Media Storm - S3E5 Police: Behind the PR machine - with Leroy Logan and Chantelle Lunt

Episode Date: June 29, 2023

For the full uncut discussion with Leroy Logan and Chantelle Lunt, subscribe to our Patreon: patreon.com/MediaStormPodcast The Conservatives succeeded in their manifesto pledge to recruit 20,000 new police officers by 2023. But with growing awareness of sexism, racism and violent offending within the police, is this for better or worse? Media Storm has uncovered early evidence that racist recruitment practices were at play, with Black applicants more than 40% more likely to be rejected than White applicants. This finding is consistent with data from the College of Policing that spans forces across England and Wales, as well as averages taken across the 12 individual forces that provided Media Storm access to their records. A spokeswoman from the College of Policing responded: “Policing is currently more diverse than it has ever been before. Our data which is based on all 43 forces within England and Wales shows an increase of 15.9% of Ethnic Minority and 19.3% of Black candidates passing the assessment process since May 2020, ensuring we are now better able than ever to represent the communities we are serving.   "College of Policing encourages all forces to interview candidates following success at the online assessment process. We provide guidance on the interview process to ensure all recruits are consistently and fairly assessed to the same high standards.   "Whilst we are proud that policing is the most diverse it has ever been, we recognise that there is more to be done to be a fully inclusive organisation. We are working hard alongside forces to understand all aspects of the recruitment process and how to ensure it is as fair and consistent as possible.” Media Storm is off in search of police officers who will tell us what’s going on behind the PR machine. They shine a light on internal problems ranging from grassroots cultures to leadership structures, and external problems like politics and (yes, you guessed it) the mainstream media. Mathilda and Helena are joined in the studio by Dr Leroy Logan MBE (@LeroyLogan999), founding member of the Black Police Association and one of the original officers to testify to institutional racism during the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry, and Chantelle Lunt (@chantellelunt), Merseyside police officer-turned-BLM Leader. They pick apart mainstream media mistruths and policing PR and discuss how we can work together to bring about positive change. The episode is created by Mathilda Mallinson (@mathildamall) and Helena Wadia (@helenawadia). The music is by Samfire (@soundofsamfire). Learn more: Watch “G’s” story in the BAFTA-winning short film, The Black Cop, online at The Guardian Listen to Oliver Laurence’s Protect and Serve wherever you get your podcasts Read The Thinner Blue Line, by Sophie A. Matthews Speakers: Dr Pete Jones @fatwhitebloke Gamal ‘G’ Turawa @PurpleWisdom Sophie A Matthews @sophieamatt Owen West @PolicingCrowds Adam Pugh @AdamPugh Oliver Laurence @Protect_ServeUK Media Storm was first launched the house of The Guilty Feminist and is part of the Acast Creator Network. Become a member at https://plus.acast.com/s/media-storm. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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What is MediaStorm, Matilda? Oh, I know this one. MediaStorm is the news podcast that starts with the people who were normally asked last. Right, but what does that actually mean? What do we do? Well, we investigate stories affecting marginalised communities from the perspective of those communities. So why does that make this week's episode a little weird? Well, because this week we're looking at policing from the perspective, of the police.

Yeah, not exactly a marginalised community. Can't argue with that. That would, in fact, be the people on the receiving end of police brutality. And there's been no shortage of such testimonies with horrifying accounts of abuses of power and evidence of sexist, racist and homophobic cultures implicating policing as an institution. Okay, but our strapline also means something else. Go on. At Media Storm, we speak to the people being spoken about in the mainstream media all the time,

but never spoken to. And at the moment, that is the police. And I don't mean the commissioners or comms directors being rolled out to respond to the press. I mean those who make up its ranks. Right. I've worked in quite a few London newsrooms. And every day there's a story about the Metropolitan Police, whether that's individual officers who have committed crimes or about the force at large. and all we see to address it is the PR machine, high up officers being rolled out on mainstream media to say tight PR-approved lines that actually don't address any of the problems. So this is important because when you actually listen to voices across the officer corps,

you can spot a real disconnect between what public-facing senior officers are telling us and what everyone beneath them is feeling. And with that cultural or communication barrier, you have to ask whether those at the top are actually in any position to bring about change. Which at the end of the day is what we all want and what many in the force want to, although the question of how appears quite divisive. I do want to get behind the PR machine and find out what the hell is actually going on inside. Where are these terrible offences coming from?

