Mind-forg'd Manacles

The Macpherson Report into the handling of the murder of Stephen Lawrence became a defining moment in British political history. It accused the Metropolitan Police of 'institutional racism', an ambiguous phrase that has been regularly confused with overt racism. The concept was used not only to condemn the Metropolitan Police, but also to condemn all British police forces. For many commentators, it condemned Britain as a whole as a racist society. In Mind Forg'd Manacles, Jon Gower Davies argues that the charge of institutional racism was ill-founded and that reforms designed to address it have introduced negative and unintended consequences for British policing. It has bogged down the police with unnecessary and counter-productive bureaucratic demands. It has paralysed the investigation of some crimes that involve ethnic minority suspects, frequently exposing vulnerable victims to greater harms...