A Race to the Top

Further to my recent post, the police in the UK are again shaming themselves.

I know, you'd think they'd have better things to do than utter crass, politically correct statements, but apparently London and the rest of the country are now so safe that actually catching criminals and enforcing the law is simply an archaic alternative.

After all, why risk your life on the streets dealing with miscreants when you can sit in an office drinking tea and worrying about why the 'service' doesn't reflect 'the wider community'.

Several incidents have occurred over the past couple of weeks which are worthy of note, but in many respects it's just Groundhog Day; the same thing in a cycle, spawned from one source which never gets tired, never gets old, never dies.

Racism.

Oh, yes. It's perfect, because you can never quite prove you've done enough to eradicate it.

Since the Macpherson Report of 1999 - in which the Metropolitan Police was declared 'institutionally racist' over its handling of the murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence - the onus has been on all police forces to recruit officers from ethnic minorities in order to ensure a given force has the same percentage of minorities as found in the area it serves.

The Mail on Sunday recently announced that this policy - which has seen frequent cases of white men being rejected despite the quality of their applications and even being banned from certain 'recruitment days' - was being brought to an end.

However, just days earlier on the 18th February, it had been announced that there are too few ethnic minority officers in senior roles, and some police forces were considering 'affirmative action' style rules to redress this.

Having seen this, it seems that the concept of race and racism still has a grip on the imagination of the public when it comes to the police - or perhaps it's just the government and senior officers think so.

However, on 24th February a new race row was publicised.

'Apartheid Met Row' screamed the headline in the London Lite.

An Asian PCSO, Asad Saeed, alleges that a culture of segregation had been enforced at Belgravia Police Station by two white officers, using the threat of violence. He claimed that a black PCSO was told 'this is the white van, get in the black one', and on another occasion a white PCSO boasted that all of his family were BNP members, among other incidents.

I suppose the fact that Saeed is claiming discrimination after being sacked in 2007 for beating up a tramp outside McDonald's is completely irrelevant (I may be wrong but I very much doubt a white officer would get away with such behaviour either).

However, I have a clue as to where most current racial problems in the police force originate, and I'd like to expose another form of disgusting apartheid; an organisation in the modern British police that you can only join if your skin is the correct colour.

It's called the Black Police Association (BPA). Its stated interest is to 'improve the working conditions of black and other minority ethnic officers' - but a white police association was deemed racist, as these associations are supposed to protect minority interests within the force.

They are currently fighting an alleged 'Golden Circle' of senior white officers that they say have a 'culture of racism' in terms of promoting black officers.

This is where my problem comes in, I'm afraid.

You see, there should be no 'minority interests' in the police force. There should simply be a willingness to serve, a commitment to duty, and the desire to tackle crime and criminals thus upholding the law.

The Black Police Association has, in the past, tried to suppress certain data about the rate at which young black males commit offences, saying these statistics are 'racist'. They also claim to be overwhelmingly concerned about crime in poor black communities and how the police deal with ethnic minority victims.

Take the recent case in Scotland [hat tip: The Frozen North], where it was revealed that offences against Muslims would be treated as more serious than crimes against white men. Ostensibly this was to stop Muslims feeling 'vulnerable' and becoming 'radicalised', whilst Scottish police will learn about Islamic culture.

But this isn't about crime, it's about an agenda. Because the BPA and its politically correct cohorts in the government don't care about crime - they only care about what they call hate crime.

If the perpetrator is white and the victim is from an ethnic minority, the crime is automatically classed as such. That the reverse can be also true is slowly becoming more widely accepted, but many don't yet acknowledge it as the growing problem it is.

But the fact is, the BPA abandoned thousands of decent, law-abiding black people to crime and victim hood. They did this by insisting that enforcing the law and trying to be proactive about offences which are committed by large numbers of young black males in certain parts of the country is simply racism.

They only care about black victims if the criminal happens to be white. The police will bend over backwards in such a situation to prove they clamp down on hate crime.

In my opinion, the term 'hate crime' is perhaps the most Orwellian and ridiculous ever dreamed up. Are many crimes committed out of love? But then, the BPA and its attitudes are borne of perhaps the most famous 'hate crime' in Britain.

Stephen Lawrence was a black teenager murdered whilst waiting for a bus in 1993. The killers, their alleged motive racism, have never been convicted.

Even today, the facts surrounding the case seem sketchy. What does seem certain, however, is that the police bungled the investigation quite spectacularly.

Now, Doreen Lawrence, Stephen's mother, claims that was due to an ingrained culture of racism. The Macpherson Report, published in 1999, backed her assertions, calling the phenomenon 'institutional racism'. Many quotes and statistics were taken out of context, however.

With all due respect to Mrs Lawrence, I feel she is a grieving mother looking for someone to blame. That's understandable. From the reports, her son sounded like a nice lad, and I'm genuinely sorry about what happened to him.

Here's where Mrs Lawrence, the politically correct lobby and I part company, I'm afraid. Because the attitudes she helped to foster, in my opinion, put back race relations in Britain several decades.

That is because they had the opposite effect to those allegedly intended. Instead of bringing people together, it actually puts forward the idea that some people's lives are more valuable purely on the basis of their colour.

Stephen Lawrence's case has become a cause celebre. He has a memorial plaque in the spot he died, watched over by 24 hour CC:TV coverage, should some evil racist come along and deign to wreck it (which to be fair, has happened). As far as I'm aware, none of London's many other murder victims have any such thing.

The annual memorial service to him would not be missed by any London politician trying to climb the greasy pole.

The worst excess, in my opinion, was abandoning Britain's ancient 'double jeopardy' law in a desperate and hysterical attempt to convict the 5 men arrested for the attack. Oddly, they've still not been convicted.

Are they innocent? I don't know. But I genuinely don't believe that some cases should accept a lesser standard of evidence on the basis of how fashionable they are.

The hysteria surrounding the suspects culminated in the Daily Mail calling them murderers and challenging them to sue in 1997. I find the persecution sickening - if the CPS were so sure, they should have got it right first time. At one point it looked as if the individuals concerned were on trial for their recorded racist attitudes rather than the murder.

My views on this are controversial, perhaps. They shouldn't be. All I'm asking is that all crimes and all people are treated equally. But are they?

Let's look at the case of Kriss Donald (below), a Scottish teenager brutally tortured to death over hours by three Pakistani men. They put the young boy, who'd done absolutely nothing wrong, through severe and unimaginable suffering.

Why? Because he was white. They were upset with a white person who wasn't available to them, so went out looking for another one to kill. They admitted it, it's on record.

Have you ever heard of Kriss Donald? You should have. But, sad to say, his cause is not fashionable enough.

Police incompetence and corruption are wrong, full stop. Murder is wrong, full stop. I don't care what colour the victim or the perpetrator is.

But still, the PC gravy train rolls on. Anyone who criticises it is deemed a racist. I'm sure there might be someone who reads this and dismisses me as such.

I don't care. What I find racist is the idea that a black teenager's life is more valuable than a white teenager's, simply because the press can get more mileage out of it and the government can employ a few thousand more bureaucrats and advisers.

What I find racist is the notion that black people are only capable of obeying the law and respecting the authority of the police as legitimate if enough coppers look like them.

All police officers, rank and file and senior, are paid to enforce the law and protect the innocent. Social engineering is not part of their remit, nor should it be.

The law should be colour blind, and if it's racist to believe that, then we truly live in more perverse times than I suspected.