Ademola Adeyeba, Rob Blackie & Chris French

Rob Blackie, our candidate for London Mayor, has highlighted an aspect of policing and the Black community that is sometimes forgotten.  For far too long the right wing media have drawn attention to Black criminals but ignored Black victims of crime.

Rob cites the statistics that show that Black people are six times more likely to be murdered in London, twice as likely to be raped, 66% more likely to suffer domestic abuse, and over 2.5 times more likely to be a victim of a hate crime. That disparity is really shocking. He says:

This is completely unacceptable, and the current Mayor, Sadiq Khan, has not made any significant progress. Since he has been in charge of the Met the proportion of Black police officers has only increased from 3% in 2016 to 3.6% in 2023. At this rate it will take 40 years to have a police service that reflects the makeup of London.

Rob met with Ademola Adeyeba, founder of the mentoring organisation 1000 Black Boys, and Chris French, Lib Dem Greater London Assembly candidate for Lambeth and Southwark and a former special constable, to talk through his proposals for a Race Equality Plan for Policing:

We will prioritise building stronger relationships between the police and London’s Black communities through:

1. A focus on recruiting, retention and progression of Black police officers, PCSOs and staff – with monthly reviews by the Mayor. This would use the model of the initial period after the Macpherson report when this focus was successful before a loss of political will.
2. Commissioning a study on innovative behaviour change science programmes to boost recruitment and retention.
3. Improving and accelerating the vetting process for new recruits, starting with automated social media audits.
4. Finishing a study of stop and search using bodycam footage to understand how necessary (e.g. for knives) stop and search can avoid being counter productive. Recent MOPAC data shows that 43% of Black Londoners who are stop and searched (and 30% of all Londoners) communicate about it negatively to their friends and family – meaning that this is a major cause of damaged relationships between people and the police. On reasonable assumptions over a million people in London will have been told of a negative stop and search experience by a friend of family during the last five years.
5. Introducing a police survey, modelled on commercial equivalents, which aims to capture at least 10% of all interactions between the police and public. This will allow us to understand in which situations police interactions are positive and negative.

* Mary Reid is a contributing editor on Lib Dem Voice. She was a councillor in Kingston upon Thames, where she is still very active with the local party, and is the Hon President of Kingston Lib Dems.