A NEW TEAM to stamp out toxic racism in police forces has been announced.

The Independent Scrutiny and Oversight Board (ISOB) will scrutinise the police race action plan which is being drafted and implemented by the 43 police forces across England and Wales.

New board members for the ISOB include a communications specialist, a charity boss, a social justice expert and a civil service mandarin.

The ISOB chair Abimbola Johnson, a criminal defence barrister, said she hopes the new team will finally begin to rebuild tarnished relations with black communities in the UK.

The announcement comes after a series of recent scandals to plague the Met police and bring the rampant “toxic culture” in the force into public debate. 

Speaking to The Voice, Ms Johnson described the recruitment of the new team of five as having a “real wealth of experience” to bring to scrutinising the developing race action plan.

“I definitely didn’t want to just have people who want CV points. I think that nowadays work like this, people can see that it can be really attractive with it becoming more mainstream to have this sort of thing on your CV,” she said. 

“I really needed people who I trusted would pay key attention to it. 

“the reason why I recruited them is that in their day-to-day roles that they’re doing this work anyway.

“We’ve had a couple of board meetings to get to know one another and to discuss the approach that we’re going to be taking around this sort of work. 

“And a lot of the time they’re referring to things that they’ve done during the week just in their jobs, where they can bring those insights to the meetings as well. 

“So, we’re getting a full picture. We’re getting a lot of collaboration and a lot of passion behind this as well.”

Colin Douglas now sits on the scrutiny board having been a former director of Communications for the NHS, while also being self-employed as strategic communications and marketing specialist with a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics.

Katrina Ffrench is a graduate from the University of Cambridge in Social and Political Sciences and is the founding director of UNJUST C.I.C. – a charity aims to address discriminatory practices and policies stacked against black communities, while Nick Glynn, a Senior Program Officer at Open Society Foundations, leads work on police accountability and justice in Europe is also a new board member.

Joining them will be Racheal Grant, who works in data science, and has a passion for social justice and the development and protection of young black people and has managed data for The Ministry of Defence and The Ministry of Justice 

A graduate in Physics from University of Oxford, Rami Josh is an experienced policy professional with a track record in leading the delivery of public policy initiatives, and fulfilling his role as senior leader in the Civil Service as a recent board member. 

The diversity of the board members to tackle the lack of trust in policing comes after a 2021 YouGov poll revealed that Britons from an ethnic minority background had less faith in policing with it dropping from 52% to 44%.

Figures saw an even worse plunge for black Britons post-the Black Lives Matter resurgence in 2020, falling from 42% to just 37% having confidence in the police. 

Nearly six in ten ethnic minority Britons were reported to see police brutality as a problem in the UK, in comparison to a third of the general population.

Despite the lack of trust, Ms Johnson said initial belief from communities of colour in the work of the scrutiny board to once and for all combat racism can be found in its name.

“We’re independent, so when we’re not the police and so the stigma which is attached to that relationship that the police have or lack of relationship in some ways that the police have with black communities, we don’t come from that place and we have no vested interest in saying that the plan is successful or that the plan is working or that people should put effort into the plan unless we are satisfied that that is worthy of that backing by us,” she said. 

“We are from those communities and although on the one hand when you look at the background of the board members you see that quite a few of us went to Oxbridge and so on. 

“So in some ways we look like a normal board but actually when you break it down, many of us have had experiences of being arrested, of being victims of crime, of being related to people who have been the subject of harsh treatment by the police, ourselves being treated in that way by the police. 

“There’s a plethora of experience, of lived experience, amongst us. A lot of our members have been doing work in the community.”

She added: “We’re going to be creating in the next few weeks our accountability forum, where we’re going to have individuals, organisations, leaders in local communities working with us, meeting with us to give us their views, to push us, to challenge the police, to highlight areas of work that’s going on in their areas that they want the police to take into account or trends that they are seeing, that they want data collected about and so on.”

The new Independent Scrutiny and Oversight Board aims to hold the police to account, but will not operate in the same way as the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) that deals with individual cases and instead will prioritise all 43 police forces in England and Wales.

The boards completion comes as the Met Commissioner, Cressida Dick, resigned in February after a series of policing scandals, including at Charing Cross police station and the murder of Sarah Everard, which prompted ongoing calls from campaigners for her successor to acknowledge the impact of institutional racism.

Ms Johnson said her role as Chair and the new board won’t have the powers to decide who next takes on the top job this summer, but that the new Commissioner needed “cultural and emotional intelligence” to begin repairing relations with black people.

“The Met Police is the biggest police force in England and Wales, 55% of the black population live in London. And so what we need, what we need to see is a commissioner that takes these disparities very seriously but doesn’t react defensively, that doesn’t seek to minimise the hurt, the generations of hurt that the police have inflicted upon black communities. 

“That doesn’t hear anger or aggression, that may come to black communities and use that as an excuse to switch off, but recognises that that comes from years and years of trauma.”

“We see these shocking stories that black people have had with the police,it’s about how they’ve been treated when they’ve been the victims or the families of victims of crime. Not even when they’ve been the accused or the suspect, so there’s a lack of understanding about the vulnerability that we have as well.”

In a review of 101 cases involving Taser use by officers, the police watchdog unearthed that black people were more likely to endure prolonged Taser use lasting up to five seconds. 

The findings determined that racial bias was a part of these interactions with officers as 60% of black people in comparison to just 29% had a stun gun used against them for a prolonged period of time.

The IOPC also recently outlined reforms to the use of Tasers and particularly in the presence of a child.

The report urged for police officers to ensure their decision-making and their police response is not influenced by stereotypical notions about the “strength and threat” posed by black people. 

Living in Camberwell, south-London, Ms Johnson said she still has to worry about  the encounters her young, black son will have with the police and that “the talk” becoming the norm in black communities and households needs to be addressed.

“At some stage, the talk is about what you should do if a police officer wants to speak to you, even if you’ve done absolutely nothing wrong or if you have done something wrong and it’s super minor. A lot of the discussions are around how can you, as the person who lacks the power, de-escalate that situation,” she said.  

“The new commissioner needs to understand just how much fear and concern and anxiety we have about the police. And that’s our base level that a lot of us start from when we think about the police and think about interactions with them.”

“It wasn’t just Cressida Dick that a lot of people from black communities felt let down by. There were senior leaders who were working with her who contributed to that culture. 

“And rank and file in the police as well who contributed to that culture. So it needs to be somebody, I think that black and other members of communities feel they can trust, who will call that out and won’t be afraid to make changes. Someone will change the actual culture of that police force.”

She added: “Changing one person is not going to transform a police force, so I’d be really looking for engagement with programmes like this, [the Police’s Plan of Action on Inclusion & Race] how willing they are to engage with programmes like this, the rhetoric that they use around topics like institutional, structural, systemic racism.

“I share the exact cynicism [that black people have about policies and reviews]. So, I’m starting from the same point. 

“And the reality is I do not know. But the key selling point of this programme, the thing that drew me in is the fact that my board will remain engaged.

“And so, we are not going to let them [the police] become complacent about this, we’re not going to let them treat this as a moment. It’s going to be a movement and it’s going to have to stick.”