Janet Hills, president of National Black Police Association: ‘I’ve heard it all before. Theresa May has no plan to deliver’
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Version 0 of 1. After 24 years on the police force, many of them spent in Brixton, Janet Hills has naturally had some experience of stop and search. What may be slightly more surprising is that some of that experience has come when off duty – and not as the investigator, but the target. Yesterday, Hills became president of the National Black Police Association (NBPA), 24 hours after Theresa May addressed the body’s conference and issued what she described as a “wake-up call” to the police about its chronic shortage of ethnic-minority officers – a failure that she said reduced public confidence in the force. May talked about stop-and-search, too, taking on Met commissioner Bernard Hogan Howe’s recent contention that a reduction in its use may have resulted in an increase in knife crime. Hills has her reservations about May’s speech, but she agrees with her on that point, at least. And when she reflects on her own experience, she sounds weary, and a little amused. Related: Theresa May: police forces are 'too white' “It’s happened a couple of times,” she says. “You just feel, like, why would you want to stop me? It is a completely different experience for black people. And it still happens without good reason.” She remembers one incident in particular – not, technically, a stop-and-search, but reflecting exactly the same assumptions. “I was driving,” she says, “and I had my hood up because my hair was wet. So they couldn’t identify that I was a woman, and because the car is registered to a woman, that was why [they stopped me]. But if I had blonde hair and blue eyes … come on.” After the car was stopped, Hills expressed her frustrations, careful to avoid mentioning that she was a police officer. “But then an off-duty officer went past and waved to me, and that’s when they found out who I was.” You would think that might be the end of it. In fact, it only made things worse. “They tried to get me in trouble. Because I was objecting to the reasons that they had stopped me, and I was a police officer, they thought: we’d better get in there first. This is the problem around complaints, internal or external - if you make one, you might become the target.” That’s unbelievable, I say. Hills snorts. “That’s not unbelievable,” she says. “That’s policing.” Hills describes herself as a “critical friend” of the police force. And as she takes the reins at the NBPA after filling the same role at the organisation’s London branch, there may be those in authority who ruefully conclude that the home secretary’s intervention demonstrates that it has quite enough such friends already. That May made her speech and set off a maelstrom at the NBPA’s conference was, says Hills, a “spirit-lifter”. And by and large she gives her eight out of 10 for her work on the subject. But she is far from convinced that the argument May set out about the need to increase ethnic-minority representation in the police goes far enough. “What’s that song? ‘I’ve heard it all before’... there were a few things in there, but what it lacked was action. No plan for delivery, no accountability.” Among the most striking aspects of May’s speech, for example, was her contention that four police forces don’t have a single black officer (which two of those forces subsequently disputed, but the point was made). What was less clear was whether any consequences would stem from that. “Fine,” says Hills, warming to her theme, “you have these forces – but what are you going to do about them? If these leaders have other priorities, they aren’t going to look at diversity unless it’s being measured. So chief constables need to be held to account … unless the government is prepared to speak firmly around this issue, and back that up with what will happen if you continually get it wrong, that will not change.” However far there still is to travel, Hills is clear that the progress made since her own early days on the force is significant. The daughter of Jamaican parents who moved to the UK in the 1960s, she remembers huge scepticism towards the police in the black community. To her, policing didn’t seem so strange: her elder brother was in the force, and when she told family and friends that she was joining, their view was mostly: what took you so long? “But the perception in our community more widely was around sus law [as stop-and-search was known in its hugely controversial earlier incarnation] – there was a massive negative feeling. I talked to a lot of people who said: I always wanted to be a police officer, but things like sus put me off.” Related: Police forces much whiter than the communities they serve, analysis finds Brixton in the 90s was, she says, “probably the most political place you could go as a black officer”. She thinks she was the first black woman on the local force in more than a decade. And she found herself in an environment that was a long way from welcoming. “The language!” she marvels. “That was very different. Racist language wouldn’t be challenged.” An overwhelmingly white force viewed the members of ethnic minorities in the communities they policed as something like the enemy: “You had a them-and-us culture. So you’d hear them say something, and you’d be like: ‘Hang on, what?’ And they’d say sorry, but it would only be because you heard it.” Did she ever challenge it formally? “That would just have been career suicide,” she says. A bit like the time her car was stopped, there was always the risk that the complaint would be, as she puts it, “flipped”, recasting the victim as the troublemaker. It’s easier now, she says, in part because of the progress that has been made – even if they are qualified successes – in improving ethnic-minority representation and changing the culture. In the old days, her status as the exception caused endless confusion. “You can become invisible,” she says. “People would come into the room looking for Janet, and they’d see me, and think, that can’t be the person I’m looking for.” Another mindboggling example: when she was a detective doing plainclothes work, she would often take a prisoner into custody – “and they’d be asking the prisoner who I am!” All of this, I observe, must have been made doubly complex by being not only black, but also a woman – another group that the police hasn’t always been renowned for treating fairly. But to Hills, that seems like far less of an issue. “I never had time to think about being a woman in a man’s job,” she says. “I was too busy being visibly black.” Gender issues, she says, “are more challengeable. Institutional racism is harder to pin down. One of the reasons this is so important is: if you get it right for race, you get it right for everything.” These days, the problems are subtler, but pernicious nonetheless. One issue that persistently dogs ethnic-minority police officers is the difficulty of gaining promotion, which Hills puts down to a kind of bias that is all the harder to address for often being unconscious. “The process could be well written, and on paper it looks great, but ultimately if the numbers remain the same then something’s not working. Putting it into practice better is a big part of my job, because you’ve got a lived experience about what your members say is happening on the ground floor that people in HR can’t necessarily see.” Related: Theresa May complains about police diversity – but she can fix it | Leroy Logan Officers looking to step up, for example, have to pass an exam and then gain the approval of their line manager to move to the next stage of the process. “And that’s a barrier,” says Hills. “Talent, if you’re a white manager, is someone that looks and behaves like you. So why do you need the supervisor’s say-so? You’ve passed the exam off your own back, no one gave you the answers, it took three and a half hours – and then someone says: actually, I don’t think you’re ready.” It must be strange, it occurs to me, to have such a fraught relationship with an institution you love: the role of the critical friend, who blind loyalists might mistake for an enemy, is not an easy one. Does she ever get sick of it? “No, the organisation needs that critical friend,” she says. “But the truth is, most black police officers, they just want to be police officers. Sometimes we do get people shouting about the race thing, who we just tell: actually, you need to arrive on time. But actually, far more often, when they come to us with a problem, they often don’t want to tell us that it has a racial aspect to it at first. Because they just want to be police officers. They don’t want to address the politics – they just want to do the best they can do.” |