Recruiting police to reflect diversity of London ‘will take many decades’

Filling the ranks: a recent drive focused on women
Anthony Devlin/PA
Sophie Sleigh14 January 2019

A Met chief today said it would take “many decades” for the force to accurately reflect the make-up of London’s population at present rates.

Black and ethnic minority officers account for 14 per cent of the Met’s 29,700 police officers, despite constituting 40 per cent of the capital’s population. Only 27 per cent of the force are women.

Deputy commissioner Sir Stephen House said: “The rate that we are going, it’s going to be many decades before we get there.”

He told the London Assembly’s Police and Crime Committee that figures for ethnic minority officers were “very poor” and said the force was not retaining mothers returning from maternity leave.

He added that the Met’s decision to temporarily lift a ban on recruits from outside the capital would further reduce the proportion of black and Asian officers.

Sir Stephen said: “It was a very difficult decision. There was agonising around what this would do to the mix of our recruits. But eventually we felt we were simply not making progress in increasing our numbers.”

The Met recently launched a recruitment campaign focused specifically on women. However, co-leader of the Green Party and London Assembly member Siân Berry said more needed to be done to remedy the disparity.

She calculated that at the current rate of change it would take until 2070 before black and Asian officers represent their numbers in the population.

Ms Berry told the Standard: “They should be going out and specifically recruiting cohorts from particular communities. We do have a problem with trust with the police in particular groups. The only real way [to solve this] is for the police to look, sound, feel and be part of these groups and communities.”

Sir Stephen told the meeting he had “reservations” about affirmative action. At the last census 40.2 per cent London’s population were recorded as from ethnic minorities.

In November the Met extended its recruitment drive for officers from outside London as part of efforts to recruit more than 2,500 officers to bring total officer numbers up to 30,700.

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