In an effort to increase diversity among the force at all costs, London’s Metropolitan Police has been lowering its standards and recruiting officers who are considered “functionally illiterate” in English.
This is according to a member of His Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary, Matt Parr, a police watchdog. While Parr conceded that it is “noble and right” for Scotland Yard to take steps to hire more ethnic minorities, he believes that hiring standards should not be lowered in order to do so.
Speaking to the Telegraph, he said that he believes that London shouldn't be policed by a largely white police force, particularly when you consider the fact that white people will likely be a minority in the city within the coming decade.
He explained: “That is clearly wrong. It is not just wrong from a legitimacy point of view, and from an appearances point of view, it is also operationally wrong because it means that the Met does not get insight into some of the communities it polices and that has caused problems in the past.”
However, he said that the push for diversity carries the risk of “recruiting the wrong people”. For example, he shared hearing of trainee officers who he said are “on paper at least, functionally illiterate in English.” This means that in some areas, these new hires are struggling to write up crime reports.
Former Met Commissioner Cressida Dick, who was the force’s first openly gay leader, started a drive for greater diversity that was supported by the city's leftist mayor, Sadiq Khan. They pledged in 2014 that the city would recruit 40 percent of its new police officers from Asian, minority and black communities by 2023. However, even with this campaign and the reduction of their literacy standards to accommodate minorities, the percentage of non-white police officers that are currently serving in London still falls below 17 percent.
The Met Police are also reportedly using so-called "racism spotters" to study aspiring officers and assess whether they hold racial or other types of prejudices. They have also been spending tens of millions of pounds on what they term “equality training” programs and “diversity, inclusion and equality officers.”
Dick's successor, Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley, has said that he will focus less on meeting diversity targets and more on hiring the best officers possible.
Police resources are already stretched in London
Police resources are currently so stretched in the city that some major department stores have effectively given up on calling the police to help with shoplifters, hiring their own private detectives to apprehend them instead.
Fortnum and Mason said it “lost faith in the police” as shoplifting levels rise in the wake of the cost of living crisis. Last year, shoplifting prosecutions dropped to an all-time low of 16.8 percent, just half the rate of 30.8 percent seen five years prior. Hundreds of thousands of shoplifting incidents are reportedly going unpunished as overstretched police departments throughout the UK have stopped responding to some types of crimes.
Car theft, meanwhile, has been effectively decriminalized, with a 0.5 percent success rate when it comes to solving this type of crime. In 2015, the head of the National Police Chiefs’ Council announced that officers would not be able to attend some burglaries due to a lack of resources, with two thirds of these crimes not being investigated.
Although it does make sense for a police force to reflect the people it is policing to some extent, lowering the standards and allowing illiterate officers onto the force just to meet a woke agenda is only going to cause further damage to a city that is already suffering from rising crime.
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