 |
Politically incorrect - but real life
The Manchester police force is reeling from the
revelations of the BBC reporter who posed as a recruit in order to find out what
police recruits and their officers "really" thought. And guess what
- they discovered that English working class or lower middle class people are
racist. I'm sure that if the same reporter had enrolled in an exclusive London
club, he would have found the same thing. Class prejudice too. I'm certain that
if he'd become a regular worshipper at a church or a mosque, he'd have found quite
nasty things said about Muslims or Christians respectively. How about what Gunners
football supporters say about Spurs supporters, or Turkish and English football
supporters about each other. What's the surprise? None at all. And it's really
stupid to suppose that these attitudes can be trained out of people, particularly
within the time constraints of a police training programme. Talk then turned to
screening - let's not let the racists into the police force! Of course, excluding
racists, religiously prejudiced, sexist and any other set of supposed bigots would
create severe recruitment problems, and this supposes that you've got a perfect
screening mechanism.
Why is this a marketing problem? Well, it is in many ways
- whether it's to do with the image of the police force, or with the image of
those who would claim to wave a magic wand to sort out the problem, or with the
roles of the media. The reason it's a marketing problem is that police recruits
are the front-line staff of a service organisation. They will have a tough job
when they qualify, and their trainers have tough job to turn them into the kind
of people we want policing our relatively relaxed, open and multicultural society.
The more our society moves in this direction, the harder it will be to find police
recruits who meet our standards, which will rise along with the complexity of
our society. We've come a long way since the British police force's main job was
to keep the working classes down! In those days, half a brain, physical strength
and the willingness to beat up one's fellow worker would do.
The problem is, we've started to believe our own myths about
how such public service organisations should work. We've customerized not only
the public, but felons along with them. We've tried to turn our police forces
into shop assistants. Not long ago, in a TV documentary about the Yorkshire police,
we witnessed the spectacle of a poor young policeman taking 90 minutes to explain
to a driver who held an overseas driving license but not a UK one why not being
able to afford driving lessons (and the subsequent fine) was no excuse for driving
a car illegally (despite the fact that the driver had just paid for the car and
its insurance) and why the driver would have to get out and walk as he was driving
the car illegally. Leaving aside the cost of the police time, what other crimes
could the police officer have worked on - even prevented - in that 90 minutes?
Can we get real about public services, please? Can we also
get real about what service staff think? When we peel away the veneer of those
who have to serve us, the public, I am sure we'll find a normal set of people
- sometimes grouchy, often prejudiced, definitely not saints - just like us. Well,
they are us, aren't they! Just key into your web browser "Customers suck"
and see what you come up with. Let's focus on the service that we get and not
try to control the brains of those who deliver it to us. Let us of course train
them, help them to understand that even if the statistics show concentration of
felony in certain ethnic groups or classes, that is no reason to brand all members
of the group. Let them understand the impact of crimes committed by pillars of
the community, how a few (usually White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant) financial fraudsters
deprived hundreds of thousands of people of their pensions. Let's all admit that
we have a dark side. But let's also agree that this dark side shouldn't stop us
doing our duty - as police officers, managers, shop assistants or call centre
operators.
|
|
