Response to the Reviews from Dr James Whitfield
| Published date | 01 November 2004 |
| Date | 01 November 2004 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1350/pojo.77.4.363.58968 |
RESPONSE TO THE REVIEWS
FROM DR JAMES WHITFIELD
I am very grateful for the opportunity to respond to the reviews
of my book that have been written by Owen Kelly and Brian
Rowland.
Unhappy Dialogue attempts to show why it was that the
Metropolitan Police Service failed to develop positive relations
with London’s West Indian community in the 1950s and 1960s.
In its final chapter the book examines developments in police
racial awareness training from the 1970s to the present, and
considers the MPS’s relationship with the recently appointed
Metropolitan Police Authority.
The book contains a number of serious and detailed allega-
tions against the Metropolitan Police Service. In it, I accuse the
Met of responding negatively in the late 1950s – a time of
increasing immigrant discontent – to offers made by the then
West Indies Federation to help raise awareness among Metropol-
itan officers of Caribbean lifestyles and cultures. I also accuse
the then Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Joseph Simpson,
of holding racist views; and go on to claim, giving several
examples, that such views were common among senior ranks of
the service at that time. As a result, it was policy that black
applicants to the Metropolitan Police would not be accepted. In
Chapter 3 of the book I give examples of the way in which many
West Indians seeking an end to racial prejudice in the early
1960s were referred to as ‘communists’ in Special Branch
reports, a fact accepted by a former Commissioner of the Met,
Lord Imbert, when I put the matter to him. My assertion that the
police service was an inward-looking organisation in this period
is in accord with the view of Sir Kenneth Newman, as set out in
his book, The Metropolitan Police: The Principles of Policing
and Guidance for Professional Behaviour (p.6). I argue that the
Metropolitan Police failed to give racial awareness training the
priority the subject merited, even after events at Brixton in 1981
and the murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993, and that problems
arising from poor supervision of junior-ranking officers, a defect
highlighted in the mid-1960s, still remain to be addressed.
Not one of these serious allegations is challenged or even
acknowledged by the reviewers. I am left to conclude, therefore,
that this is because they are unable to refute any of the claims
that I have made in the book. They clearly do not like what I
have to say but are unable to challenge the evidence presented in
The Police Journal, Volume 77 (2004)363
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