How do we or can we actually stop them? Because by now so many of the issues we're seeing being reported on while shocking are not new. And unfortunately our findings this week suggest all this media scrutiny may not actually. be resulting in those cultural changes that are needed. In some cases, it may even be having the opposite effect. What do you mean? You may be familiar with the fact that the Conservative government pledged in its manifesto to recruit 20,000 new police officers by 2023. Yeah, and probably important to point out that this is mostly making up for officers cut during austerity, but yeah, they technically succeeded in that pledge. And you'd think a new generation

of officers could be quite an opportunity to implement some of those changes with speaking about. Yeah, I mean, I am not personally convinced expanding the force is the direction we should be going in, but it's certainly a chance to shift the makeup of the force and make it more representative and also make sure as hell that no more violent rapist types are getting in. Okay, well, in this investigation, I've worked with an expert on the inside to source and analyze exclusive freedom of information data on this recruitment. And it shows undeniably discriminatory practices at play, with ethnic minority applicants being rejected at a far higher rate than white ones. You're joking. And as for making sure no violent rapist types are getting in, I'm also being

told that forces are actually cutting corners in a bit to meet that quota and giving people badges with fewer checks than ever before. Sorry, what? With all that we're seeing reported in the press and all that we know about the many police officers being accused of violent sexual offences, how is this going under the radar? It has really made me wonder whether the mainstream media are asking the right questions because for all the times

the media has recently mentioned institutional racism, is anyone looking beyond the label at what it actually means? Something I'm hearing from individual officers is that blame and accountability is falling in the wrong places. And that really is a topic for Media Storm

where we try and find out what the media could be doing better to provide the real social value it was built to provide. I'm off to learn from lived experience. I'll be asking officers with a wide variety of professional and personal insights. What is really going on?

First, we'll examine institution-wide practices, then we'll hear about bottom-up cultural problems, top-down leadership problems and external problems emanating from the government. And I'll see you back in the studio with two very special guests, founder of the UK's Black Police Association, Dr. Leroy Logan, MBE,

an ex-officer turned Black Lives Matter leader Shantelle Lunt to discuss everything around this media storm. For more than two decades, David Carrick, a serial rapist hid behind his police uniform. Wayne Cousins will never be released from prison. Admitted publicly that his force is institutionally racist, sexist, misogynistic. I mean, do you accept that there is still institutional racism? I don't find it a helpful label. Welcome to Media Storm, the news podcast that starts. of the people who are normally asked last.

I'm Matilda Malinson and I'm Helen O'Owadia. This week's investigation. UK police behind the PR machine. The video playing now was published by the Conservative government in April. A rotating, flashing police siren reads 20,000 new officers. Promise made, promise kept. With this pledge, a new generation of officers has arrived. And any new generation is a good metric of changes on the horizon.

I was a police officer for the first 22 years, I think, of my adult life. I'm a chartered psychologist, a chartered scientist. And for the last 20 years or so, I've specialised around the implicit bias revolving around the police service. One person has been keeping a very close eye on the recruitment. We have had adverse impact against black and brown people within the recruiting process. Year upon year upon year, nothing's being done about it. Over the past few months, I've worked with Dr Pete Jones to gather unpublished data via freedom of information requests

about these new police recruits and calculate what's called the adverse impact ratio for different ethnic groups. The numbers speak volumes. Among the forces that replied, black applicants were more than 40% more likely to be rejected than white applicants. Asian applicants also face discrimination,

being a third more likely to be rejected than white applicants. And minority ethnic groups as a whole fared 24% worse than white applicants. This was once in a generation opportunity for the police service to be representative for the communities that it served, and it's squanded it. To me, that's part and parcel of that implicit bias.

It's this kind of assumption that the communities are somehow to blame. And why is that? Instead of looking at the process and saying, why is our process discriminating against black and brown people, they pointed the finger at communities and said, well, they don't want to join the police service, you can't make them. They are getting hundreds of applications from black people, from Asian people,

but they're disproportionately failing in the recruit process. Now, at some point, we have to do. turn the mirror on ourselves and say, well, perhaps it's our systems that have done this. So is this the kind of thing that we mean when we talk about institutional racism? Is this the kind of evidence that quantifies it? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I don't know how many times the evidence has to be presented before the police service at the senior levels puts their hands up and says, look, as an organisation, we have had practices and processes, which are fundamentally

institutionally racist. There's no reason why a statistician who is working at College of Policing or working in the Metropolitan Police should not be able to identify exactly where in the recruit process the problem was and do something about it. But nobody is held accountable for recruiting. There's no targets. There's nobody asking awkward questions about them. It's interesting to me that you specifically underlined systems in your answer and not people. Yeah, I think it's not necessarily about the individuals, you know, fair and equitable individuals can work within an institutionally racist system. I see the recruiting process as institutionally racist. I don't see all the assessors. I don't see all of the people who develop

those processes or the HR managers who run them as racist. But I do think that the lack of scrutiny of the process are not seeing the patterns. Those systems are institutionally racist. Even the the 95% who are not racist, sexist or homophobic are going to find it really difficult for their practice not to become racist or homophobic if the systems force them in that direction. And I think individuals further down the organisation need that explaining to them. We are not talking about you as a frontline operational response officer. We're talking about the systems that we operate. You know, try not to be defensive.

I decided to put our findings to an officer. a black officer who was rejected four times in three years before he was finally accepted into the Met in 1992. The first recruitment campaign for people from minority backgrounds in the police service took place in 1971. Here we are 60 years later. The police are very good at coming up with a plan. They're not very good at sustaining the plan.

