The police must overcome their equality obsession

If policing sitcom The Thin Blue Line, had conjugal relations with the BBC parody, W1A, the resultant lovechild would bear a striking resemblance to West Yorkshire Police. “We are establishing what we do most of best and finding fewer ways of doing more of it, less”, says Sarah Parish in W1A, with a face so straight that it defies the laws of geometry. At the swanky police Headquarters on Elland Road, Gold Command appears to have mistaken the joke for a Mission Statement, which is perhaps what happens when your state of the art building is protected by  something called Zen Control. Irony fails to penetrate, like telephone signals against a Faraday Cage.  

A recent Freedom of Information Request has revealed that West Yorkshire Police spent almost 3 per cent of its annual budget on Diversity, Equality and Inclusion, a figure so huge, and accompanied by so much extraordinary detail, that one should perhaps attribute its release to a whistle-blower. The jobs involved are Head of DEI (£91K — nice work if you can get it), Communications and Marketing (96K — split between two different jobs), six Ambassadors of Positive Action (£360K), a Positive Action Inspector and Sergeant (£174K) , a Positive Action Progression Officer (£46K),  two Administrative Assistants For DEI and Positive Action (£60K). There are also funds for external training (£360K).

This is a staggeringly large amount to be signed off by a Chief Constable who pleads poverty so regularly that you’d mistake him for having a role in the West End revival of Oliver. Quite what the Department of Progression actually progresses, mind, remains a mystery. The latest report published by His Majesty’s Inspectorate does little to solve the enigma. 

On matters relating to the core elements of policing — investigating crime, handling suspects, looking after victims — West Yorkshire receives a rating of “Requires Improvement”, which is not  the ringing endorsement likely to be hung from the fence on a banner. In fact, should you ever find yourself the victim of a grievous bodily assault in Wakefield, you should consider holding off dialling 999 until you have crawled across the border to Barnsley. As with most things, South Yorkshire is superior. 

Of course, if you read the Inspectorate’s report with the mindset of a hateful bigot — the type of regressive who would rather judge a plumber by his ability to fix a tap than by his knowledge of structural racism — then you might find yourself outraged. If this is the case, keep it to yourself. Detecting hate is something at which West Yorkshire does excel.

The Chief Constable calls this progress. The rest of us call it obscene

This, remember, is the force that made the Great Leap Forward by investigating Posie Parker for correctly sexing a male, arresting a teenage girl who said that a female officer looked a bit like her lesbian nan, and who provided the metaphorical rotting cabbages to be thrown at the mother whose son had offended the local Imams by dropping a copy of the Quran to the floor. The Chief Constable calls this progress. The rest of us call it obscene.

That the cheque book has been allowed to run amok in an area where short armed men with famously deep pockets warn each other over pints of warm beer to “Eat all, sup all, pay nowt” suggests that the spend, up until now, has not been common knowledge. Yorkshire is not renowned for tolerating kleptomaniacs who would rather teach cops about the unconscious bias as found in Season One of Motherland than recruit 40 new response officers, and a couple of hard-as-nails sergeants. As every Yorkshireman knows, you cannot spend the same shilling twice.

There  is also the hidden cost in letting loose these morale sucking buffoons amongst otherwise hard working officers. With no real policing to do, the zealots rampage around parade rooms and WhatsApp groups like Cromwell looking for a monastery to burn. What really stinks is how successful they are at it.

 An Inspector with over 30 years of uniformed service told us this week that officers on patrol together are so afraid of dropping a conversational clanger that entire shifts can pass without colleagues saying a word. Spooks from The Department of Progression are everywhere. Morale is so low that the best officers are nicking one another’s CVs in an attempt to find a route of escape. 

Perhaps nothing sums up this tragedy of the absurd better than the recent purge of Non Progressive police crockery. Starsky and Hutch mugs are out, “Love Is Love” mugs are in. And if you are foolish enough to drop a teabag into a cup bearing the legend “In God We Trust … Everyone Else, We Stop and Search”, you can expect a meeting, minus the the shortbread fingers, with Their Excellency, The Ambassador of Progress.