Sadiq Khan is Mayor of London. He is a pompous blowhard who pretends to a socially progressive agenda. There appears to be no racist trope that he does not subscribe to.
The Guardian Newspaper in the UK is a squishy liberal apologist toilet roll of a publication.
Here is a link to an article that is in The Guardian and about Sadiq Khan’s plans for the Metropolitan Police force in London.
The astounding thing is that the article comes within a gnat’s whisker of actually being useful.
I am, personally, not a fan of the British Police as an institution. In fact in many ways I despise their performance and management. But! The police I knew who lived where I lived? Not a problem at all. They knew most of us, they drank in the same pub. Somewhere in the 60’s and 70’s the Home Office decided that it needed to cheapen the police force and spread it thinner so that it would appear that they were being “efficient” and the era of “Panda Cars” was born. By the years at the start of the new millennium they had become “Pander Cars” in that the police sat in the cars and ignored what they were seeing in areas like Rotherham, Manchester, Oxford, Huddersfield, Rochdale. They missed or enabled or tolerated the activities of known sexual abusers because they were afriad (in some cases) of being seen as “racist”. That is th elevel of the leadership in the police forces of Britain today. Too afraid to deal with crime but very sensitive to criticism of being racist.
And now Khan and the current “leader” of the met Police , Cressida Dick, want to validate the fear of racism by balkanizing policing in the British capital based on race.
If only they had followed through on the original thought – recruit people from the community. Not by race. Just people who wish to be of service to their town, village, area, . Recruit and do the requisite, thorough, background checks, give these men and women solid , professional training and a rewarding job and career. Keep them trained, keep them there. Subsidized housing, professional treatment. Have a strata of support but defer to the leadership of the local constable in all matters in the local community. ALL MATTERS. Stop treating the people who sit in offices as the “elite” and start treating the “plods” as the elite.
Above all – stop trying to treat policing in the communities as an afterthought and start with respect.
Let Khan and Dick run this kind of thing and you will have a racially stratified police and community where merely talking to someone is going to become a careful algorithm of race, class, location, language – even caste. That will reduce policing and move even more resources not into policing the community but in servicing the slew of racial requirements using increasing numbers of civil servants eating the policing budget.