Source · Select Committees · Home Affairs Committee
Recommendation 43
43
Accepted
Paragraph: 267
Racial disparity in police officer dismissals and disciplinary processes remains persistent.
Recommendation
There is clear racial disparity in the number of officers being dismissed from police forces—BME officers are more than twice as likely to be dismissed as White officers— and in the number of BME officers and staff being subjected to internal disciplinary processes. We welcome the recent work by the NPCC to instigate reforms. However it is extremely troubling that this disparity has been allowed to continue for so long without serious action being taken by police forces to investigate or address the problem.
Government Response Summary
The government agrees with the finding of racial disparity in police dismissals and misconduct. It welcomes the NPCC's new Race Action Plan (May 2022) to address this and commits the Home Office to review the police misconduct system in summer 2022 to ensure fairness and uphold integrity.
Paragraph Reference:
267
Government Response
Accepted
HM Government
Accepted
The Home Office welcomes the work of the National Police Chiefs’ Council and the College of Policing in developing a new Race Action Plan for policing to address the issues of disproportionality in the police misconduct system. The new Race Action Plan, which will be published in May 2022, will set out a range of measures to improve outcomes for Black people in policing, including developing a clear plan to address the disproportionality in police misconduct cases, and ensuring misconduct data is published consistently and is fully broken down by ethnicity for all forces. In addition, the Home Office will work with the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) and the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) to review the police misconduct system to ensure that it is fair and effective in upholding the highest standards of integrity in policing. The Home Office will set out the terms of reference and timeline for this review in summer 2022. The Home Office agrees that there is a clear racial disparity in the number of officers being dismissed from police forces. However, it should be noted that the police misconduct system was reformed in 2020 to introduce legally qualified chairs to ensure the independence of decision-making at misconduct hearings. In addition, changes to the police complaints system in 2020 has also strengthened police accountability and transparency. The Home Office has also made significant improvements to its data collections to enable greater scrutiny of police activity broken down by ethnic group. The Home Office also supports the actions outlined in ‘Inclusive Britain’ to improve accountability and tackle disparities including removing unnecessary barriers that prevent increased use of body worn video, and supporting the development of a new, national framework for how the use of police powers are scrutinised at a local level.