Britain's top Asian police officer described today how racism had dogged his career and sabotaged his chances of becoming a chief constable.

Tarique Ghaffur, an assistant commissioner at Scotland Yard, said he had bid for four top jobs - as deputy commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and chief constable of Greater Manchester, the West Midlands and Leicestershire - only to see his applications rejected.

But he told a conference of the National Black Police Association: "Each process attracted unfair media attention, had no true level of independence and basically amounted to an informal appraisal of me as an individual rather than me as a proper assessment of my experiences and competencies."

Mr Ghaffur said senior officers were still too ready to surround themselves with like-minded people. Police leaders failed to understand ethnic communities which led to stereotyping and "limit their belief in the abilities of people different from themselves".

Giving the keynote speech in a conference on training and education, Mr Ghaffur said that throughout his own career he had been deliberately excluded from groups, processes and decision-making on occasions.

"I have had creative ideas turned down only for them to then be subsequently suggested by colleagues and accepted," he said.

Mr Ghaffur, who was in charge of top-level CID squads at the Yard and recently moved to head specialised uniformed operations, told the conference: "I have developed innovative policing ideas only for them to be passed by others."

He said that the dynamic of race was played out in the amounts and types of leadership opportunities available for minorities and those from minorities found it difficult to penetrate mainstream networks.

Mr Ghaffur said his problems illustrated the "murky atmosphere of misconception and distortion" in which officers from ethnic communities have to work. It was "miasma" operating like an ever-present toxic fog, he said.

He told the conference that "for people from minority communities, identity issues can influence many things, from personal dress decisions to professional strategies and activities. We are often faced with either having to conceal our identity or assimilate into the dominant white culture."

One solution lay in recruiting but Mr Ghaffur said if change was not fast enough he would support affirmative action giving ethnic groups priority.

Speaking about the relationship between the police and ethnic communities Mr Ghaffur called for a public inquiry into the links between young Muslims and extremism. He told the conference that Islamophobia in Western society had created a "generation of angry young people" who were vulnerable to extremism.

"Young people have developed a strong sense of connection with Islam. The cumulative effect of Islamophobia, both internationally and nationally, linked to social exclusion, has created a generation of angry young people who are vulnerable to exploitation," he said.

He said that while it was right to tackle the terrorist threat "robustly", the police service needed to think very carefully about the wider consequences.

Mr Ghaffur said the increased use of controversial stop-and-search powers and "passenger profiling" techniques under the banner of counter-terrorism had tended to be led more by physical appearance than actual intelligence.

He said 701 people had been arrested under anti-terror laws between the 9/11 terror attacks and the end of 2004 but only 17 were convicted and only three related to Islamic terrorism.

"The consequence of this type of wide-scale enforcement has been to create a strong feeling of mass stereotyping within the Muslim community and in fact the wider non-Muslim South Asian communities," he said.

But at the same time there were elements within the Muslim community who were in "various stages of denial" about the events of 7/7, extremism or the responsibilities of the community at large.

Mr Ghaffur said: "For some, there is an overriding preoccupation with conspiracy theories around the threat of terrorism and the significant political leverage of fear attributed to the West.

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