt caused by prejudice and discrimination rather than being a callous, cold hearted attempt to set up an unfair game of language and thought control whose goalposts are constantly shifting.
In summary, I definitely need as much help as I can get here. I'm aware that there are people far better equipped for this kind of thing than I am. I'm always frightened about posting about these kind of things in public because I don't have answers, I know it's all incredibly complicated and I feel as though I am in danger of being just as, if not more prejudice than the next person through unexamined assumptions I might have. I'm trying to do a good thing here, but I'm worried that I'll make mistakes in my thinking and actions that will do more harm than good. It's complex and difficult and there are no easy rights and wrongs.
Please, if you can spare a few moments to offer advice then do so. I need examples, statistics, more robust arguments, a broader understanding. If you think I'm wrong in any of the above please tell me (preferably kindly). If there are things I've missed, or things I've mentioned that need to be fleshed out in greater detail then please let me know. What kind of risks are there, what kind of opposition might I face? I'm not in a position where I can lay down the law as to what's right and wrong, and I think that to do that would be wrong-headed and counter-productive. I want to represent a difficult situation as realistically as I can.
I don't want to go into this under prepared. Any thoughts appreciated. Thanks in advance. |
