Ramblings

Back in 1986 – when I had only recently passed my driving test – Chase Manhattan had presented me with a shiny new red Mercedes 190E – an incendiary combination. Crazy lad that I was, in November I arranged a wild night out in Birmingham (I lived in north London) with Phil and Alistair, seeing Wagner’s Die Walküre.

We had a jolly nice time, thank you, and on our way home at about midnight I took the opportunity to show what my new car could do on the M1, which was almost deserted. Almost deserted, apart from a car which sped up behind me, overtook and signalled with a blue light that I should pull onto the hard shoulder.

Oh fuck.

I wound down the window and an officer peered in.

“Good evening sir. Do you know what speed you were doing just now?”

“No, officer” I lied. (92 mph actually, but there seemed little point owning up to that.)

“I know there’s not much traffic sir, but we clocked you just now at over 90 miles per hour. That speed could result in a disqualification.”

I’d been driving for less than a year.

“Oh, I see. I’m sorry officer.”

“I’m going to let you go this time, but keep to the speed limit and drive safely.”

“Thank you officer. I will.”

It could have been worse – I happened to know the car was very comfortable at 110 mph. And I drove on, unimpeded, to Watford and London, at 69 mph. Why had I got away with it? I was polite, apologetic and deferential. The occupants of the car did not look like habitual troublemakers: in our thirties, conservatively dressed, professional – a stockbroker and two schoolteachers. And sober: my two friends may have had a G&T in the interval, but I had forgone the G. If we had been in our early twenties, the boys necking lager in the back seat, or if the policemen had smelled alcohol on my breath, no doubt there would have been a different outcome. But I’m pretty sure being white also helped.

Of course the police are not obliged to prosecute every case of lawbreaking they encounter. So they have a large amount of discretion in the case of minor offences: on the roads these include exceeding the speed limit by a small (or not so small) amount, registration plates with illegal spacing or font, faulty lights etc. And over the years, a weight of anecdotal evidence suggests that in these grey areas, non-whites – especially black people – are much more likely to be prosecuted. More so if driving luxury car brands: the implicit question is how can you afford a car like this. Yet nobody queried this white kid driving a Mercedes in 1986.

Not all minor offences are on the road: nuisance, drunkenness, cannabis possession or use…it was the last of these which was highlighted in the case of Olympic athletes Bianca Williams and her partner Ricardo dos Santos, who were stopped by police in west London in July 2020. During the incident, the couple were pulled over by the officers and searched on suspicion of having drugs and weapons, but nothing was found.

Two of the officers were dismissed in October 2023 after a disciplinary panel found they had lied about smelling cannabis when they pulled over the athletes, but reinstated by the Police Appeals Tribunal a year later.

After the incident in 2020, Williams and dos Santos accused the Metropolitan Police of racial profiling: in response the police released a statement saying the vehicle Williams was travelling in had been on the wrong side of the road, and that the driver had sped off when asked to stop.

Whether justified or not, the allegation of racial profiling is likely to resonate with many black people. It is still a matter of dispute whether the police officers were telling the truth when they said they could smell cannabis: after the dismissed police officers were reinstated, dos Santos said “We are professional athletes; we pride ourselves on not doing drugs.” Certainly, cannabis is not known for enhancing athletic performance. But even if they could smell it, one wonders whether they would have bothered to pursue it if the occupants of the car had been white. The combination of black suspects and an expensive car (a Tesla) seems to have proved irresistible. From the Met’s point of view, the most unfortunate aspect was that they had unknowingly picked on someone with a degree of fame, so the case became a national story. It leaves observers with the impression that this was the tip of a racist iceberg, and that hundreds of similar cases might go unnoticed by the wider public, being regarded as routine.

The long-standing perception among black people (and others) that the Metropolitan Police employ racial profiling and are institutionally racist makes the job of police officers – including the good ones – extremely difficult. In a case known to me, a man who had an expensive laptop stolen from business premises in Brixton used the built-in tracker to pinpoint its location to a hairdresser’s premises on Electric Avenue. After reporting this information to the police through the recommended channel and receiving no response, he mentioned to an officer on the beat that he had tracked the new location of his stolen laptop. The policeman responded “Was it at —— hairdressers?” It was known to the police that stolen goods were regularly being taken there, but there was no suggestion they were going to do anything about it.

Why not? My suspicion is that the police feared that an operation to recover stolen goods in this area was likely to result in disorder: it is easy to imagine a crowd of black youths gathering to protect the premises or protest about the raid, the question of criminality soon being obscured in a highly charged atmosphere. The widely held and, I suspect, largely justified perception that the police are habitually racist makes it easier for criminals within the black community to operate without interruption, and portray attempts at prosecution as persecution.

What is to be done? The UK has not yet reached the state of the US, where black drivers can be literally in fear for their lives when pulled over by the police. But black people need to feel confidence in the police, and until they do, the police will find it very difficult to do their work in areas with high black populations.

Is the Met racist? The Mayor of London thinks so. In February 2024 Sadiq Khan responded to the suggestion that claims of institutional racism in the police were “fake” or “woke”, saying the Metropolitan Police had moved backwards in some ways since the 1999 Macpherson report – ordered following the murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993 – which declared the Metropolitan Police institutionally racist.

Khan, of Pakistani heritage and British born, has reason to be impatient with the lack of progress in addressing this problem. In a 2022 Guardian article he wrote:

One of the things I remember being told as a teenager by my dad was: “Don’t make eye contact with the police, don’t give them an excuse”. My brothers and I would routinely cross the road when we saw officers on the beat, simply due to the fear of being unjustly targeted.

As Khan puts it:

We have a longstanding tradition in this country of policing by consent. At the heart of this approach is the recognition that, for policing to be effective, public approval, respect and confidence in the service is paramount. When this trust is eroded, our model of policing, and therefore public safety, is put at risk.

It seems like little progress in race relations has been made by the Met since the 1980s, 1970s, ever. Until real and lasting improvements are achieved, black people cannot be expected to trust the police in London, and the police will remain unable to effectively enforce the law in parts of the city.

Author’s note: I am aware of my privilege. I have never faced police harassment due to my skin colour. Nor have I had the very difficult and sensitive job of policing the streets of London. If you have experience from either perspective your comments would be especially welcome.