Policing, Race, and Racism.

Vol. 14 No. 9 (September 2004), pp.719-722

POLICING, RACE, AND RACISM, by Michael Rowe. Cullompton, Devon, UK: Willan Publishing, 2004. (Simultaneous publication in US and Canada by Willan Publishing, c/o ISBS, Portland, Oregon.) 256pp. Hardback. £40.00 / US $59.95 / CDN$ 78.97. ISBN 1-84392-045-X. Paper. £17.99 / US $28.50 / CDN$ 37.54. ISBN 1-84392-044-1.

Reviewed by David A. Harris, University of Toledo College of Law, Toledo, Ohio. Email: david.harris@utoledo.edu

Michael Rowe’s valuable new book will give readers a clear sense of how policing and racism intersect today in Great Britain. It will surely bring new understanding to those in the U.K. who study police and their work, and to British police administrators, public policy analysts, and concerned British citizens as well. It will also be an unexpectedly useful work for those in these same roles in the United States. By comparing what has happened in Britain over the last ten years with many of our own similar struggles in the U.S. – the controversy over racial profiling and police stops in the late 1990s, the use of new mechanisms for insuring police accountability, and the like – Americans will gain useful insights. In the bargain, anyone who is unfamiliar with the recent history of police and minority relations in the U.K. over the past decade will learn much that will be of value.

Rowe’s inquiry begins with the now-infamous murder of Stephen Lawrence, a young black man, by a group of racist thugs in 1993 in Eltham, South London. The crime itself – a vicious, unprovoked attack on Lawrence and another young black man because of their race – would have been ugly enough standing alone. Unfortunately, the events that followed Lawrence’s killing only made things worse. The police botched the investigation, which also seemed to have been infected with racism. After all of this lead to an acquittal of Lawrence’s killers, a national public inquiry was established. Headed by Sir William Macpherson, a former High Court judge, the inquiry began in March of 1998 and collected evidence for six months. The document the inquiry produced – known in Britain as the Macpherson Report – was published in early 1999.

Rowe discusses numerous specific recommendations made in the Macpherson Report, but he centers the book on two particular issues. First, he says, the Macpherson Report candidly described the central problem in policing that led to the bungled Lawrence case as “institutional racism.” Rowe says that the Report defined institutional racism as a “collective failure of an organization to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture or ethnic origin. It can . . . amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness, and racist stereotyping which disadvantages minority ethnic people” (p.9). As Rowe explains it, the difference between individual and institutional racism is that “the latter [*720] places greater emphasis on outcomes and effects, rather than intent” (p.10). In other words, policing in Britain was being influenced not just by the attitudes or actions of a few racist bad apples; rather, racism pervaded police institutions and practices generally. (After the issuance of the Report, a number of the country’s senior police leaders, including Sir Paul Condon, head of London’s Metropolitan Police, publicly stated that they agreed with this finding – a one hundred eighty degree reversal of the “no institutional racism exists” position that Condon and other top police officials took when they gave their own statements during the course of the Macpherson inquiry.) Second, says Rowe, the Report stated that creating “‘increased trust and confidence in policing in minority ethnic communities’” (p.7) had to become a top priority of the national government. Thus Rowe’s book, which comes five years after the issuance of the Macpherson Report, offers an opportunity to look back and evaluate what has happened. What actions have been taken in those five years vis-à-vis police and race relations? Have these actions addressed the deep structural problem of institutional racism? And have these efforts helped to increase trust between police and minorities in Britain? These are questions worth asking, and Rowe attempts to answer them by looking at policing in Britain over the past five years across seven related dimensions: recruitment, retention, and promotion of minority officers; racism in police culture; race relations training; stop and search; handling of racist incidents and hate crimes; accountability and complaints; and diversity.

When all is said and done, Rowe’s take on all of this may seem more than a little discouraging for anyone with a reform-minded view of policing issues. The issuance of the Macpherson Report seemed to create a real moment of possibility, Rowe says, a chance to make genuine progress at the difficult intersection of racism and policing. The consensus at the time of the issuance of the Report seemed to be that things needed to change; the popular and political will seemed to have coalesced around the issue so that the government and the police services would have to act, act quickly, and act effectively, in ways that they had not in the past. And Rowe reports that the police services have indeed acted. There is now extensive new training on issues of race relations and the cultures of the many ethnicities a police officer in any city in today’s ethnically heterogeneous Britain will encounter. There are new requirements and standards of all kinds to guide police officers in the performance of their duties. Efforts to recruit new officers from black and Asian communities have been redoubled, and new accountability mechanisms are in place.