There's been so many wonderful plans. Don't tell me about what you're putting in the shop window. Show me what you're doing in the stockroom. My name's Gamal Tarawa. I like to be called G. Up until 2018, I was a police officer with the Metropolitan Police and all-round troublemaker.

Gee has relayed the discrimination he's faced in a BAFTA-winning short film, The Black Cop. And he said, we think you're the wrong colour for the job. And I had some of me. shoe white enough. We used to white in our trainers. And they've painted me white.

The profession of policing, I am absolutely 100% proud of. Some of the behaviours within the culture, some of the people within the culture, I am not proud of. I want to talk about this grassroots culture in the police, how it catches,

on and why it seems to be so persistent. If I had the answer to that question, I'll be a multi-millionaire. What would I say? It's a culture that keeps getting repeated. You want to fit in. You want to be part of the team. You want to be part of the banter. You want to be part of the fun.

Part of it is the nature of the job. You very quickly see the world as us and them. You have a culture that marginalises. It's got a right-hand mindset. When the left-hand is coming, it's very difficult to fit into that right-handed environment. And you have to become ambidextrous. So when we're talking to the organisation say that things need to change,

the right handers are looking around and saying, I don't get what you're talking about. Everything's fine. I mean, my left-handedness, for want to have a better phrase, would have been my colour and my sexual orientation. The bullying just got to a point where I just broke and wanted to commit suicide.

That was a big turning point for me. And the turning point was, actually, I need to take ownership of me. I became the first. openly gay black officer to come out. How long did you stay in the force and why did you ultimately decide to leave? I did 26 years. I was four years away from doing 30. And I think I'd got to a point where I got tired of being told who I should be.

It was like breaking out and becoming the butterfly that I should have been years ago. This culture of marginalisation, as G described it, takes many forms and is present. at many levels of policing. One that springs to mind was during a police operation in London. We had to go and locate an arrest of violent man for murder. The 20 or so officers of us that were on this operation, the only five female officers on duty were all posted together in one vehicle to remain down the road, safely tucked away out of sight,

whilst all the male officers surrounded the property where this guy was living. Introducing Sophie A. Matthews, an alias used by a serving officer, the same name from which she authored the thinner blue line, a book that details her experiences as a woman in the Met Police for 14 years. We were all fuming, feeling very unappreciative and discriminated against, and the sergeant that organized this operation was actually reprimanded for this afterwards. But what annoyed us most was that during the briefing, when he posted the officers, nobody spoke up challenged him. All of the bosses were present, but nobody challenged him. And I know why he did it. He just thought, women, weaker sex, get them out of the way. But we are there to do a job.

And, you know, I honestly believe most officers and most people do recognize the need for both sexes and the police. But there was a male detective who I massively respect and admired. He said in an open office one day in front of the whole team that no women should be police officers. And this was as recent as 2015. So we're only talking eight years ago. It's sad to think that is still there. But Sophie was keen to stress that discrimination is not just internal. In my personal experience, I actually have probably been more victim of public perception based on my sex rather than internally with the police.

I was posted on a night duty with another female. We responded to a call from some residents in a council block that some youths were smoking weed. We quickly saw that they were not used. They were full-grown adult males, and there was quite a few of them. Very quickly, I was surrounded by these males who were big, five or six of them, towering over me, very angry that we were there. And I knew straight away I was in trouble. I used all sorts of police tactics that were running through my head. Nothing worked, and I was left face to face with this huge guy towering over me with a clench fist.

I honestly thought, this is it. This is the first time I'm going to be assaulted on duty. I then heard literally a police car come flying around the corner. the sirens wailing, a male colleague jumped out, ran towards us. And no joke, all these men literally just scattered. And I had no doubt this was because this was a male officer. They didn't care that prior to that, it was two female officers. They didn't have any regard or respect for the fact that we were wearing the uniform.

In this message, Sophie was not alone. I'm Chris Donaldson. Did 30 years in the Met Police. There's a firearms commander on the armed response vehicles. And we retired in 2013. I never dreamt of being a police, obviously. Black kids in them days, to some extent now, don't consider the police schools because of family pressures, community pressures. You're just one of those things you don't consider being.

My first duty at Notting Hill, yeah? I was getting petrol bombs and bricks thrown at me by black people. A serving MP who still sits in Parliament, a black MP, came up to me in front of my colleagues and called me a Judas and a traitor. So a lot of young kids, black kids, who I've spoken to, who are really interested in the police, would never consider being a policeman because would they be rejected by the community? How am I to tell them no? You know, I can't help but notice. My question was about internal problems and you steered us away from that.

Is that to imply that, you know, you don't think these internal problems are as relevant or that accounts of them. Maybe unfounded? No, not so. Of course it's not unfounded. I can only talk about my own journey. And the frustrating thing is, because I haven't got a negative experience, my journey and experience is dismissed. Out of hand.

Literally, I'm laughed at. Oh, you're a gaslighting. Oh, you don't know what you're talking about. Well, I do know what I were talking about. I didn't join to represent the black community. I didn't join to tick a box for the home office. I joined to be a police officer, and that's the key. Then speaking as a police officer, where do you think the problems that we are seeing reported could be coming from?

