RACISM in the police service is being driven underground by diversity training that could be fostering secret racists among officers, the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) said yesterday.

Fourteen chief constables face jail and their forces face large fines under county court cases that the CRE is threatening to bring unless they produce race quality plans within 90 days.

Many officers treated race and diversity awareness as a “big joke” and black and Asian recruits were excluded from a dominant culture of heavy drinking, said a CRE investigation into the police service in England and Wales. It uncovered a “disturbing racial pattern” in recruitment. The police turned down 42 per cent of Chinese applicants for failing to show “respect for race and diversity”, according to Home Office statistics that showed 34 per cent of blacks and 33 per cent of Asians were rejected compared with 23 per cent of whites.

Sir David Calvert-Smith, QC, the author of the report, which was produced after the BBC’s The Secret Policeman documentary exposing racism among recruits in the North West, said institutional racism still existed in the police.

Race and diversity issues were marginalised or “conveniently put on the shelf”, he said, and inspection reports had not been acted on with any degree of urgency.

One trainee officer reported that an instructor at a police training college told the class: “You’ve done the diversity. That’s a load of b***s. Now let’s get on with the real stuff.”

Chairmen of eight police authorities, as well as chief constables, face legal action if they fail to produce race plans.

The CRE found that police officers had resented the recommendations of th inquiry report on the racist murder of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence, which branded the Metropolitan Police “institutionally racist”.

Sir David, former Director of Public Prosecutions, said: “Many officers, perhaps the majority, saw the implementation of the Lawrence recommendations on training in race and diversity as punishment for the sins of Lawrence, as an imposition, as an attempt to innoculate them against a disease. Therefore they did not much welcome it.”

Ethnic minority recruits in one group of 30 told the inquiry that the dominant pub culture “reinforced macho and anti-diversity attitudes” which excluded those who did not drink. “One informant suggested that the training was helping to create a new phenomenon, the ‘stealth racist’, who learnt how to remain undetected by the emphasis on what terminology to use and not use,” the report said.

It also said that many police officers did not understand the term “institutional racism”, as defined by the Macpherson report into the death of Stephen Lawrence. One officer claimed never to have heard of the Lawrence report.

Training managers had only paid “lip service” to diversity, the report said. It found that ethnic minority trainees and trainers often felt isolated and vulnerable. One Asian Muslim officer told how he had been left without a partner when his all-white classmates split into pairs. He said that he had also had curry splashed on his bedroom door.

Long-serving officers said the use of racist language had fallen, although it remained a big problem in some regions and police stations.

Matt Baggott, Chief Constable of Leicestershire, said: “There are real opportunities to tighten both the content and oversight of race equality schemes and the effectiveness of recruitment training and misconduct processes.”

The CRE said that a culture of fear persisted, resulting in officers, particularly probationers, afraid to raise grievances. Ethnic minority officers feared that they would not be believed and that colleagues would not support them. The report also highlighted the inadequacies of the existing procedures.

A complaint made in November 1999 after an officer allegedly said to a motorist “so you are deaf as well as black” was not concluded until June 2001. It contained 62 pages of attachments, 20 pages of witness statements and 172 pages of interview transcripts.

One trainee said that the courses were “tokenism”: “It would help (racists) to cover their tracks and to some extent the course simply drives racism underground”.

The CRE’s interim findings make bleak reading for the police service which has invested time and money in trying to eradicate racism and a macho culture within the service.

“Evidence taken from these groups and individuals (recruits) suggests that many trainers were unconfident, uncommitted or even hostile to diversity,” the report said.

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