Cops forked out at least £631 million on diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) activities over the last six years, a report by Policy Exchange estimated.
A police car in London (Image: Getty)
When you dial 999, you don’t care about the diversity training record of the officer coming to help you. You want officers on our streets focused on stopping burglars, catching shoplifters and tackling knife crime, not DEI initiatives.
Yet a bombshell new report reveals that police forces have spent at least £631 million on Diversity, Equality and Inclusion since the murder of George Floyd in 2020. That is enough to fund 8.3 million hours of frontline policing, or pay for 2,000 additional police officers every year.
This is a shocking waste of taxpayers’ money and completely the wrong priority when the public rightly wants to see more police on the streets tackling the knife crime, burglary and shoplifting we see every day.
But it gets worse. The report finds that 87 per cent of forces have signed up to “anti-racist” commitments, while 58 per cent focus primarily on one community rather than serving everyone equally. As Policy Exchange, the authors of the report, rightly warn, this risks creating an implicit hierarchy of ethnicities.
The National Police Chiefs’ Council’s own Race Equity commitment calls for people to be treated differently based on skin colour. That is wrong and should end.
The police should scrap this DEI nonsense and spend their time and money catching criminals instead.
Equality under the law is what matters. That is why Kemi Badenoch has announced our Integration Commission, to end this wokery and ensure we put an end to identity politics in the state, including policing, once and for all.
These divisive DEI drives are what, no doubt, drove the officers that attended Henry Nowak’s murder to be more interested in taking an accusation of racism seriously than taking care of Henry as he lay dying.
British justice does not ask what colour you are. It asks what you have done. Chief constables who lose sight of that are failing the communities they are sworn to protect impartially.
Most police officers on the beat agree, but a handful of activist police leaders appear more interested in identity politics than policing.
The Conservatives are the only party talking seriously about this. As a Minister, Kemi unashamedly faced down those who wanted more DEI in our institutions. We are also the only party with a serious plan to tackle crime, with hotspot policing, live facial recognition and a pledge to recruit 10,000 more police officers.