There's a #policetwitter mindset that believes every untruth about or challenge to policing must be 'robustly' confronted. That can translate into expressions of the worst values in policing, whether present today or echoing from the past, esp from behind a cloak of anonymity.
My feeling is that police leaders could do much more to highlight how *counterproductive* this can be.
"You're not helping. In fact you are being unhelpful. Please stop."
I'd add, however, that police leaders have been conspicuously absent from many public debates about policing, leaving a vacuum.
(I think back to the introduction of spit hoods in London, for eg. It was left to rank and file plus others to explain the issues and necessity.)
Many of the issues that blow up centre, in their origins, on a lack of public understanding - because things have never been explained.
Others of course reflect a lack of information - eg about incidents - and the speculation that often fills the gap.
There are also people looking for an argument and fairly set in their views where, frankly, there is little or nothing to be gained from interaction, and a bit of prudence is called for. But time after time the 'defenders' of policing dive in.
I've discussed these kinds of issues before. The point here bears repeating, I think.
Includes the detail that the attempt to stop Mr Kaba's car followed "the activation of an automatic number plate recognition camera which indicated the vehicle was linked to a firearms incident in the previous days"
And that "no non-police issue firearm has been recovered from the vehicle or the scene."
This isn't the first time I've seen this issue raised, and it's interesting that the Met's (relatively recently introduced) internal workforce ethnicity data has a (well used) Black British category - and also Black Asian (v few), but not Asian British.
I've heard from a number of officers that the lack of a Black British option in monitoring eg stop and search has caused issues with members of the public feeling their self-identity is not reflected in/respected by police systems.
The framework for ethnicity questions is set by ONS, for the Census, for use across public services, and that may be the proper place for the issue to be explored, in conjunction with eg the Home Office.
I wasn't aware until yesterday that #policeworkforce data on police officers in E&W are now published with a detailed breakdown of their ethnicity (18+1 categories).
Here's the full breakdown as at Dec 2021, in numbers and percentages.
1/🧵
Here's Asian representation - this is the % of police officers in each force.
2/
Here's Black representation, again by force. Note the importance of police officers with mixed Black/White heritage - and especially Black Caribbean/White heritage - to overall Black representation.
One striking finding of the London Rape Review 2021 is that the (joint) most common reason for victim withdrawal from police investigations was that the victim 'did not intend to report rape'.
The researchers note that victims who disclosed (they use the word 'reported', but I'm not sure that's accurate) rapes in response to DASH questions were 3x as likely to withdraw than victims who reported in other ways.
These will in many cases be DASH risk assessment processes conducted in response to allegations of violence, where a disclosure of rape is made in response to a direct question asked by a police officer about any history of harmful sexual behaviour/sexual abuse.
I've been thinking quite a bit recently about two things relating to this:
(1) Would it help if British policing explicitly acknowledged it's role in *creating* the unequal society it now polices, due to overt individual and institutionally racist practices in the past?
(2) I feel like policing has had relatively little to say about doing policing *with not to* Black communities - which in many cases are more vulnerable/victimised. In the Met, the model of specialist units being sent in to do stop and search is arguably an example of doing to.
I've made the point repeatedly before that there may be clues about how to better police with communities (in London) from the early days of Operation Trident - which the likes of Cressida Dick and Neil Basu should know well, having been involved.