Police have a long way to go to make necessary changes, Gavin Stephens told The Guardian.
The head of Britain’s police chiefs council called policing “institutionally racist,” and he admits police reform progress has been slow.
Gavin Stephens, who chairs the National Police Chiefs’ Council, told
George Floyd’s 2020 murder in America and the resulting Black Lives Matter protests prompted the council to prepare a race action plan that showed the depth of racial issues in policing. The Guardian reported the plan’s first version, released in 2022, said that “Black people are seven times more likely to be stopped and searched than white people and five times more likely to be subjected to the use of force … 10% of our recorded searches, 27% of use-of-force incidents and 35% of Taser incidents involved someone from a Black ethnic group. The latest estimates suggest that only 3.5% of the population is Black.”
Stephens, in the interview, pointed to some progress, though he said it’s been slow.
“I’d be the first to accept that we haven’t made progress at the rate that we would want to,” he told The Guardian. “To get acceptance of the scale of that challenge took longer than we’d anticipated.”
Never miss a beat: Get our daily stories straight to your inbox with theGrio’s newsletter.
The post Britain’s police chiefs head calls forces institutionally racist appeared first on TheGrio.
