Mark Rowley has said the Metropolitan police must recruit more black and Asian officers in order to gain the trust of minority ethnic communities in London, and vowed not to be “blown off course by the culture wars”.
The right has criticised drives for diversity, claiming they lead to lower standards. Rowley, who is commissioner of the Met and Britain’s top police officer, said that as a leader of a major organisation he was prepared to take a stand against the “toxicity” surrounding the diversity debate and criticised other leaders for “running away from the subject”.
In London, 46% of people are from a minority ethnic background, compared with 18% of Met officers. Rowley said he was driven by operational necessity, not politics, and believed “inclusivity” was vital to policing by consent, which is the philosophical cornerstone of British policing.
“We cannot police London effectively if we fail to recruit from all of London,” he writes in the Guardian. “Effective policing depends upon inclusivity. If you are committed to policing by consent which stands or falls on the trust of all communities, you cannot do without it.”
He writes: “Today, we are launching a major recruitment campaign. We have no interest in the politics and ideologies of the culture wars. Inclusion is an operational necessity.
“We cannot be effective if large sections of society do not trust us, do not work with us or do not see policing as a service that understands their experiences. An inclusive workforce is not a public relations exercise. It makes us better at protecting victims, catching criminals and preventing crime.”
Rowley is braced for attacks from some on the left who may say his force is not going far enough, as well as from those on the right who are critical of diversity, equity and inclusivity (DEI) initiatives.
Many on the right have previously accused police of being “woke” and of “two-tier policing”, a claim that alleges people from ethnic minorities are favoured over white people, when the evidence shows the opposite.
“The toxicity is horrible around the DEI debate,” Rowley said. “Lots of leaders, both in the public and private sector, are running away from the subject. I think leaders need to stand up and make a practical case. We need to do what works for policing London.”
The Met is disproportionately white. It has the greatest number of black and Asian officers of any force in the UK, but also the biggest race gap – the difference between the ethnic makeup of its officers compared with the population it serves.
The gap is starkest with black officers, who make up 3.7% of the Met compared with 13.5% of London’s population overall.
Rowley writes that the barriers have lasted for generations and limited opportunities. “Some will wrongly argue that recruiting from under-represented communities means lowering standards. It does not and they are wrong,” he writes.
“Historically, some groups faced barriers that made it harder to join policing, harder to access specialist training and harder to progress into some roles. Removing those barriers is not favouritism, it is fairness.”
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The Met was found to be institutionally racist by the 1999 Macpherson inquiry into failings that meant it took 19 years for the killers of the black student Stephen Lawrence to be convicted of his murder.
In 2023, the Casey report, commissioned by the Met, found the force to be institutionally racist, misogynistic and homophobic. Rowley accepted the findings and said bias was systemic but rejected the label of “institutional”, believing it was politicised and ambiguous.
Louise Casey and others subsequently warned that Rowley would struggle to repair the poor trust levels among black people in London when it came to the police.
Last year, Met officers at Charing Cross police station were recorded calling for immigrants to be shot, bragging about excessive use of force, being dismissive about a rape complaint and making anti-Muslim and anti-women comments.
Responding to Rowley’s recruitment drive, Leroy Logan, who joined the Met in 1983 and was the first chair of the Met’s black police association, said he would hesitate to join the Met now. “The Met is seen as a safe haven for white supremacists. It has gone backwards since Macpherson,” he said.
“It has lacked the leadership and the culture,” Logan added. “My younger self would be really questioning whether to join now. The Met has not helped itself to ensure the experience of black people at the hands of the police is as fair and just as for white people. People are not going to join just because Sir Mark Rowley says so.”