Yet, despite all of this action, Rowe says that the heart of the problem – institutional racism in policing – remains largely unaffected. This, he says, is because the numerous reforms put in place after the issuance of the Report have tended to focus only on officers as individuals. Officers receive training; individual citizen complaints are handled; the racist overtones of particular criminal incidents are identified. But there has been little or no effort to address the issues in institutional or structural terms. And [*721] without institutional change, there is no reason to think – and according to Rowe, there is little evidence – that the key finding of institutional racism in the policing services has been addressed in any effective way. Accordingly, it will come as little surprise that Rowe says that there is also no evidence that any of the multitude of actions and reforms undertaken in the wake of the Macpherson Report has had any positive impact on the “trust and confidence in policing amongst minority ethnic communities.” Thus, five years on, Rowe describes a situation in which the moment of possibility for reform in British policing vis-à-vis race relations may have passed. From any overall point of view, Rowe argues, the opportunity for the type of structural change it would take to make progress against institutional racism has largely been wasted.

American students of police and criminology will be especially interested in Rowe’s chapters on accountability and stop and search. The concept of accountability of the police service to citizens, Rowe points out, has always been central to British police forces since the establishment of the Metropolitan Police in 1832; using terms that would be familiar to any British (or American) student of criminology, Rowe call this “the principle of policing by consent” (p.120). The main thrust of new accountability efforts in the post-Macpherson era, Rowe says, is organized “consultation” between police and citizens through required “community safety partnership” bodies. Rowe points out that these systems may be far from adequate. First, they may do a poor job of engaging the very minority communities that have had the biggest problems with the police. Second, and more important, consultation, even if engaged in with the right citizens, can only do so much. Real accountability requires a sharing of power; consultation without any sharing of power is just talk. Talk can certainly be helpful in any situation in which there has been far too little dialogue between the parties for too long; it can help them to understand each other when they have not been able to do so before. But, as Rowe says, “the introduction of mechanisms of consultation does not amount to local communities holding the police to account” (p.128). While American police departments have often resisted efforts to make them accountable, a few of them – for example, the Pittsburgh Police Bureau, with its state-of-the-art early intervention system that gives supervisors instant access to data on about twenty aspects of any individual officer’s behavior – might bear looking at as a model for the U.K., if it is not already in use there.

Rowe’s chapter on stop and search will also raise American eyebrows. In the late 1990s, American police departments and police unions were still fighting requests that they collect basic data, including race or ethnicity, on the circumstances of those they stopped and searched; British police had been doing some record keeping on stops and searches since the 1980s under the 1984 Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE). According to Rowe, “there is now a considerable body of evidence that suggests that minority ethnic groups are overrepresented in terms of stop and search compared with resident population.” Rowe repeats the conclusion of British Home Office reports conducted on these data that “the [*722] over-representation of minority groups” in stop and search data “is largely related to their being resident in areas with higher levels of street crime.” For those attuned to the American debates over racial profiling, the question that leaps to mind is what percentage of those being “overstopped” are in fact guilty of anything – that is, whether stops and searches of particular racial groups yield the same, a higher, or a lower rate of “hits” on these stops than is true among whites. These “hit rates” have become a pivotal point in the discussion of the issue of racially biased policing in the U.S. Hit rates either have not been included in the Home Office studies, or if they have been, they are omitted by Rowe from his book. Either way, a crucial piece of information is missing from the discussion.

The book is academic in tone. The writing is occasionally dry and more than occasionally a bit repetitive when it references what the author has already said or will say further on. But this is only a criticism of the book’s style, not its substance. Rowe’s book will make good reading for anyone interested in police reform in any society; it has much to teach us about the particular hurdles that British police and society have faced as they have attempted to confront the intertwined problems of policing and racism. It is a work that belongs on the shelf of anyone interested in how we can attempt to overcome these problems, and how we can continue to make progress on police reform.

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