The MacPherson Report and 'Institutionalised racism'
View clip from BBC-1 news bulletin, 3 January 2012
Extracts from Peter Saunders, The Rise of the Equalities Industry (Civitas 2011):
Extract 1: Institutional racism: 'Racism that cannot be seen, cannot be proven'
The key change in the official understanding of what is entailed by 'institutional' exclusion came about as a result of the hugely influential MacPherson Inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993. Stephen Lawrence was a Black teenager who was stabbed by a gang of White youths while he was waiting for a bus with a friend in South London one April evening. The Metropolitan Police later arrested five White youths who had a history of violence (against Whites as well as Blacks), but the Crown Prosecution Service advised that the evidence was not strong enough to prosecute them. Against the advice of the police, the Lawrence family then brought their own private prosecution, but crucial identification evidence was deemed inadmissible, and the judge instructed the jury to find the defendants not guilty. The family, who believed that a racist police force had failed to investigate their son's murder properly, then took their grievances to the Police Complaints Authority. It investigated their claims and concluded that, notwithstanding various oversights and omissions during the investigation of the murder, there was no evidence to support their allegation of racist misconduct. There had been incompetence, to be sure, but it had nothing to do with racism.
There the matter rested until the newly elected Blair government decided to set up a full public inquiry, chaired by Sir William MacPherson. MacPherson's inquiry abandoned many of the traditional features of English law. Witnesses were harassed, not only by the inquiry team, but by the crowd in the public gallery. They were asked to admit to having had 'racist thoughts', and even to testify to the existence of racist thoughts among their colleagues. Norman Dennis likens the proceedings to a Stalinist show trial from the 1930s.
Despite his unusual methods, MacPherson found no evidence of racism on the part of individual police officers. Nor did he find any evidence of established rules and procedures within the police force which operated to the disadvantage of Blacks or other ethnic minorities. But in the end, none of this mattered, for following the advice of various radical academics and activists who gave 'evidence' to the inquiry, MacPherson extended the definition of 'institutional racism' to include what Dennis calls 'racism that cannot be seen, that cannot be proven.'
According to the MacPherson Report, institutional racism involves 'processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people. It persists because of the failure of the organisation openly and adequately to recognise and address its existence and causes by policy, example and leadership.' And on this definition, MacPherson found the Metropolitan Police (and British society as a whole) guilty as charged.
MacPherson thought this hidden form of institutional racism manifested itself in the fact that the police had initially failed to recognise the Stephen Lawrence murder as 'purely racially motivated' (given that the suspects had also perpetrated violence against White victims, this reluctance to jump to conclusions may have been understandable). He also pointed to national stop and search statistics which showed that the police stop a disproportionate number of Black youths. MacPherson thought this indicated 'racist stereotyping' by officers, but as we shall [below], Black youths are actually stopped in proportion to their presence on the streets. The fact that ethnic minorities often say they do not trust the police, that Blacks were 'under-represented' among recruits to the Met, and that the police were not routinely subjected to race awareness training, were also all taken by MacPherson as indirect evidence that the force was 'infected' with racism.
Basically, what MacPherson was saying was that any Black-White differences in policing and the law and order system more generally pointed to the existence of institutional racism. There was no need to investigate motives, intentions, behaviour or rules and procedures; all that mattered was outcomes. If Black people have a problem, it must be due to racism, and if White police officers deny it, this is further evidence of their own failure to acknowledge the problem.
MacPherson's legacy has turned logic on its head. If we find, for example, that Blacks are over-represented in the arrest statistics, or the prison statistics, we no longer even ask whether this might be because they commit more crimes per head of population than Whites do. Rather, since MacPherson, we take these outcomes to be the product of the institutional racism which we 'already know' pervades the criminal justice system. Yet the only evidence we have that this 'racism' even exists is that outcomes like these can be found. The argument is therefore entirely circular and is immune to disconfirmation.
Once we start out with the assumption that the Metropolitan Police (or any other agency) is institutionally racist, it becomes impossible to disprove it. I call this form of reasoning the 'fallacy of proportionate outcomes,' for it rests on the unacknowledged and implausible assumption that all outcomes would be the same for all social groups in all areas of life were it not for the operation of institutional bias.
One consequence of this terrifying logic has been the abandonment of the principle of formal equality in the way the police are now trained to deal with incidents involving ethnic minorities. Back in the sixties, when campaigners first started agitating to end racial discrimination, their aim was to achieve a 'colour-blind' application of policies and procedures by all relevant agencies. The belief was that the police, for example, should apply the law, without fear or favour, regardless of whether the perpetrator or the victim was Black or White. Post-MacPherson, however, this laudable commitment to formal equality has been shredded.
David Green quotes from the Association of Chief Police Officers' Hate Crime Manual: '"Colour-blind" policing means policing that purports to treat everyone in the same way. Such an approach is flawed and unjust...There was a time when to be passively non-racist was considered sufficient (i.e. the passive state of expressing no prejudice and engaging in no racially discriminatory behaviours). This is not enough. In a passively non-racist environment, racists can still thrive, discriminatory organisational structures and practices can still persist, and racism in the broader community can go largely unchallenged.' We have, in other words, now reached a point where police officers are being instructed by those in command to treat ethnic minorities differently from Whites. And this is being done in the name of 'equality.'
