Home Secretary Theresa May
has just issued a so-called “wake-up call” to the police about its chronic
shortage of black and ethnic minority officers – a failure she claims reduces public
confidence in the force.
Alas, this is a nonsense
narrative that fails at every basic level. Just because blacks and ethnic
minorities are heavily outnumbered by white people in the police force does not
mean that there is overt discrimination going on, much less that this supposed imbalance
can and should be corrected by any kind of state mandated action. You would
think someone pretty foolish if they said that the primary reason that there
are so few female garage mechanics or female bricklayers is because women are
being discriminated against. It's a short-sighted and hasty thing to presume that imbalances
of gender or ethnicity in the workplaces are naturally due to discrimination.
Why might blacks and
ethnic minorities be under-represented? Given that if you're an employer discrimination
is an illogical thing to do as it harms you as well (as I explained in this
blog post), the most obvious answer to the question is that blacks and ethnic
minorities are under-represented because they are more difficult to recruit -
probably due to a combination of the number that don't want to work in the
police force, and the number that are unqualified or ill-equipped to do so.
Those who condemn
discrimination and the supposed undermining of civil liberties by arguing that
the police should positively discriminate in favour of more black and ethnic
minorities are missing the fact that their proposal is simply another kind of
discrimination with the signs reversed. Quite simply, you cannot artificially
smooth the path for one group (whether it be for more black officers in the
police force or more women in Parliament, or whatever) without artificially
hindering the path of the rest of the group (or groups) that fall outside of
the purview of the group for whom you are trying to positively discriminate.
I'm all for looking for
new ways to encourage more black and ethnic minority people to acquire the
skills and enthusiasm to make themselves candidates for the police, if such
things are lacking. But no one should be given a job purely because of their
ethnicity or skin colour just to fill a quota.
Jobs should be awarded on
two things; on merit (skills, experience, personality, enthusiasm) and on the
basis that certain groups of people do actually want these jobs. If most women don’t want to be bricklayers,
and if most police officers are white due to the pretext of merit, desire, or
some other reason, then this needs to be acknowledged before anyone makes an
automatic assumption of unfair discrimination and tries to redress a hastily perceived
imbalance.
