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.

As officers, we can all remember occasions when something seemingly innocuous snowballed into something much more dangerous. The one that springs to mind with me is when I was very young in service (and very naïve). We were called to a seemingly run-of-the-mill road accident in north London. The occupant of one car was a white female and the occupants of the other car were young black men. It soon transpired that the car occupied by the black men had no insurance and no MOT. They were also extremely reluctant to provide any details or for us to take a closer look inside the car.

They became loudly aggressive which, as desired, brought many members of the community into the street. Despite not knowing anything of the circumstances, the crowd sided with the black men, no doubt because of their race. Everything quickly became much more chaotic, and this would have then provided the opportunity to dispense with anything illegal to possess, another useful tactic. There were initially only two of us attending this call and to be at the centre of this hostile crowd was absolutely terrifying. Eventually, we called for urgent assistance and back-up arrived, but to be at the heart of this was chilling, and could only have been worse for a single-crewed officer. Imagine, after all that, that you find you're being suspended because you might have been racist? Rick Prior was entirely right to highlight officers' reluctance to engage in such circumstances.

I guess this ridiculous turn of events shouldn't really come as a surprise when you have senior leaders within the police and affiliated organisations who have been completely captured by woke ideology and live in fear of denunciation by the chattering classes. The difference with this case is that the Police Federation is meant to be the one body we can turn to when we become enmeshed in a controversy borne out of our superiors' cowardice.

As long as I've been a copper, there has been a phrase in common usage among us: "the job's f**ked". This has been uttered whether something goes badly or well. But if the Police Federation doesn't even allow its chairs to express concern for its officers, then it really is.

The author is a serving police officer.

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