The exposé of vile police discrimination at Charing Cross police station comes just three years after the last exposé at the same station (Met plunged into crisis amid fresh claims of misogyny and racism, 1 October). This experience confirms that unless there is full accountability for police discrimination, the behaviour will simply carry on. The failure to have accountability is part of the institutional discrimination highlighted in the Casey review.
The failure of the police to tackle racism in its own ranks has a long history. Over the past seven years, 13 convictions have been quashed at the court of appeal – victims of the racist, corrupt British Transport Police officer Det Sgt Derek Ridgewell’s squads in the 1970s. There will be more cases. Ridgewell was imprisoned for seven years in 1980 for conspiracy to steal goods from the very depot at which he had prosecuted several British Rail employees for the same offence three years earlier. (Ridgewell died in prison in 1982.)
We represent several family members of those fitted up by Ridgewell, whose fathers did not live to see their exonerations. They are calling for a change in the law that when a police officer is imprisoned, an automatic order is made as part of the sentence to review their files for miscarriage of justice cases. If that had been done in 1980, it would have avoided decades of misery for Ridgewell’s victims. It also would have helped challenge a culture of police racism decades earlier.
Matt Foot
Co-director, Appeal
Shabana Mahmood says police chiefs have been given the power to “automatically sack officers who fail background checks”. However, one has to question the effectiveness of such background checks if the Met employed a BBC reporter who then operated underground for seven months in one of its stations.
Harvey Sanders
London
Congratulations to the setter of the Wordsearch on police (G2 print section, 2 October) for avoiding words such as “racist”, “homophobic” and “sexist”.
Rev Richard Stainer
Bradfield St George, Suffolk
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