Humberside Police urged to address racial abuse against its officers

Humberside Police has been advised to enhance its efforts in understanding and tracking racial abuse targeted at its officers.

Humberside Police Federation, representing officers within the force, acknowledged progress but emphasised the need for deeper exploration into the extent of racial abuse faced by officers.

Chief Inspector Julian Hart, Vice-Chair of Humberside Police Federation, spoke candidly about enduring racial abuse in his role. Ch Insp Hart, of mixed-race heritage, joined Humberside Police in 2001.

Reflecting on a challenging upbringing, he said his experiences ignited a desire to assist communities, noting:

“Coming from a single parent family on a council estate in Hull, I often witnessed domestic abuse and violence. The police would often be called, and as a child I noticed that when the police arrived, the violence ended. That gave me inspiration to join and help others.

“So from an early age, that’s what I wanted to do, I wanted to help people. When I looked at other people on the estates, they were getting arrested and going to prison, getting in trouble or dying young, and I just thought: ‘I want to get out of this and get on with my life.’

“No one in my family had ever joined the police. I just thought: ‘I want to make a difference in the area I live in, and do myself proud.’”

Ch Insp Hart described that racism was “prevalent” when he joined the force, and colleagues were not always attuned to the challenges faced. He remarked that the force has “come a long way in term of its diversity mix, but when I joined it was largely white.”

He recounted experiences from earlier in his career, saying: “I worked in the city centre, where you’ve got your night-time economy and your pub fights and all the rest of it. Racially abusing a police officer was almost… not guaranteed, but you could expect that you were going to get some racial undertones from suspects.

“There was one occasion where I arrested somebody for public order offences and he was so drunk that when I came in the next day he was still there. The sergeant at the time said to me: ‘Oh, this is yours from yesterday, you can deal with him’.

“I said: ‘But I’m a victim of his racial abuse against me’, and he said, ‘Well, you can still deal with him’. I challenged him on that, because how can it be right, as his victim, to deal with him as a suspect? But that was the kind of mentality within policing: alright, he’s called you a few racial names, but you can still deal with him.

“That was one of my earliest experiences of thinking, well, if the supervisors don’t get that, then how can we expect the workforce and the community to understand the impact it’s having on officers from diverse backgrounds?”

Ch Insp Hart noted recent improvements within the force but stated that police forces need to better record instances of racial abuse to fully recognize the problem's scope. Currently, these incidents are classified under ‘hate crime.’ Humberside Police Federation advocates for recording them separately to facilitate data accessibility.

“We can’t, at the click of our fingers, understand the scale of the issue, because it is grouped under one umbrella,” Ch Insp Hart said.

Humberside Police chose not to comment on this story.