‘Dear transphobes, we have a phobia of your behaviour…Yours, Scotland’. That was just one of Police Scotland’s ‘Letters from Scotland’ campaign posters that started appearing across Scotland five years ago. Misogynists, racists and religious bigots were warned by the chief constable Sir Iain Livingstone, who fronted the campaign, that they’d be dealt with the full force of the law. So it is more than a little ironic that, according to Sir Iain himself, the haters have been hiding in plain sight in the ranks of his own force.
‘Police Scotland is institutionally racist and discriminatory,’ Sir Iain announced today to the Scottish Police Authority. It is also institutionally sexist and no doubt deeply transphobic, though he didn’t actually name check transphobia this time. But it is clearly no place to be if you are black or female. Will he now be fronting a new poster campaign: ‘Dear Police, we hate your hate crime and we’re coming for you, Yours Scotland’? Perhaps not, given Livingstone recently announced his retirement from the force.
The Hate Crime Act is the infamous legislation that makes it a criminal offence to ‘stir up hatred’. The legislation was passed two years ago and has yet to be enforced because of manpower issues. But now its first investigation will presumably be into the stirring up of hatred in Police Scotland.
One can’t help wondering what this hate crime-averse chief constable has been doing for the last six years? Why has he been fronting these campaigns when he could have been addressing the discrimination and race hatred in his own backyard? Well, it seems that he was just unaware of the extent of it because the haters were too well concealed – so well concealed that this hatred apparently doesn’t exist in practice. At least, that is what he seemed to be saying today when he insisted that, while the force is institutionally racist, this ‘absolutely does not mean’ that police officers are racist or sexist. What else can it mean?
We’ve heard the 1999 Macpherson definition of institutional racism from campaigners trying to distinguish between individual acts of racism in organisations and baked-in, ‘structural’ racism in areas such as recruitment. But Sir Iain was responding to a report commissioned by Police Scotland that includes many accounts of distinctly non-institutional bigotry. It recorded: ‘instances of ongoing discrimination against minoritised (sic) communities, including first-hand accounts of racism, sexism, and homophobia’. It also pointed to: ‘scepticism and even outright fear’ among whistle-blowers about raising concerns which just lead to them being ‘punished’.
Police Scotland may not be unique in having what is called ‘a boys club culture‘, as a recent Newsnight report described it, but it clearly goes beyond mere banter. Last year, a former firearms officer, Rhona Malone, won almost £1 million in compensation from the force after an employment tribunal found she had been victimised when she had raised concerns about sexism. She insists that many others share her experience and that the leadership of Police Scotland has not taken the problem seriously.
The force is also under examination by the public inquiry into the death of 31-year-old Sheku Bayoh at the hands of six police officers in Fife in 2015. The inquiry is examining whether or not race was a factor. Sir Iain’s remarks will no doubt be leapt upon by campaigners who firmly believe that it was.
Police Scotland is under intense scrutiny right now over Operation Branchform – the criminal investigation into the finances of the SNP. The former SNP spin doctor, Murray Foote, recently described the erection of a forensics tent outside the home of the former FM Nicola Sturgeon was ‘a grotesque circus’ and he was prepared to bet that the operation is a ‘wild goose chase’. Sir Iain says he’ll ‘fiercely resist’ any political interference in this ‘diligent’ inquiry.
Livingstone is the first chief constable in the UK to actually describe his force as institutionally racist. Others, like the Metropolitan Police commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, have refused to accept the description. Could this be a genuflection by this most political of chief constables to the preoccupations of new First Minister Humza Yousaf? Yousaf has welcomed Livingstone mea culpa as ‘monumental’ and ‘historic’. Sir Iain’s successor will certainly have a monumental task trying to remove the taint of racism, institutional or otherwise, from Scotland’s law enforcement.
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