It has a cultural problem, clearly. There must be a cleansing from inside. If you want change, you have to change the structure of organisation and the attitude of senior officers. And in my experience, an awful lot of senior officers, do anything but want to be out on the front line where all the complaints come from. Make it their responsibility being there on the ground for an affecting change instead of talking about it. Poor leadership doesn't stop within the force. The more that the police signal modern-day progressive inclusive values, the more the government of the day push back. This is what we're turning a culture war.

Right. Let's have a look now at the Sunday Telegraph. Suella Braverman, our new Home Secretary, says no to wokeness. Fight crime and forget diversity in inclusion schemes. Owen West, a former chief superintendent in West Yorkshire Police, says the problem goes all the way up to the government. If the government of the day are branding officers as woke or lefty, then that has a direct consequence. You can see this in protest policing. You know, we can see a clamp down in protest policing, the right to free speech. And you can see really draconian legislation coming in.

And many police forces expressed real concern that this type of. of policing style would lead to a breakdown in trust and confidence and legitimacy. You know, the service generally is trying to move towards a more modern progressive agenda and trying to move away from, you know, coercion and the use of force. And that's uncomfortable, I think, certainly for this current government, that wants to see more of a authoritarian traditional approach to some of these policing areas. While we're on government policy, what do you think of the, program to recruit 20,000 new officers. You train incoming officers. So tell us, how do you

think this recruitment drive has been affecting the police force and this progressive, authoritarian tug-of-war that you've described? Any police force out there that doesn't reach its target suffers a financial penalty. And so forces are rushing headlong into getting as many offices into their organisation as they possibly can. Some forces don't interview anybody. It's all done automated. And I find it absolutely bizarre that somebody can walk into a police training centre, pick up their warrant card and get a uniform without ever having looked somebody in the eye and interacted. Now, I just hope that we don't get ourselves into position in a few years' time when individuals that should not have been in the police service have got in on the back of trying to

get to a political target. All of the officers I've spoken to so far expressed to me a pride in their work and a belief that things can get better. My next source was different. His experiences led him to believe that reforming the police is not possible, that the institution has proven itself unreformable.

If that is true, what comes in its place? My name is Adderipu. I have a few. I have spent four years in the Metropolitan Police. Whilst I was actually training to become a police officer, I received a text message to let me know that a family friend of mine was actually killed by the police. At that point, I was already ready to just get up and walk out and not come back.

But his mum, my auntie, sort of encouraged me and said, you know, no, stay. We need people like you on the inside. And then a couple of months later, Mark Duggan being killed in the way that he was by the police, seeing and hearing firsthand the attitude of fellow colleagues and police officers towards Mark that he's a criminal, he deserved what happened to him. I know that there are a lot of people that join with noble intentions and want reform and want to change it on the inside. That would have involved a lot of turning blind eyes and a lot of remaining silent to things

that I wasn't prepared to remain silent about. And so my politics has shifted and I've moved away from the idea of reform and away from the idea of policing altogether. Does that make you an abolitionist? Yeah. I think a lot of people would wonder how that could actually work in practice.

What does a society without police look like? What fills the gap left by the police? Abolition is a journey and it is a long-term process and plan. So we're not talking about, We just get rid of the police tomorrow and all of the problems are going to just magically go away. That's not what we're talking about. It's actually saying, okay, what are the issues that exist within society and how do we address them? Much of policing is reactionary, it is reacting to things that happen.

We are constantly chopping down branches without ever getting to the root cause of the problem, whether that is, you know, people that are adequately equipped to respond to people in a mental health crisis and making sure that communities are properly resolved. When I look at the safest parts of our society, they're not the parts that are the most heavily police. They're the parts that are the most heavily resourced. It's also a project of the imagination. It's just daring to imagine a different world.

We've been having conversations about reform. For longer than I've been alive, it clearly isn't working. If the purpose of today's investigation is to ask people with lived experience of policing, where the problems really lie. I'd like to share an observation. A pervasive feeling among officers I spoke to on and off the record

is a feeling of disgruntlement, of betrayal by their seniors, by the public, by the press. It's not a feeling that lends itself to unified collective change. These police officers are us. They bleed. They cry. They have emotions. We've got to remember there are humans behind headlines.

I asked Oliver Lawrence, host of protect and serve where this estrangement was coming from. I think balance and proportionality is the key to this. You very rarely see good news police stories on the news because they just don't sell papers. Policing is a very quick fix. It becomes solely reliant upon for the failures of other government departments. And the problem is that when the media report on these things, you know, the police are pulling away from mental health provisions,

police is letting down communities. And then the media's balance around reporting on that can sometimes be a misleading, and be quite hurtful. What I'm just trying to get across is there are far more good than there is bad. Today, we want to ask how the media can be constructive in holding police forces to account and where it might be having the opposite effect.

