Society
For advice on policing consult me: I'm on bail (as usual)
Published 22 November 1999
I was absolutely flabbergasted by an article written by Denis O'Connor, assistant commissioner of Metropolitan Police, in the London Evening Standard. O'Connor is a fine man, a clear thinker and an asset to modern policing. There is none better.
But he tells us in his article the results of a "peace summit" which he and John Grieve, deputy assistant commissioner, held with the 35 lay advisers to the Met's racial and violent crime task force.
"Peace summit" is a strange phrase. Has there been a war? Who are these lay advisers? Are they paid? How much? How does one get to be a lay adviser? I have been involved in the business of British policing for 34 years now. I have written extensively, published a book, campaigned at the heart of all the major issues. For a period of seven years, I was never not on bail. I know about policing from the end of policeman's boot, from the thick end of his baton, from the constant and open monitoring of my life by the Special Branch. I am on bail even now, after being charged with affray and assault in July. The Crown Prosecution Service has since dropped the affray charge owing to lack of evidence, and only the assault remains. So my expertise on policing is well-grounded. And I have learnt in all of this to require of the police precision, clarity, no fuzzy-wuzzy business.
During the 1980s, after the Brixton riots and consequent report by Lord Scarman, consultative committees were set up throughout the Metropolitan Police. They were local talk shops where loose cannons met the police about once a month. Police officers in Brixton used to dread the day when they would troop down to the town hall to receive their regular dose of abuse. It was a good career move for those blacks who attended. They represented no one and spoke for no one. If anybody had taken a photograph of them to one of the big London estates - Stockwell Park or the Angell Estate in Brixton, for example - hardly a resident would have recognised them.
Has the Macpherson report on the Stephen Lawrence affair resurrected them? Who are these lay advisers? (And I mean by name and number.) Their present fractious relations with the Met seem to have started with, of all things, the Paddington rail disaster. Two black women members of the group went to the scene of the crash only to be met, they said, by "a wall of unremitting racism". When I read about it, I did not believe a word of it. My instinct was to wonder what these busybodies were doing in matters as serious and dangerous as the scene of a major train crash.
We were told that they were victims of racism one minute, and then that they were not victims of racism, police-abuse style, but of institutional racism. Confusion reigned because, as a result, the entire bevy of them resigned.
O'Connor ought to have felt a general sense of relief. But it seems he values these advisers highly. I just can't understand what they advise on. Do they advise on how to police blacks in my street? I visited several of my neighbours to find out whether they knew of these advisers. No one did. I had to point out that in our council tax bills is a levy that goes towards the upkeep of the Met.
O'Connor gives a clue as to how the advisers are appointed. In his article, he mentions that they are professionals "who have been critical of police in the past". I guess one only has to stand on a soapbox outside the Ritzy cinema in Brixton, scream police brutality and police racism at the top of one's voice and, presto, you are a lay adviser.
I think we are losing it here. These advisers have been allowed to drift into policing with no knowledge of policing techniques or the art of detection, and that is a huge political mistake. There will forever be conflicts and misunderstandings.
My advice to O'Connor is to sign them up as Special Reserve Police. Or, as I used to call them in the Caribbean, Something Resembling Police. Train them on the job, let them wear the official boots, spit-and-polish style. It will help focus their advice and, more importantly, sift the wheat from the chaff.
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