In a British Government report that took eight months to prepare, a committee found the British Police Force "riven with pernicious and institutionalized racism". The report also recommends that Chief Officers of the Department should accept this as fact and a condition of their continuing to be in command.
The report, covered in a story in the 2/23/99 edition of the New York Times, came about from an investigation of a homicide involving a black Jamaican living in London in 1993. After their arrest and trial, three of the five perpetrators, all white, were found not guilty, and cannot be retried. The family of the victim claimed that because the victim was black, the police did not do a good enough job in the investigation.
The black community was upset with the head of the committee initially, but were happily overwhelmed by the vast recommendations against the police.
The report was so damning of the police and the justice system, that the Home Secretary of England attempted to get a Court Order to prevent the London newspaper, The Sunday Telegraph, from publishing a leaked copy of the report.
These recommendations are what the rabblerousers and race baiters here in the United States have been demanding. If the United Kingdom takes these recommendations seriously, there is no doubt that there will be a push to institute some, if not all, of them here in the US. While some would say that changes to the US Constitution would be necessary to invoke them, one need not look to far to see how one of our local politicians, Rudy Giuliani, has turned the Constitution on its head by taking personal property from arrested individuals, with no chance of getting it back!
And the United States Senate, unable to even convict a rapist sitting in the White House for perjury, will be more than willing to sell out all the police officers in this country in order to maintain good political relations with those they are so fearful of.
