Race and policing: An inspection of race disparity in police criminal justice decision-making
In this report, we examine what published demographic data is available for a range of police criminal justice decisions. We then detail the policy context that exists for these, before setting out the findings from the fieldwork that we carried out.
Our commission
In July 2021, the Home Affairs Select Committee published a report summarising what progress had been made on the recommendations of the 1999 Macpherson report.
The report concluded that there had been some important improvements in some aspects of the police response. For example, in the policing of racist crimes, in the commitments made to promoting equality and diversity, and in good examples of local community policing.
The report recommended that His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services carries out thematic reviews of race and policing to provide scrutiny of the police service response. Our programme of work on race and policing demonstrates our response to this recommendation.
This inspection is the second in our race and policing programme that we started in 2021. The first inspection, focusing on leadership and governance , is published alongside this report. We draw on some of the findings from that inspection in this report.
Our overarching question for the race and policing programme is:
How effectively are the police responding to race-based inequalities and disparities that negatively affect community confidence?
In this inspection, our aim was to explore race disparity in the police forces selected for fieldwork, and in particular how well they understand, scrutinise and communicate their relevant work.
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Police forces still failing to record and publish data on ethnicity