London’s Metropolitan Police recruited officers who are “functionally illiterate” in English in order to increase diversity, according a member of His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary.
The diversity and inclusion push from the woke leadership of the largest police force in Britain has seen the Met accept applicants who can barely write in English, HMI Matt Parr said. The police watchdog said that while he felt that it was “noble and right” to increase the number of ethnic minorities hired by Scotland Yard, Parr urged that this must not be at the cost of lowering standards.
“We completely support the idea that London – which will likely be a minority white city in the next decade or so – should not be policed by an overwhelmingly white police force,” Parr told The Telegraph.
“That is clearly wrong. It is not just wrong from a legitimacy point of view, and from an appearances point of view, it is also operationally wrong because it means that the Met does not get insight into some of the communities it polices and that has caused problems in the past,” he continued.
Yet, the HMI said that there is a “risk of recruiting the wrong people,” saying that he has heard of trainee officers “who are, on paper at least, functionally illiterate in English”. Par noted that this has already had a trickle-down impact on the force’s ability to function, saying that “just writing up crime reports has become quite difficult in some areas.”
“So in that drive there is at least anecdotal evidence that they have lowered standards,” he said.
The push for more diversity at the Met came under former Met Commissioner Cressida Dick, the first openly gay leader of the force, and leftist Mayor Sadiq Khan, who pledged to recruit 40 per cent of all new police officers from Black, Asian and minority (BAME) communities by 2023.
However, despite this push and the apparent lowering of literacy standards to accept more minorities, at present the number of non-white police officers serving in London is still lower than 17 per cent.
In addition to implementing woke standards in the hiring process, UK police forces have also been spending tens of millions on so-called “diversity, inclusion, and equality officers” and “equality training programmes”.
In 2020, it was revealed that the Met Police force began hiring “racism spotters“, who would study prospective officers to determine if they held any racial or other prejudices.
Cressida Dick’s successor as Met Commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley has said that he would “dial down the requirement to meet [diversity] targets” and instead try to hire the best officers.
Former police officer and current head of crime and justice at the Policy Exchange think tank, David Spencer said: “There is a tension between volume, quality and diversity and something has to give. Someone has to ask what is the most important of those three things and you have to be really careful because once you have recruited someone they are possibly going to be there for the next 30 years.”