Recommendation 44

It is completely unacceptable that forces’ data on ethnic disparity in police misconduct has been inconsistent and incomplete to the point where it cannot be understood or acted upon. We are appalled that it has not been possible for us even to assess the extent of racial disparities in the misconduct system fully due to inadequacies The Macpherson Report: Twenty-two years on 183 in data gathering by forces. We welcome the recent agreement between the Home Office and NPCC to gather more comprehensive, comparable information this year. However it is unacceptable that it has taken a full six years after HMICFRS warned about the problem for the Home Office and the majority of individual police forces to manage to establish effective, comparable ways of collecting data. Remarkably, the IOPC had not deemed it necessary to gather information by ethnicity in advance of us raising the issue with them. This combined failure by the Home Office, national policing organisations and police forces to conduct rigorous and systematic analysis of misconduct data for so long demonstrates the complacency regarding this issue across the police service.