That takes us back to the studio. Thanks for sticking around. Hey, lovely listeners, we've loved. launched a Patreon where we will be making available exclusive insights into today's investigation, such as the original data behind our findings, uncut video interviews, and an extended cut of the studio discussion you're about to hear, all for less than the price of a cup of coffee per month. So head on over to patreon.com forward slash mediastorm podcast and join the MediaStorm community.

Welcome back to the studio and to Media Storm, the news podcast that starts with the people who are normally asked last. Our first guest is a former superintendent in the Metropolitan Police, where he became one of the UK's most highly decorated and well-known police officers during 30 years of service. He was involved in the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry, which investigated institutional racism in the force, and was a founding member of the Black Police Association. and is played by Star Wars' very own John Boyega in Steve McQueen's Red, White and Blue, a serialisation of his incredible struggles against racism in the Met Police.

We are thrilled to be joined by Dr. Leroy Logan. Welcome, Leroy. Thank you very much. I was wondering who you're talking about. No, I was very thrilled, very honored, very humbled. Thank you. Our second guest is a writer, lecturer, PhD researcher and activist with a background in policing in national security. She worked as a police officer from 2017 to 2018 but was subjected to racism and sexism that was logged as a hate crime against her. This led to her founding Merseyside's BLM Alliance. She was elected Labour Town Councillor for Hillwood North.

Joining us today all the way from Liverpool, welcome to the studio, Shantelle Lunt. Oh, thank you for having me. Thank you for that introduction too. Pleasure. You each demonstrate really fantastic examples of driving reform, but in slightly different ways. Leroy, you are founding member of the Black Police Association have been described by the press

as the man who risked everything to fight racism in the police force from within. We want to focus on that last bit, the from within bit. From your extensive experience trying to bring it about, do you believe internal reform is possible and what do you think it will take? Well, I think internal reform is only possible when you've got the political will to go with it.

We saw significant reform after the McPherson inquiry into the death of Stephen Lawrence and the subsequent report and recommendations were being independently assessed. So we weren't leaving the police to mark their own homework. So equality, diversity and inclusion was up the agenda. This current government took the pressure off and they defaulted back to what comfortable doing. So you think it's possible, but we're not heading that direction right now. No, it might be after the general election. We don't know. Thanks. And I'm turning to you, Chantal, you actually ended up leaving the force and pursuing your anti-racist activism from the

outside. So why did you decide to do that? And do you believe that internal reform is possible with the police? I remember when I did leave because it was a year after. So I had to had around nine months of racist and sexist bullying, which was just really, really intense and obviously caused me to almost have a complete mental breakdown, took time off work. And at that time, I could have just left. Like, it probably would have been easier if I'd just left. And I was like, do you know what? No, I'm not going to leave at this point. So I'm going to raise it. I'm going to attempt to do something about it. And I'm going to stick around. So it was logged as a hate crime. But then quite quickly, it was clear that nothing was really going to happen. And, you know,

it's quite well known what the police do now in response to instance like that they move people around they don't you know people don't get stuck they sort of problematize the victim as opposed to the perpetrator so I was subjected to all of that and for a long time I was a bit of a pariah within the force like no one wanted to work with me because I broke the you know the blue line of silence where we don't tell on other officers but over this time I got offered a permanent role I was offered you know the force to pay for me degree and put me on this pathway to be you know a chief superintendent or whatever and I remember I remember looking in the mirror and I had the uniform on and, you know, people weren't being

horrible to me anymore. And I looked at the minute and the uniform and a thought, as anything actually changed? Does any of those issues that I flagged had they been addressed? And the answer was no. I could still see women being subjected to misogyny. I could still see the issues that had raised around racism and nothing happening. And it was clear to me that the sort of condition of me saying was, well, just don't tell tales again. Do you know what I mean? You'll be fine. You'll progress. if you just don't raise these issues and so for me it was a case of I can't be in a force where I'm expected to look the other way I've gone through the entire complaints procedure I can see that it doesn't work so I have no voice to fight against it well I think today

what we're going to do is dive a bit more into the media's role in all of this because you know they are so intertwined and our interviews with police officers throughout this episode exposed a communication gap between the police and the public but also between high-ranking officers and low-ranking officers. So some officers felt like the leaders weren't defending their good work. But from the outside looking in, it seems like all we see is senior officers being wheeled out on these mainstream media platforms to defend and to deflect criticism. So we had Cresta Dick, now we've got Mark Rowley and the Met Police rejecting the term institutional to describe various problems. So we want to know,

what's really going on behind the PR machine? So, Leroy, I wonder if you can explain to us how that machine works. Who decides what messages to put out to the press? Are those messages necessarily accurate? Are they communicated to the force at large? It depends on the force area, really. In terms of the Met, where I spent 30 years, I saw that it not only suffers from institutional racism, sex and misogyny, it also suffers from institutional error. because it has this national responsibility, terrorism, royalty protection, diplomatic protection. And so the PR is normally very, we know what we can do, and if we can't, we'll call you. They're very reluctant to show weakness.

