Recommendation 84

Twenty-two years on, police forces need to take responsibility for the lack of progress in vital areas raised by the Macpherson report. Individual forces and Chief Constables have considerable scope within their own organisations and communities to increase BME recruitment, establish fair misconduct processes, and build trust with local communities over stop and search policies. Police and Crime Commissioners also have considerable scope to hold their Chief Constables and forces to account, or to pursue measures like BME recruitment targets or additional oversight arrangements involving local Black and minority ethnic communities. Yet whilst policing has changed in many ways for the better in the last two decades, in these key areas affecting race equality too little progress has been made. Many Chief Constables and Police and Crime Commissioners are not doing enough to tackle the problems or to recognise the additional work still needed to achieve the objective William Macpherson set out twenty-two years ago of “the elimination of racist prejudice and disadvantage and the demonstration of fairness in all aspects of policing”.