I'm not shocked by the police's discrimination against Carol Howard
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Version 0 of 1. We are now well accustomed to the Met's knee-jerk responses to malpractice. There is the usual forceful denial of any such thing and then the closing of ranks. Finally, when the public manages to claw enough evidence of the truth from their unrelenting clutches, there is the carefully worded, PR-sanctified non-apology. It is a trajectory with which PC Carol Howard – "singled out and targeted" because she is a woman and black in the elite Diplomatic Protection Group (DPG), the same unit responsible for the Plebgate scandal – is no doubt all too familiar. She was once used as a face for the Met's diversity, but now an employment tribunal has ruled that the organisation had "directly discriminated" against her and exposed the force's practice of systematically destroying evidence of sexual and racial discrimination within its ranks. Their actions are, in a word, outrageous. They follow last year's 20th anniversary of Stephen Lawrence's murder, when the Metropolitan Black Police Association (BPA) pointedly chose to declare that the Met remains institutionally racist. A year later, a string of revelations have further dented any trust we may have left in the force. In December the chief commissioner, Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, admitted that crime figures were being fiddled, with offences such as rape going under-reported. New details emerge from Plebgate, exposing officers capable of brazen deceit, arrogantly believing themselves to be above the very law they purport to uphold. It is presumably the "lack" of data that allowed Hogan-Howe to state that when it comes to racism "there is lots of evidence to say … we're actually doing a pretty good job and we are improving all the time". If doing a good job means adhering to the three wise monkeys' maxim of see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil, then let's give them a big thumbs up. If Howard's case helps us do anything, it should be to better understand how discrimination doesn't come in neat distinct packages labelled gender and race, which has white women and black men as the focus of discussions. As ethnic minority women are considered prototypical of neither, we are rendered invisible. Academics estimate that a quarter of us are unemployed due to prejudice. In 2012 the all-party parliamentary group on race and community found that 20.5% of Pakistani and Bangladeshi and 17.7% of black women were unemployed, compared to 6.8% of their white counterparts. And though more attention is given to the low employment rates of ethnic minority men, unemployment is in fact higher for such women. This type of data is valuable, yet increasingly hard to come by. The Met is not alone here. Both the public and private sectors are guilty of not properly monitoring how race and gender combine in workplace discrimination. As ethnic minority women we know that our faces do not fit. Howard, working in a unit that was predominantly male and white was faced with a boss who couldn't envisage a black woman when he thought of a DPG officer. Indeed, only weeks after becoming her line manager, Acting Inspector Dave Kelly "formed the view … that [Howard] was dishonest and not up to the standard required for DPG". Baseless opinions about her inadequacy could be quickly formed then acted on precisely because she was a black woman who, by virtue of her gender and race, was an inadequate member of the unit. Just by being in the team she had become a colleague who didn't "know her place" and thus someone given to insubordination. Giving evidence in April, Kelly summoned the figure of the angry and petulant black woman as the reason for Howard's case against him. She was, he said, "dissatisfied" with not having her own way. Unable to acknowledge that ordering junior officers to ask about Howard's sex life and glean whether she was sleeping with a colleague or aggressively shouting at her while armed with a Taser gun were acts that would "undermine, discredit and belittle", Kelly resorted to the sexist infantilising that many women will recognise. He wasn't the problem, she was. The angry black woman stereotype is used so often because it enforces silence. Don't protest against what is being done to you, simply shut up and accept it. If you are justifiably angry about the way you are being treated, it is in fact a sign that reason has abandoned your mental faculties – anger is only a stone's throw from being mad, bad and dangerous. Even after yesterday's revelations the Met appears unrepentant – once again, the old boys have closed ranks in the face of uncovered misconduct. Sadly, their willingness to literally erase the validity of Howard's experiences is not all that shocking. Black women live this in varied forms daily. |