It is not only in policing that discrimination is said to have become 'institutionalised.' MacPherson declared that, 'It is clear that other agencies including those for example dealing with housing and education also suffer from the disease.' And so it is that in recent years, the BBC has been attacked by a former Director General for being 'hideously white'; museums and art galleries have been criticised by an ex-minister for being 'too white'; and a former Chair of the Mental Health Act Commission has accused the mental health sector of being 'institutionally racist.' As Munira Mirza (who reports these three examples) points out, 'In this new approach, no one and everyone is guilty of racism. Any unequal outcome is assumed to be the result of prejudice.'
Extract 2: Do police stop and search statistics prove institutional racism?
While Black people make up just 2-3% of the population, they constituted 15% of those stopped and searched by the police in 2008-09. Relative to their population size, the EHRC calculates that in 2007/08, Black people were stopped and searched 6.5 times more than they 'should' have been, and Asians 1.9 times more. We saw [above] that it was these figures that led the Macpherson Report to its 'clear core conclusion of racist stereotyping' by police officers.
But Macpherson was wrong. Consider Table 1. It shows that Thames Valley Police stop and search Asians in Reading twice as often as their numbers in the population would appear to warrant (5% of the population, 10% of stops), and Blacks are stopped 2.5 times as often than they 'should' be (6% against 15%). In nearby Slough, Asian stop and search figures look roughly 'right' (28% against 31%), but Blacks are again stopped 2.5 times more frequently than they 'should' be (6% of the population, 15% of stops). Alarmed by these figures, Thames Valley Policy commissioned independent criminologists to investigate the reasons behind this apparent persistent of 'institutional racism,' despite all their efforts to stamp it out.
Table 1: Ethnic patterns in police stop and search in Reading and Slough
Reading Slough
Pop % Available Stop & Pop % Available Stop &
pop % search % pop % search %
White 87 74 75 64 42 54
Black 6 13 15 6 17 15
Asian 5 9 10 28 40 31
What the researchers found was that in both towns, Blacks and Asians were spending more time than Whites in public places, on foot or in cars, where they were 'available' to be selected by the police for stop and search. Using their own observations and CCTV footage, the researchers compared police stop and search records with the number of people in different ethnic groups who were out and about in areas patrolled by the police. They discovered that in Reading, all ethnic groups were stopped and searched in proportion to their numbers on the streets, and that in Slough, Whites were actually over-represented in the police stop and search statistics while Asians were under-represented. In other words, if you spend time driving around the streets or hanging out in the pedestrian precinct, you are more likely to attract the attention of passing police patrols, irrespective of your ethnicity.
As a result of doing this research, the team also came to realise how difficult it would be in many situations for racist police officers to determine the ethnicity of somebody before stopping them. In a car in good daylight, the researchers were able to determine the ethnicity of the occupants of other cars around them in only 5% of cases. Pedestrian ethnicity too is often hard to pick. If the police were targeting suspects according to their ethnicity, we should expect ethnic minorities to be stopped more in circumstances where it is easier for the police to determine their racial characteristics (e.g. at times of day when the light is better, or in summer, when people wear fewer clothes that obscure their skin colour and features). But when the researchers checked this, they found no difference.
They concluded that in the Thames Valley force at least, there is simply no evidence that the police are using their stop and search powers to target ethnic minorities unfairly. Each group is being stopped in proportion to its availability. As for MacPherson, their findings could not be clearer: 'MacPherson was in error in concluding that the disproportionality in stop and search figures was evidence of racial stereotyping.'
It is also important to look at what happens after somebody is stopped and searched. The EHRC reports that the police arrest about 1 in 10 of all those they stop and search, but this is true across all the ethnic groups. Thus, although Blacks are being stopped more often by the police, they are also more often found to be engaged in activities that turn out to warrant an arrest. Once again, there is no evidence from these figures that they are being unfairly targeted.
Blacks are five times more likely than Whites to find themselves in prison, and equalities campaigners often cite this as evidence that our law and order system is biased. The EHRC, for example, is indignant that ethnic minorities make up 25% of the prison population when they only account for 11% of the population as a whole (a 'greater disproportionality in the number of Black people in prisons in the UK than in the United States). But it offers no data on the ethnic composition of offenders. The possibility that there are more Black people in prison because more Black people commit crimes is rarely considered in this literature. To the EHRC, it seems to be unthinkable, racist even.
In 2007, a Home Affairs Committee Report looked into the reasons why young Black people are over-represented at all stages of the criminal justice system. It said it is 'unclear whether young black people commit more crime of all types than young people as a whole,' although it accepted compelling evidence that 'they are more likely overall to be involved in certain types of serious and violent crime, including gun crime.' It also found evidence of higher levels of Black involvement in criminal gangs and drug crime. Yet despite this, it could not bring itself to accept the possibility that higher imprisonment figures reflect higher offending rates. The report concluded that, 'Social exclusion - both historic and current - is the key, primary cause of young black people's overrepresentation' in arrest and imprisonment statistics, and it repeated familiar accusations about police bias in stop and search procedures.
Feedback on this topic
(received 3 January 2012 from former police officer):
Peter, I sat through a 4 hour lecture on the Stephen Lawrence murder enquiry delivered by former Kent Police ACC Andy Clapperton in 1997 as part of my CID course. He was of the view that McPherson drew up his 73 recommendations and then went through his report to justify them! . Simple conclusion was that the murder investigation was initially run by a failed ex Bedfordshire Senior Detective. Andy saw no evidence of racism in the police investigation, only corporate incompetence. As a former UK Detective I attended diversity training and found contradiction a key theme. It struck me that a section of the white middle class liberal elite have taken it upon themselves to champion the cause of anyone who decides they are offended by any comments made by disaffected white British people who make any reference to an ethnic minorities skin colour or differences in culture etc.