Humberside Police has been told it has more work to do to understand and track racial abuse towards its officers. Humberside Police Federation, which represents officers, has said that the force has come a long way but more work is still needed to understand the scale of the problem.
Chief Inspector Julian Hart, Humberside Police Federation’s Vice-Chair, Treasurer and PIP Lead, has spoken out about his own experience of receiving racial abuse. Ch Insp Hart, who is mixed-race, joined the force in 2001.
During a difficult childhood, he said he saw first-hand how police can help communities. This motivated him to join the force, he said:
“Coming from a single parent family on a council estate in Hull, I often witnessed domestic abuse and violence. The police would often be called, and as a child I noticed that when the police arrived, the violence ended. That gave me inspiration to join and help others.
“So from an early age, that’s what I wanted to do, I wanted to help people. When I looked at other people on the estates, they were getting arrested and going to prison, getting in trouble or dying young, and I just thought: ‘I want to get out of this and get on with my life.’
“No one in my family had ever joined the police. I just thought: ‘I want to make a difference in the area I live in, and do myself proud.’”
Ch Insp Hart has explained that when he first joined the police, racism was “prevalent” when he went out on the streets, but his colleagues didn’t always understand what he had to deal with. He has said that since he joined the force has “come a long way in term of its diversity mix, but when I joined it was largely white.”
“At the time, there were only around five or six officers from black and Asian backgrounds in the force and even fewer at higher ranks. So in terms of role models, there were very few that worked in Hull.”
Ch Insp Hart has recounted some instances of racism from earlier in his career:
“I worked in the city centre, where you’ve got your night-time economy and your pub fights and all the rest of it. Racially abusing a police officer was almost… not guaranteed, but you could expect that you were going to get some racial undertones from suspects.
“There was one occasion where I arrested somebody for public order offences and he was so drunk that when I came in the next day he was still there. The sergeant at the time said to me: ‘Oh, this is yours from yesterday, you can deal with him’.
“I said: ‘But I’m a victim of his racial abuse against me’, and he said, ‘Well, you can still deal with him’. I challenged him on that, because how can it be right, as his victim, to deal with him as a suspect? But that was the kind of mentality within policing: alright, he’s called you a few racial names, but you can still deal with him.
“That was one of my earliest experiences of thinking, well, if the supervisors don’t get that, then how can we expect the workforce and the community to understand the impact it’s having on officers from diverse backgrounds?”
The force has got “massively” better in recent times, Ch Insp Hart has said. However, he added that police forces need to get better at recording instances in order to recognise the scale of racism against officers.
Currently, racial abuse incidents are recorded under ‘hate crime.’ Humberside Police Federation is pushing for such incidents to be recorded separately, so that data is readily available.
“We can’t, at the click of our fingers, understand the scale of the issue, because it is grouped under one umbrella,” Ch Insp Hart added.
Humberside Police declined the opportunity to comment on this story.
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