Recommendation 82

Fourthly, police forces must strengthen their approach to tackling the systemic problems of race inequality that we have identified. Forces should adopt the approach set out in the David Lammy review of the Criminal Justice System: explain or change. That must mean monitoring, assessing and robustly investigating race disparities so that only robust and evidence-based explanations are accepted; and where forces cannot explain disparities, they must set out changes to eliminate them. At a national level, policing organisations and the Home Office should be holding forces accountable for doing so. Recent comments by Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner Neil Basu, Dame Cressida Dick and Martin Hewitt, as well as new initiatives from the NPCC, HMICFRS, the IOPC and from individual PCCs and Chief Constables suggest that police leaders recognise the importance now of taking a ‘big step forward’—but they must now make good on their intent by rigorously examining their institutions, explaining the disparities we have highlighted, or changing their organisations and practices to eradicate them.