Police relations with black community getting worse, says former Met chief inspector

‘There are some parts of the community who are lost who I don’t think we will be able to get back,’ says Rod Charles

A former police chief inspector of the Metropolitan Police said relations between officers and the black community in London were at their lowest point in decades and were continuing to deteriorate.

Rod Charles said the Met’s stop-and-search drive had resulted in “stereotyping the community wholesale”, and also criticised the “reprehensible” actions of some officers.

Speaking on the third anniversary of the death of his nephew, who died after being restrained by police in east London, Mr Charles said tensions between officers and the black community were now worse than in the 1970s and 1980s.

“I don’t think we’re anywhere near the bottom yet. We still have a long way to go,” he told The Guardian.

“The effects of poor decision making by the police won’t just lose us a few months or a few years, it will lose us a generation and there are some parts of the community who are lost who I don’t think we will be able to get back.”

The author and police training consultant said the approach to stop-and-search – with police given further powers last year to carry out “no suspicion” searches – had proved particularly damaging.

“We are stereotyping the community wholesale,” said Mr Charles. “We do not want to alienate hundreds of thousands of black people simply because they share the same pigment. If we had genuinely intelligence-led policing rates of stop and search would plummet.”

He added: “Police need to focus on crime and criminals, not on aligning types of people to types of crime,” he said. “That’s how you end up with stereotyping.”

Mr Charles wrote recently that the hostility towards the police in some communities “has become so ingrained that there is no possible chance of change during our lifetime”.

His 20-year-old nephew Rashan Charles died in July 2017 after being chased into a shop in Hackney, where CCTV showed an officer from the Met struggling with him on the floor. The jury found his death was an accident following justified use of force, a verdict his family branded a “farce”.

Last week a Met police officer was suspended after video footage appeared to show him kneeling on a man’s neck during an arrest, sparking widespread outrage. The force has referred the incident to the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC).

On Wednesday Met commissioner Dame Cressida Dick said she would not “take a knee” in the symbol of solidarity with Black Lives Matter protesters. She told LBC radio officers who knelt at London demonstrations following the death of George Floyd may have felt pressured by crowds.

Earlier this month Dame Cressida denied the force was institutionally racist. The Scotland Yard chief also said she was “listening” to the concerns raised by BLM protesters who have had “their whole consciousness raised about a huge variety of issues”.