SOUTH Yorkshire Police is \u201cahead of the curve\u201d in tackling discriminatory behaviour, the Chair of its Federation has said.<\/p>\n
Last month, Baroness Casey\u2019s report into the standards of behaviour and internal culture of the Metropolitan Police Service was published. It concluded that the London force was \u201cinstitutionally\u201d racist, sexist and homophobic.<\/p>\n
South Yorkshire Police Federation Chair Steve Kent said that South Yorkshire had put in place initiatives to tackle issues in the culture of the force several years ago. He said: \u201cOur culture is calling out bad behaviour and it has been for some time.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe can always improve on dealing with corruption from our officers and bad culture. But we, as a force, have had a culture project now running for years. Our anti-corruption department has been proactively dealing with these people for a long time. I think our force is well ahead of the curve in terms of tackling this.\u201d<\/p>\n
Steve continued: \u201cThe culture within policing has changed significantly in the 20 years I\u2019ve been here. We encourage our officers to call it out locally and it\u2019s really refreshing when you speak to our force about how we are progressive with this. In any organisation in the whole world there will always be room for improvement. But I think that we are well on this journey already.\u201d<\/p>\n
He added that he believed the word \u201cinstitutional\u201d wasn\u2019t fair on policing.<\/p>\n
He said: \u201cI back our Chief Constable, who\u2019s said to our force that she doesn\u2019t support the term \u201cinstitutionally\u201d racist or sexist because that makes the police out to be an outlier. It’s not fair to target policing with that when there are these problems across society.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat sets up a barrier in terms of recruiting because people might not want to become part of that organisation and help to continually improve it.\u201d<\/p>\n