Strategic PLANNING
Be the
change you want to see
Building a representative police service is one of the most urgent and important diversity and inclusion issues in society today.
The background
2020 saw the murder of George Floyd by police in America, the profile of the Black Lives Matter movement rise and the failures of police forces globally relating to racial inequality exposed. It reinforced the need for a representative police service, something the UK has struggled to achieve. The reasons for this are complex. They include suspicion around the use of racial profiling in stop and search, criticism of investigations into cases like Stephen Lawrence’s murder and stark accounts of institutional racism within UK policing. With these national and global events at the forefront, the appeal of policing as a career decreased in 2020 by 26%.
Diversity and inclusion
Our work with Police Now is committed to recruiting more graduates from underrepresented groups into police forces across England and Wales, delivering change and rebuilding trust in policing.
Police Now’s mission is to transform communities by recruiting, inspiring and developing leaders in policing, focusing on graduates from underrepresented backgrounds who wouldn’t normally consider a career in policing, to build a police service representative of society, better able to understand the issues, build trust and help improve the lives of all communities.
Core to the brand is the bravery to do something new to attract a different type of person who will innovate and bring change through new ideas. We address and tackle the issues with honesty, being truthful about the realities of policing, having honest conversations with graduates, however challenging that is.
We use a data led, evidence-based approach that looks across the graduate to police officer journey for key trends within ethnic minority groups.
We build campaigns around real people’s experiences of policing, through police officers on Police Now programmes, and external activists passionate about racial inequality, to break down the barriers preventing graduates from joining.
25% of the 600 graduates recruited into Police Now programmes in 2020 identify as Black, Asian and minority ethnic.
This is a significant growth on 2019’s 16% and more than double policing’s own recruitment achievements of 11%. It’s the largest ethnic minority diversity ever to be achieved in national police recruitment in this country.
10% of the 600 graduates are of Black heritage, that is eight times the current police workforce percentage and significant given the exceptionally low confidence levels in police reported by the government for the ethnic groups that sit within this.
60% of Police Now recruits say they would never have gone into policing without Police Now.
