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Only two days after Labor MP, Dawn Butler, accused the Metropolitan Police of “racially profiling” her, the force has hit back by warning of “trial by social media”.

 

Aggrieved MP Dawn Butler calls for ‘system change’ after racist incident
The Met’s deputy commissioner, Sir Steve House, has robustly defended the actions of his officers (who stopped the car Butler was in for apparently no good reason) by claiming they acted “professionally and politely”.

House claimed while he expects his officers to be “scrutinized”, this should happen in the framework of “existing, appropriate and proportionate processes for complaints”.

The Met’s deputy commissioner did not stop there and went on to say: "The increasingly routine trial by social media is unfair and damaging to individual officers and has the potential to undermine the role our communities need us to do to protect them, and keep them safe from violence".

One reason for this unusually robust response may be the fact that Butler has seized on the incident to call for a “system change” in the met – and the wider British policing community – to tackle the apparently intractable problem of institutional racism.

Butler has used her own adverse personal experience to draw attention to the fact that the Met Police has apparently failed to make significant progress on tackling racism within its ranks since the publication of the Macpherson report in February 1999.

  The Macpherson report was the product of a public enquiry into the racist murder of black teenager, Stephen Lawrence, who was killed in south-east London in April 1993.

The report, which was compiled by retired judge Sir William Macpherson, accused the Met Police of “institutional racism” for its deliberate failure to properly investigate Lawrence’s murder.

     

Original Article Source: Press TV | Published on Wednesday, 12 August 2020 16:20 (about 1324 days ago)