Source · Select Committees · Home Affairs Committee
Recommendation 82
82
Acknowledged
Paragraph: 559
Police forces must strengthen race inequality approach by adopting 'explain or change' model.
Recommendation
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.
Government Response Summary
The government agrees on the need to monitor trust and confidence, stating they already collect extensive ethnicity data and will continue to explore improvements in data recording. They note that the National Policing Board includes public trust as a strategic priority.
Paragraph Reference:
559
Government Response
Acknowledged
HM Government
Acknowledged
All communities should have confidence in the police. The police’s ability to fulfil its duties is dependent on its capacity to secure and maintain public trust and support for their actions, as part of the model of policing by consent. The Home Office agrees with the Committee on the need to monitor trust and confidence in policing both nationally and at a local level. The Home Office and policing partners place great importance on the regular collection, monitoring and evaluation of a range of data broken down by ethnicity. This is not just limited to information on trust in the police but also includes data on, for example, the use of police powers, complaints and misconduct, recruitment, vetting, and victims’ services. The National Policing Board, chaired by the Home Secretary, has also established four strategic policing priorities where we want to see improvement in policing—importantly, this includes being trusted by the public to work together across the policing sector. The Home Secretary uses the Board and its sub-governance to hold the sector to account for delivery of these priorities and to ensure we are collectively delivering what matters to the public. Ethnicity data is central to effective policing and policymaking, ensuring we can understand the impacts of the policies we design and to help us mitigate disproportionate impacts. The Government has made improvements in the way it collects and uses this data in recent years, including on stop and search and community confidence, where it uses various sources such as the Crime Survey for England and Wales, internal polling, and data from forces. The Home Office, with policing partners, will continue to explore how we can improve recording and the quality of data across policing, such as collating more granular ethnicity data, improving the use of qualitative data and reducing levels of missing ethnicity information. Inclusive Britain also sets out a series of actions in relation to reporting responsibly on race, using data effectively and also specifically on improving the way data is reported in relation to stop and search.