The Metropolitan police commissioner, Mark Rowley, has said he will not be diverted by the “toxicity” surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion debates as he pushes to recruit more Black and Asian officers into the force.
Writing in the Guardian, Rowley said the Met’s recruitment campaign, launched last Monday, is designed to draw talent from communities the force has historically drawn least from. He said inclusion is an operational necessity rather than a political position.
“We have no interest in the politics and ideologies of the culture wars,” he wrote, adding that an inclusive workforce makes the Met better at protecting victims, catching criminals and preventing crime.
Rowley’s argument rests on the principle of policing by consent. He said the force cannot operate effectively if large sections of society do not trust it, will not cooperate with it, or do not see policing as a service that grasps their experiences.
He pointed to practical consequences. Victims are less likely to come forward about sexual abuse, domestic violence and other traumatic crimes when culture, experience or background makes them reluctant to talk, he said. Where officers understand the people they serve, he argued, more crimes are solved and more harm is prevented.
The commissioner also linked inclusivity to public confidence in police powers, singling out stop and search, where he said fairness, empathy and accountability are essential to keeping London safe.
London, he noted, is home to nine million people and hundreds of languages, and the scale and complexity of policing it far exceeds anything Sir Robert Peel imagined when he founded the Metropolitan police in 1829. Peel recognised, Rowley wrote, that success in a democracy depends on public approval, respect and cooperation as much as on impartial service to the law.
Rowley reported progress: last year brought the most representative intake of recruits in the Met’s history, with more women and more Londoners from ethnic-minority backgrounds joining.
He rejected the suggestion that recruiting from underrepresented communities means accepting lower standards. Standards, he said, are unchanged and uncompromising, and reaching further into those communities widens the pool of talent rather than diluting it. Removing historical barriers to joining the force or progressing within it is “not favouritism. It is fairness,” he wrote.
He said some potential recruits fear they will not fit in, while others are discouraged by family or friends, and that the campaign is intended to challenge those perceptions and remove those barriers.
Beyond frontline roles, Rowley said he wants more women and people from underrepresented backgrounds to put themselves forward for specialist positions, naming firearms teams, the flying squad, counter-terrorism, specialist operations, public protection and major investigations.
He criticised the polarisation of public debate on inclusion, saying it is too often assumed that inclusion and impartiality or merit are competing objectives. They are not, he said, and the Met will not be blown off course by the culture wars.
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