Police Union Rep Suspended For Telling the Truth

You really couldn’t make this stuff up.

Rick Prior, the Chair of the Met Police Federation, recently gave an interview to GB News highlighting the fact that some police officers are reluctant to engage with members of ethnic minorities because they could be labelled as being ‘discriminatory’. Prior was then duly suspended by the Police Federation of England and Wales (PFEW) for being discriminatory.

As a serving officer, I can tell you that the fear of suspension, or worse, if an interaction ‘goes wrong’ is all pervading. Aside from the obvious physical dangers, we know there are many activists and keyboard warriors out there who are just waiting to take some phone footage out of context and put it online, along with their mischievous interpretation of events. Also (and this is far worse), we know that police senior management will hang an officer out to dry if it means extricating themselves from any blame, regardless of context. They can then point to a ‘rogue officer’ rather than address any failings at a strategic level – of which there are many.

The Territorial Support Group (TSG) officers who were wrongfully dismissed following a stop and search incident involving athlete Bianca Williams is a case in point. They were dismissed for gross misconduct after a disciplinary hearing ruled they had lied about the reason to search the occupants of the car she and her husband were travelling in. The car had blacked out windows and initially made off when indicated to stop by the officers, in an area which was plagued by gang-related violence. If that car hadn’t have been stopped, the officers would not have been doing their job. But then they were sacked for it, and only reinstated by the Police Appeals Tribunal.

Rick Prior is a vocal supporter of these and other colleagues who are the victims of politically motivated misconduct procedures, and many colleagues are whispering that this could be one of the reasons for his suspension.

The understanding is that Mukund Krishna, the CEO of the PFEW, was responsible for suspending Prior. Krishna has never been a police officer and would have no idea of the dangers and fears which stalk the frontline copper. And it is us, the Federation members, who pay his undisclosed salary. A petition titled “Vote of No Confidence in the CEO of the Police Federation of England and Wales” has been launched. I have no doubt that many thousands will sign it, and rightly so.

The elite (and, by extension, senior police leaders) seem to think that the rank and file are always thinking in racial terms and that this governs each interaction with the public. This may have been the case when said senior leaders were young in service (and maybe they were the ones who were actually racist). But nothing could be further from the truth today. Indeed, it is the leadership’s condescending attitude to its PCs which reveals their own obsession with race.

Plus we need to acknowledge, in times such as these, that some members of the public are more than willing to racialise engagment with the police. And why wouldn’t they, with a culture that seems to view everything through the two-dimensional prism of identity? Of course, there is the added bonus that if they have done wrong, there’s a chance they could get away with it.