#equity

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By: Andrew Doyle

Published: Jun 10, 2026

‘The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.’ These words are among the most frequently quoted from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. We see them in memes, in online arguments, repeated endlessly in opinion columns in the national press. The passage has turned into the very thing that Orwell hated the most: a cliché.

Yet ideas become clichés for a reason. So many aspects of Orwell’s novel seem prescient today, not least this tendency among authoritarians to blur the lines between truth and fiction and demand that the population play along. There is no clearer example than what has become known as ‘two-tier policing’. The evidence for it is overwhelming, and yet commentators, journalists, politicians, podcasters, activists and online loudmouths continue to deny it. Once again, the narrative has taken precedence over reality.

The notion that members of the public must be treated differently according to their group identity is not simply a speculative explanation for egregious police conduct. It is explicitly encoded in guidance published by the College of Policing and the NPCC (National Police Chiefs’ Council). There are numerous recorded interviews with officers who tell us that their job is to investigate and arrest those who have caused offence to particular groups. Multiple whistleblowers have revealed details of training sessions they have been compelled to attend that have instructed them to take a two-tier approach.

But you wouldn’t know any of this had you only read a recent article by Andy Hughes, LBC’s Crime Correspondent. Hughes argues that it is ‘nonsense to say police are told to treat people differently based on their ethnicity’ and claims to have spoken to dozens of officers who have confirmed his view. It seems odd that Hughes does not realise that there is nothing particularly surprising about officers repeating the party line. Far more revealing are those who are speaking out about two-tier policing – none of whom Hughes appears to have spoken to – in spite of the risk to their career. They’re called ‘whistleblowers’ for a reason.

Then there is the police guidance itself. Hughes attempts to shrug off the Police Anti-Racism Commitment on the grounds that he doesn’t understand it:

‘The NPCC guidance says: “Producing equality of policing outcomes for people from different ethnic groups by responding to individuals and communities according to their specific needs, circumstances and experiences.” I’ve read this section several times, and I still don’t know what it means. The wording is “clumsy”, as the NPCC admits, and police chiefs say they will review the guidance. But to suggest this means every police officer is now told to treat people differently based on race is inaccurate – and dangerous.’

A generous interpretation would be that Hughes simply hadn’t read the following sentences in the guidance, which could not be clearer even for those unfamiliar with the activist jargon.

And there you have it. The ‘Police Anti-Racism Commitment’ explicitly states that officers should treat people differently based on race and that they must reject the principle of equality before the law. Their commitment to racial equity, it says, ‘does not mean treating everyone “the same” or being “colour blind” (racial equality)’. Of course, it’s unlikely that Hughes stopped reading at that point. It’s more plausible that he realised that the document flatly contradicted his narrative and decided to omit the relevant line.

However, the ‘clumsy’ language that Hughes cites (but does not understand) is evidence enough. When the guidance calls for ‘equality of policing outcomes’, it is saying that suspects should be treated differently according to their race in order to reduce disparities. It draws on a principle of Critical Race Theory, that equality of outcome is evidence of unequal treatment. As Ibram X. Kendi puts it, ‘racial inequality is evidence of racist policy’.

It’s the same logic that prevented Valdo Calocane, a paranoid schizophrenic, from being sectioned by the NHS. Having perpetrated a violent crime, mental health staff did not detain him because they were concerned about ‘over-representation of black men’ among those committed. They were simply following the NHS guidelines, but Calocane went on to murder two teenagers and an older man in June 2023. When ‘racial equity’ is adopted as policy, it costs lives.

Let’s have a closer look at the evidence of institutional capture as reflected in the official police guidelines.

The key change in policing practice occurred because of the shift from equality (treating everyone the same) to equity (treating people unequally to ensure equal outcomes). These principles are oppositional, but are frequently presented as synonymous. When Sir William MacPherson wrote his report in 1999 about the racially-motivated murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence six years prior, the need for racial equality was emphasised. This was not a controversial stance, and the vast majority of the public still agree that racism in law enforcement must not be tolerated. 

Twenty-one years after the report, the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) submitted written evidence to the Home Affairs Select Committee for a follow-up inquiry. By this point, there had been a clear shift away from equality and towards equity, although the specific term was not yet used. While the NPCC made a pledge ‘to embed diversity, equality and inclusion into our workforce and into the services provided to communities’, point 9 was perhaps the most significant: ‘We are committed to understanding disparity within policing and to explaining that disparity. If we cannot, we will reform.’

We all understand that disparity of outcome does not automatically mean that there has been unequal treatment. Nobody, for instance, claims that since 96% of the prison population are male, that must mean that sexism against men is embedded into the system. So while black people are represented in prison at roughly three times their share of the population, we cannot assume that this is because of racism in the police force. Tony Sewell, the chair of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities in 2021, has persuasively explained how family structure, education and socioeconomic factors can account for the disparity.

In other words, the NPCC was proceeding from a false premise. But it was only after the death of George Floyd in 2020 and the subsequent Black Lives Matter riots and protests that the concept of ‘equity’ became the guiding principle. The Police Race Action Plan, launched in May 2022, opens by explaining that it had been authored in response to an event that had taken place across the Atlantic and in a completely different context of police practices.

‘In the summer of 2020, nations across the globe were rocked by the outpouring of emotion following the murder of George Floyd. It provided a catalyst for the expression of deep concerns about the social injustice experienced by Black people. This was the same in the UK. Although this was a wider expression against societal injustice, it was about policing.’

The document repeatedly referred to the need for ‘equitable’ rather than ‘equal’ treatment. By now the seeds had been thoroughly sown for the abandonment of the principle of equality before the law. By the time we get to the updated Police Race Action Plan of 2025, also produced by the NPCC and the College of Policing, the language is explicit: ‘The police service of England and Wales is committed to anti-racism and racial equity’. Every force in England and Wales has been encouraged to implement this plan, which has led to local forces producing their own likeminded policy guidance. 

In 2025, the Met Police commissioned what it described as ‘two key documents’ - 30 Patterns of Harm and A Structural Companion Guide - as part of its London Race Action Plan. The analysis was based on the highly tenuous premise - expressed as though it were incontestable - that ‘anti-Black harm is not incidental to policing; it is structured into its logic’. On the ideal of police neutrality, the author of the review (Dr Shereen Daniels) had this to say: 

‘Neutrality is often presented as a position of fairness, balance, or objectivity. But in practice, especially in institutions like the Met, neutrality is not neutral. It reflects dominant norms, particularly whiteness, in how risk, credibility, professionalism, and even “evidence” are defined. To claim neutrality is to claim distance from bias. But that distance is not real. It is structurally coded. It hides power while appearing impartial.’

Such dogma was the inevitable result of the ideological capture of the College of Policing and the NPCC, whose Police Race Action Planestablished a new performance framework for law enforcement. This was then filtered down through training, policies and local action plans. Suddenly, officers were being told to acknowledge their ‘white privilege’ when they should have been honing strategies for crime prevention. The influence of this ideology has been undeniable, but that hasn’t stopped many from denying it.