Why is it so difficult for racists to admit that they are racist? This question is currently exercising the minds of the British establishment, for it affects one of the most powerful institutions in the land, the Metropolitan Police Force of London.
The issue arose over the way the Metropolitan Police investigated – or rather failed to investigate – the murder of Stephen Lawrence, a black sixth-form student, who was stabbed to death by a white racist gang in April 1993.
The investigation into the murder was so badly handled that the Crown Prosecution Service concluded that it did not have enough evidence to charge anyone in court, even though an eyewitness to the crime was available. This decision so incensed Lawrence’s parents that they brought a private prosecution against five white youths who were suspected to be the murderers. But the case was thrown out of court because the judge decided that Lawrence’s companion on the night of his murder was not a reliable witness.
President Nelson Mandela heard about the Lawrences while he was on a visit to London, and in his typical big-hearted manner he found time to visit them and express his support for them. He also, in his fearless manner, expressed the opinion that he was very much acquainted with the habit of some authorities to consider black lives “cheap”.
This was a pointed remark and it stung the British political machine into action: a judicial inquiry was ordered into the way the police had investigated Lawrence’s murder. At this inquiry, a laborious attempt was made by the investigators to get the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Paul Condon, to admit that the London police were affected by “institutional racism”. But he was having none of it. There were some bad apples within the police force, he said, but to say the force was “institutionally racist” would mean every single police member was a racist. And that was not true.
But another police boss, Ian Blair, chief constable of Surrey, contradicted Condon. “The canteen culture” of the police, he said, was like an “anvil: solid, old- fashioned, if not quite obsolescent, and something that things are done to but does not change as a result”.
This week the contents of the inquiry’s report became known. The report said there is “pernicious and institutionalised racism in the Metropolitan Police”, and that “there must be an unequivocal acceptance of the problems of institutionalised racism and its nature before it can be addressed, as it needs to be, in full partnership with minority ethnic communities”. This finding aroused speculation that Condon might resign.
But the inquiry conceded that the racism within the police might be “unwitting”, and this was seized upon by Condon as a face- saver. He told the London Evening Standard: “I hope, pray, anticipate that [the report] will say something very significant around institutional racism. I will embrace that with zeal.”
The report makes 70 recommendations for action by the Metropolitan Police to combat racism and the black community in Britain will be watching closely to see whether Condon will embrace all of them with equal “zeal”.
For as far as the black community is concerned, the racists within the police are simply untouchable. Time and again, blacks have read harrowing reports of how the police have handled blacks they have arrested with impunity, and yet they were not punished. In particular, they are very fond of stopping blacks who drive what the police consider “flashy” cars. One witty British columnist has observed that a new crime has come into being in Britain: “The crime of being black.”
Official statistics support this view. Research by the British Home Office shows that deaths of black detainees in police custody are 10 times more likely to be linked to use of restraints or struggles with officers than those of their white counterparts.
The study found that police actions were linked to 37% of black detainee deaths, or seven out of 19 black deaths recorded between 1990 and 1996. Only 4% or nine out of 225 deaths of white detainees were in similar circumstances.
Additionally, it has officially been admitted that a black person is five times more likely to be stopped and questioned, or probably searched, than a white person.
The alarming thing is that whenever black people die in police custody, one hardly ever hears of police being punished as a result. Often they are not even suspended. Whenever it appears that the evidence against a police officer is strong enough to warrant prosecution, he is allowed to retire, often “on health grounds”. Cases brought by blacks against the police for harassment are vigorously defended. Even when the Metropolitan Police agrees to pay damages to the complainant, it refuses to accept “liability” for the crime itself, which means the police officers concerned cannot be punished.
The British are, of course, masters of hypocrisy, and it wasn’t lost on black South Africans that while the British severely criticised the practitioners of apartheid, the years before the National Party came to power before 1948 were not exactly without discrimination against blacks in South Africa. Nor that when the British were ruling Kenya and the Rhodesian Federation, no racial discrimination was practised in those countries either.
Well, the chickens of hypocrisy have come home to roost. And the cackling noise those chickens are making will build into a cacophony, unless their breeder wakes up and faces his image squarely in the mirror, like a man.