They're very success driven. They've got this sense that, well, no, it's not a sense. They are gaslighters in chief. So they will say to everyone, there's nothing to see here. And people, including the media, were buying to this narrative. What offset that was Sarah Everard. Because for the first time, the wider public was starting to recognize that we cannot assume that you were a troublemaker and police were just doing their job because look at Sarah Evard. She was just going home and cousins kidnapped her, raped her, murdered her.

So all of a sudden, the media. start to get a bit more savvy to this. They are starting to think, hold on, we're going to ask you a bit more questions. But they can, from time to time, still bind to the narrative about, oh, the police knows best. Thanks for talking us through that. Something else we heard from officers that we interviewed in the first half of this episode. I mean, a lot of them are feeling really personally attacked by this coverage that you're talking about. the coverage we're seeing more of since Sarah Everard, since George Floyd, and something that

they said was, oh, the press is only reporting now on the bad things police are doing, not the good things. We actually searched headlines, you know, over the past weekend. This doesn't really check out. You know, most of the stories are, you know, police are chasing up on this crime and this criminal is getting this sentence and local news updates on police investigations. It's not overwhelmingly negative coverage at all. I don't know, Shantelik, from your experience recently within the ranks, why do you think people are feeling so disgruntled and what should we, if anything, take away from it?

I feel like for a lot of police officers, they kind of individualise it and personalise it. So quite often when I give talks, when I attend events, there's always an officer or, you know, it's usually a white man who walks up to me and he goes, I just want you to know, I've never seen any racism. Oh, thank you so much. Thank you.

But they genuinely believe that if they haven't seen it and if they haven't done it, then it's not happening. And sometimes, you know, I have to very slowly explain to them, well, what glasses are you using? Are you using your white man glasses? Because, you know, my black woman glasses probably sees a lot more than you see. The bystander effect is really, really powerful.

Being in a room full of officers and, you know, one white officer's done something and everyone in that room didn't see anything. No one in that room backed them up when they raised the issue, no one in that room would give a statement, no one in that room would support them. I bet everyone in that room thinks that they're not racist.

Everyone in that room thinks that they're a good officer. But your, you know, your legitimacy as a good officer fails when you look the other way, when bad officers are doing what they do. Because that's what gives them power. That individual element versus the institutional, that is so important because, you know, not every officer kidnapped and raped and murdered Sarah

Everard. But, you know, officers were in WhatsApp groups with Wayne Cousins. Officers were enabling him. Officers were laughing at his jokes. He had a nickname, the rapist. People were laughing at that. People went along with that. And that's something that you don't see senior officers calling out. So they're being protected. There's no way cousins could be called rapy and not being protected somehow. And then the level of professional is dumbing down saying, oh, it's just a joke, you've got a chip on your shoulder. You should be able to take a joke, you know, but in the name of a joke, you can be racist, sexist, homophobic, aslamophobic, you name it. And that's one of the things they still can't get.

Yeah. Lately, we've seen, obviously, a lot of instances and examples and evidence of racism, of sexism, of horrendous chronic power abuses within UK police reporting in our press. And officers we spoke to had various perspectives about the root cause of. the problem. Is it top-down leadership, bottom-up culture, or is it external to do with government, society at large? And could you each tell us, from your lived experience, what are the biggest barriers to police reform? I think hierarchy is a big barrier. I'm sure we all remember when Nicole Smallman and Bieber Hendy were maids and those horrible pictures were going on these WhatsApp groups. Yeah, just to give the context, that was when police officers

on the crime scene took photos of the bodies of these sisters selfies with them in it and shared them around. Yep, in a lot of what I've rooted a lot of officers. Do you know who actually raised the alarm about that, a probationer

which is essentially an officer in training like what I was. It's often officers who were younger in service who were coming in and kind of seeing it with those fresh eyes who haven't internalised that culture. And the reason why this is a point of attention often within the police force is because of the hierarchical nature of the police force.

So I'm sure that young woman who saw those selfies would be a massive voice in looking at how we imagine a police force that saves the needs of the community. But because of a rank, probably every time she opens them off, she hasn't been listening to in the same way of other officers. So I feel like the police has to flatten that pyramid. I'd say a lot of these younger officers who are coming through, Gen Z and so on, they're the ones we really need to be listening to

because they really will not put up with it. And so their voices need to be as valid as the officers you've got 30 years plus service. Thank you. Leroy, do you agree? Yeah, yeah, but I build on it from this point of view because policing was actually set up to protect the haves from the have-nots. So their actual system is very protective.

And so if they're challenged, they close ranks at the expense of truth and justice. So that's why I was very clear that I have to join with a certain mindset. I'm a black man who happens to be a cop. I'm not a cop who happens to be black. Big difference. And even the white majority male colleagues don't have a real identity outside the organisation.

That's what I lot of them. They're like a fish out of water and they say, well, what do I do after 30 years or 40 years? Oh, they've become a police staff member or they're going to local authority where their other mates are. Because they can't operate outside that bubble. Right. What I really appreciate about this conversation is that you are pinpointing such clear institutional issues.

