BETTER DEAD THAN RUDE: Diversity Up, Public Safety Down.
With the number of voluntary resignations from England and Wales police forces up 72 percent since last year, these efforts to attract new officers are sorely needed. Yet Rowley appeared more concerned with virtue signaling than with promoting the police force.
“I am really pleased that we have achieved our highest ever female representation as part of the Met reaching its greatest ever total number of officers,” he said.
The number of female police officers in London has indeed reached a record high, according to Met figures. As of September, the force was 30.4 percent female, and it aims to increase its share of women officers to 33 percent by the next fiscal year, intending for 50 percent of all new recruits to be women. Of the 1,678 officers recruited since April, 44.5 percent (746 officers) have been female.
Rowley is devoted to diversity and inclusion. “The evidence across the world is that the best companies and organisations benefit from diverse teams,” he has said. “It is not only about fairness, it is about being the most effective in a complex world.”
The world is indeed complex, but London’s violent crime has risen steadily in recent years. Police in London recorded a quarter of a million violent crime offenses in 2021-22, a 10 percent increase from the previous year. A major driver of violence in the capital has been gang warfare. According to a Sky News investigation, roughly 200 gangs operate in London.
As David Frum wrote in his 2000 book How We Got Here: The 70’s: The Decade that Brought You Modern Life (For Better or Worse), about police on the other side of the big pond:
Americans over a certain age are often surprised to see diminutive women patrolling their city’s meanest streets. The policemen of their childhood were tall, commanding figures. Have the cops shrunk? Well, yes. In March 1973, the federal Law Enforcement Assistance Administration issued an order forbidding any local police department that received federal funds (that is, all of them) to maintain minimum height requirements—the rules disqualified too many women. In 1977, the Supreme Court seconded LEAA by striking down Alabama’s minimum height requirement as a violation of the 1964 act. The federal government lived up to its own principles. In 1971 it waived size and strength requirements for its own police forces. In 1977, New York City acceded to a judicial order and permitted women to apply for fire-fighting jobs. None of the applicants passed the department’s strength test so the judge ordered the strength test made easier until sufficient numbers of women could pass.
Well, better dead than rude, right?