'Recruit Met police only from London'

The Metropolitan Police should restrict recruitment to applicants from London, a report on race equality recommended today.

The Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) said the move would boost the numbers of ethnic-minority officers joining the force.

The radical proposal appears in a report into racism in the police service commissioned after the BBC documentary The Secret Policeman-exposed appalling racism among police recruits.

The CRE inquiry, headed by former director of public prosecutions Sir David Calvert-Smith, admitted the plan would discriminate against non-residents of London and could constitute indirect racial discrimination. But commission chairman Trevor Phillips said he believed recruiting exclusively from London would be legal and could be justified on the grounds that living in the capital would be a useful asset for those policing it.

The move would increase the proportion of ethnic minority recruits to 25 per cent.

But it would exclude thousands from outside London who have already applied to join, as well as specialist officers from other forces whom the Met is seeking to attract.

The CRE said at the current rate it would be 20 years before the Met achieved a mix of officers which reflected London's population.

The Metropolitan Black Police Association (BPA), which proposed the plan, has also warned that a two-tier policing system exists in London. A large proportion of police community support officers deployed on "challenged" innercity estates are ethnic-minority recruits but most "fully-sworn" colleagues engaged in crime fighting are white, the BPA said.

The association warned: "It is not difficult to foresee community perceptions of a lower-status 'black tier' of frontline policing."

The CRE inquiry found racist attitudes and beliefs persist at the police service's core, five years after the Macpherson report accused the service of institutional racism.

Sir David made a total of 125 recommendations with a key message of improving training and education to break a vicious circle of racism in the ranks.

He said there was a willingness to change at the top of the service but a failure translating this into action lower down.

Many middle managers "froze in the headlights" of any race problem, he said. Ethnic-minority officers who made complaints found that these were unnecessarily escalated so that they became the target of victimisation, while the white officers who were the subject of the complaints also came to feel they were being unfairly treated.

Peter Fahy, race and diversity spokesman for the Association of Chief Police Officers, said: "Only our harshest critics would fail to acknowledge the progress made since the Stephen Lawrence report." He said all forces now use a national assessment process to screen out racists.