I mean, the hierarchical structure, the infectiousness of the culture. And I wonder whether the media is kind of failing to get into that nitty gritty of, okay, sure, we want this label of institutional racism to be confessed to, but what does that actually mean? And one example of this is this recent uplift program, the recruitment of 20,000 new officers. And on our investigation this week, we sourced the ethnicity data of everyone who applied. Cross-reference that with everyone who was appointed. And there is clear evidence that there was very racist discriminatory practice in play during this recruitment. Black applicants were 40% more likely to be rejected than white applicants. And while we saw the 20,000 recruitment number bandied about loads in the media,

you know, Boris Johnson dressed up as a police officer saying, oh, we're recruiting 20,000 new officers. What we haven't seen is any actual interrogation of what institutional practices are in play that are creating this problem. I mean, what's your responses to that data to those findings? Does that fit with your experience of applying and promote, yeah? I'm not surprised at all. I mean, we saw that with the,

recruitment retention and progression figures in the McPherson the recommendations were clear I was working on the home office around this and when you do that cross-cutting work it's very clear that they deselect people even before they through the application process and then they'll actually offer jobs to people who look like them and then even when you get in the organisation you're demotivated you're not going to get the opportunities that your white colleagues yet a lot of them they have the social networks that you're excluded, maybe because you're black or you have a certain faith or a gender, whatever it may be. And people lack confidence. It needs an analysis around this. And that's one of the

reason why I thought, I'm going to come to this conversation, because you're looking into the nuances of it all, which is really important because there's too many people just overlook the norms and values of the culture and how it impacts on everyone's day-to-day lives. And until a real piece of work is done. Objectively, with clear evidence and analysis, and you've got the testimonies, it will be something that I truly believe will start to chisle away at this control and power of the police federation in particular. And just keep on doing that, because that's the only way we really get the police service we all deserve. It's time now to look at some of the stories making recent headlines

on this topic. A few favorites from the Daily Mail recently arrest the harm caused by the woke police. This is an editorial piece from the paper asking are they the ardent and uncritical champions of woke causes or the

enforcers of law and order and claiming police appear less interested in criminal justice than social justice. Another Daily Mail headline hinting at where this could be coming from reads Home Secretary Suella Braverman tells woke police chiefs to spend less time on diversity and concentrate on fighting crime.

What are your thoughts on on headlines of this kind and what do you think the impact is? I get annoyed. I don't know. Call it a newspaper if you will. Rags like the Daily Mail really, you know, appropriating the term woke, which is ruses in the black civil rights movements of the 1970s in the US. And it was essentially speaking to the fact that people were awake to the injustices and discriminations faced by a minoritized group and to be woke meant that you essentially empathised and were prepared to do something about those barriers that were very real and now it's just sort of being used by rags like the daily mail as a throwaway comment to sort of delegitimize people and to almost mock anyone who wants to you know actually see what other people's lived experiences are

but to call the police woke it almost makes me laugh It's completely far as the obstacle. It's like, could they be more on work? I know. Have you actually been in a police station? Have you ever spoken to a police officer? And, you know, I looked at some of these articles and, you know, some of the imagery was the police of pride and things like that, which is absolutely great.

You know, there are officers within the force who are LGBTQ plus and it's brilliant that they feel supported and they can go to pride. But quite often, when we speak to this PR machine that is the police, woke is a really shallow PR attempt at looking like they're engaging with real issues. So it's when you see your dancing police officers a carnival. It's when you see your police officers a pride. But you don't see police officers when black houses are being broken into

and that's when black communities are being unprotected. And a lot of people were really questioning, well, you can't turn up at our marches. You can't come to carnival and dance with us and then ignore us for the rest of the year when we actually need you. Black communities are asking genuinely to be protected. LGBTQ plus communities are asking to be taken seriously when hate crimes are committed. is against them. So this, these, these, these headlines drive me mad because the false and no one is actually being served. The police aren't woke. They're not helping anybody. If the

police were woke and they were using a term like woke, I'd be like, you know what, they see diversity, they see the needs to be representing and meeting the needs of communities who are quite marginalized. The Daily Mail can, you know, can make fun all they want. But the fact is, what the Daily Mail are referring to is just a real superficial PR that the police often engage. And so I don't like the headlines and I don't like the suggestion of the police awake because of the no. Yeah. This is a massive form of gaslighting. I remember during the George Floyd issues and taking a knee was something that, you know.

