Two-tier policing is a feature, not a bug

The capture of the Police by DEI ideology, isn’t a continuation of the old equality agenda, it’s a silent revolution you still haven’t noticed. 

The juxtaposition couldn’t be starker. While DOGE in the USA is frantically ripping our every DEI position it can uncover, we in Britain feel hopeless that any quick reversal of the ideological takeover of government institutions, their culture, their budgets, will reverse anytime soon.

This week, the latest example of DEI spending by a police force hit the headlines; West Yorkshire Police revealed that it is spending a cool £1 million a year on 19 DEI positions and over £360,000 for related training. That’s the bill for only one of 45 area forces. 

It’s poor timing for this to become public, not only because of the transatlantic contrast, but also because of months, years, of a growing sense that policing is two-tier. Increasingly, the public are comparing the treatment by the police of different individuals or ethnic or religious groups in society. One case highlighted among others is of a rape-gang ringleader being released halfway through his sentence despite it being his third conviction of sexual abuse. 

How far policing is now in fact unjust or unfair can be debated, but there is no doubt that public perception increasingly sees it that way: last year, a poll indicated that one in four people don’t trust the police.

This represents a stark failure of the New Labour revolution, aiming to usher in the high point of the post war equality era. When introducing the Equality Act in 2010, Harriet Harman proudly boasted of how the Act would enable both justice and unity, saying that “a more equal society is more cohesive and at ease with itself, than one marred by prejudice and discrimination”. She claimed too that such aims would enable a more, not less meritocratic society, because “[f]airness and equality are necessary to underpin a meritocracy”.

It’s going to become hard to assess if a judge is taking individual factors into account or is delivering reparative “justice” through reduced sentences

It really can’t be doubted that the aims have not been achieved, so much so that it’s not uncommon to see calls for the scrapping of the Act altogether. 

So it seems obvious to ask, why, despite landmark legislation aimed at ensuring equality, and with an exponential increase in spending on training and personnel does it seem like the police are less, fair, just, equal in how they operate?

The answer is of course that this is to ask the wrong question, and to mistake the new, radical revolution for the old one you thought you understood, that equality agenda that had become part of the furniture of life for the last quarter century. 

To care about people feeling like discrimination is increasingly prevalent in policing and sentencing, is to appeal to the 1980s — 2000s notion of equality — that idea that people should be treated equally according to their merit. Many people will still assume that this is still at the heart of DEI training. 

But that is to miss the radical ideological revolution since 2010 that has occurred. Like a parasite incubating in its victim, the E-for-equity, took legitimacy from modern notions of equality, while emerging from its emaciated host in order to reverse the agenda entirely.

Back in the noughties when the Equality Act was being dreamed up, equity and equality were broadly synonymous. No longer. Equity doesn’t require you to treat people in the same circumstances equally, as in the same. Equity instead allows you to discriminate against people in the same situation, in order to engineer the desired outcome for society as a whole. Of course, this at one and the same time, inverts the liberal notion of equality of the individual as well as the Christian principle that the ends do not justify the means. Put starkly, DEI teaches that two-tier policing in the pursuit of social justice isn’t a bug, it’s a desirable feature.

Such ideology is responsible for many of the news stories related to discrimination in the workplace against whoever the perceived group of “privilege” is perceived to be, often white males, as the recent controversy at the RAF illustrates.

But when it comes to the police and the justice system, this ideology is all the more undermining, being squeezed into core institutions founded to enable traditional notions of fairness. “Equity” as now promoted through DEI encourages the police to treat with favour and fear, individuals who may be guilty of a crime, more leniently because of the overarching aim of achieving cohesion through the recognition of the victim group status of that person. And while recent, highly controversial changes to sentencing guidelines that enable judges to reduce sentences are not explicitly about recognising victim group status, in practice they can and likely will be used in that way. It’s going to become increasingly difficult to assess whether a judge has taken individual factors into account in sentencing, or whether they are in practice simply delivering woke, reparative “justice” through reduced sentences.

In short, your average member of the police force is in a pickle. On the one hand, they are being trained to uphold the law, such as the Equality Act, and therefore that discrimination against individuals is harmful. But at the very same time, DEI training moulds a culture of behaviour that in practice treats people differently for the same things. I’m not at all claiming that the Equality Act is a good piece of legislation, but there would be a tragic irony if by scraping it in order to fight against a fuzzy notion of “woke”, politicians on the right removed the one legal requirement preventing the spread of DEI even further.

If you’re wondering why the drive for equality seems to have had the opposite effect, you’re misunderstanding what all the training, spending police force social media posting is actually trying to achieve.