That went on and on, didn't it? Yeah, yeah. And then Chris Seder Dick said, well, I'm telling officers that they can't take a knee. And I thought, well, why would you want to say that? There's one thing about being a police officer is you still got the element of this. So if you find you're in a situation that your discretionary powers means you can show some form of embracing the community, working with the community, building bridges, not barriers. I mean, doesn't that mean you might police better? You might tackle crime better. It's about trust and confidence because police are not seen as approachable because of this testosterone-driven, a militaristic person and I don't need you unless I'll call on you.

back off and they will escalate everything they go to. They're not trauma-informed. They're not trauma-reresponsive. You know, it's all Robocop stuff. And until such time, they understand. It's not a control and power thing. And you're there to be a public servant to show people that you're a human being. And you can understand this situation,

even if you've had to arrest them for certain things. You still respond in a professional way and don't stereotype them. Try and help. the situation that their police constable or sergeant or whoever is there for them and not there to do something to them and that's what these that sort of headlines about let's do things to people and not be there for them right i wonder does or why does the police as a job police officers as a job attract those men who are testosterone fueled who want power and control is that a fair thing to say? Does it attract people like that? White supremacy. White supremacy is drawn to policing

because of the control and power. When you think about the power of a police officer, you don't have any, not even the military have that unless you're in martial law. To take someone's liberty away just on sometimes you've had a bad day. It's got nothing to do with intelligence, got nothing to do with information you receive. It's because you failed the attitude test. The nature of policing, if you are into the control and power is an automatic attraction for white supremacists. Right. Can we talk about also the involvement of Suella Baverman here?

Because something that an officer I spoke to, you know, he said, oh, this government is going in a really scary direction. They're trying to position police against people, which is kind of like what you were saying with not allowing them to take the knee and to relate to the people that they're supposed to be policing. And, you know, just lately, we've seen a lot of headlines because Suella Bravman has come out and been like, oh, hey, I back police to ramp up, stop and search efforts.

And, you know, she's not really doing anything. She's just saying something and she's getting a headline in every paper for it. And this is clickbait. This is a culture war. And the media is playing into this politicization of policing, this propaganda that's really serving, you know, very populist political agendas. And, I mean, I wonder if you think that the media is guilty of playing into politicians' hands and using the police as a prop in that way.

Daily man is, for sure. A hundred percent, aren't they? And when I was reading the Soella headline and reading the article, I thought it was really interesting because they can't really get away with the black-on-black crime narrative anymore. So instead, they say black young men

are more likely to be the victims of knife crime. So they've just flipped it on its head a little bit. And it's a bit like you're still problematizing and pathologising the whole, you know, black community. And so for me, stop and say it. There's a suspicion of stop. stop and search that can be used in supposedly exceptional circumstances where it's suspected that there'll be serious violence or disorder. They're massively used in diverse communities and

disproportionately used in diverse communities, but the charge and arrest rate for that Section 60 suspicion of the stop and search is 4%. So 96% of the people who are being stopped in search have done nothing wrong. That's like clear evidence of racial proof. And that's the clearest evidence that this, when they are given that power, they will disproportionately use it against young black people. And stop and search alone does nothing because those issues are still there and it feels like so much of policing is just reactive and there's no proactive work. The only way you will take away those young boys feeling like they need to carry knives and these young people feeling like the only way to get ahead is to sell drugs

is by putting real opportunities and communities that have none. And I'm not talking about racial communities. I'm talking about working class communities. The white communities are my area too. The whole pathologising of young black people are making it a black issue, really is a misdirect because it's a societal issue. And as you take away the funds and you take away the opportunities and you take away any hopes and aspirations for young people in working class areas,

that's when you see all the violence ramp up. Dr LeRoy Logan, thank you so much for joining us. Where can people follow you and do you have anything to plug or say? Well, yeah, you can follow me on my website, Leroylogan.com. And it has on there my Twitter feed, Lear I Logan, Triple Nine. please don't report crime on my Twitter feed. The Triple-9 was something that I thought of, well, it just shows.

I actually do value being a police officer because there's some great people in there. It's just that, unfortunately, we're not sure if they're outnumbered, the good people. Also contributed to a book called Black British Lives Matter. And, of course, the small-ax film, Red, White, Blue is still out there. So please go and check it out on an eye player. Or if you've got money, Abison Prime. But, yeah, I'm still around making a...

an annoyance of myself on that pebble in the shoe that it's you can't scratch anything else I can think of so it's good being here and yeah Shantelle how about you can people follow you

is there anything you'd like to plug so I am Shantelle Lunt I think on all social media platforms it's in different variations there might be an underscore in there or a dot but you should be able to find me I'd love to plug why I'm no longer talking to institutionally racist police

that's the podcast that I do with Michael Morgan available on all good podcasting platforms. Follow Midside BLM Alliance or Midside Alliance for Racial Equality on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram too. Thank you for listening. Just a reminder, we've set up a Patreon. So if you want to support us, follow the link in the show notes. We'll be back next week with a mini episode about when Helena and Matilda went to Parliament. And our next investigation into transgender rights and the facts behind Scotland's self-ID laws will be out on the 13th of July.

lie. Follow MediaStorm wherever you get your podcast so that you can get access to new episodes as soon as they drop. If you like what you hear, share this episode with someone and leave us a five-star rating and a review. It really helps more people discover the podcast and our aim is to have as many people as possible hear these voices. You can also follow us on social media at Matilda Mal, at Helena Wadia and follow the show via at MediaStorm pod. Get in touch and let us know what you'd like us to cover and who you'd like us to speak to. MediaStorm is an award-winning podcast produced by Helen Awadier and Matilda Mallinson. It came from the House of the Guilty Feminist and it's part of the ACAS creator network. The music is by Samfire.