Kent Police, Race and Power: When Does Disparity Become Institutional Racism? — Part Three

Racist misconduct has been proved against Kent Police officers. Black people are arrested at more than twice the White population rate and are substantially overrepresented in stop-and-search. The force’s officers remain far less ethnically diverse than the population they police. None of those facts, taken alone, proves institutional racism. Together, however, they leave questions which demand rather more than a shrug.

Hundreds of anti-migration protesters descended on Dover on 5 September, many dressed in black and concealing their faces behind balaclavas. Roads serving the Port of Dover were blocked and traffic was disrupted. Kent Police attended and engaged with the demonstration. Nobody was arrested on the day. Our own eyewitness later saw protesters near Sandwich and described those they saw as white.

Part Two then moved from what happened on the road to what happens in Kent more generally. Our analysis of the Home Office’s arrest data found that in 2024/25 Black people were arrested at 24.09 per 1,000 population, compared with 10.17 per 1,000 for White people — a Black-to-White arrest-rate disparity of 2.37 times. Black arrests rose from 764 to 1,367 in a year, an increase of 78.9%. White arrests rose 9.7%, while total Kent arrests increased by just 5.1%. The Home Office calculates these ethnicity arrest rates using self-defined ethnicity and Census population data.

Those figures establish disparity.

They don’t establish its cause.

That distinction matters, because Part Three asks a much more difficult question: when does disparity cease to be simply a statistic and become evidence of something institutional?

What does “institutionally racist” actually mean?

The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry didn’t define institutional racism as simply having racist individuals inside an organisation. Macpherson focused on the collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service because of colour, culture or ethnic origin, including discrimination embedded in processes, attitudes and behaviour. The report also expressly distinguished institutional racism from individual racism.

There’s another important distinction. Institutional racism isn’t a legal concept under the Equality Act 2010, and the Equality and Human Rights Commission doesn’t use it as a legal test against individual institutions. Police forces are, however, subject to the Public Sector Equality Duty and must have due regard to eliminating unlawful discrimination, advancing equality of opportunity and fostering good relations. That includes considering indirect discrimination produced by apparently neutral policies or practices.

So there’s no mathematical line at which a disparity of 1.5 times, twice or three times suddenly becomes “institutional racism”.

There is, though, a useful principle for dealing with disparities.

The 2017 Lammy Review called it “explain or reform”. Where an apparent ethnic disparity exists, criminal-justice institutions should provide an evidence-based explanation. If they can’t, Lammy recommended reform to address the disparity. Parliament subsequently urged police forces to adopt that approach by monitoring, investigating and explaining racial disparities rather than merely noting them.

That’s a sensible test to apply to Kent.

Racist conduct has been proved inside Kent Police

In November 2023, Temporary Detective Sergeant Jamie Weale was found guilty of gross misconduct following comments made to a colleague at Margate police station. The independent panel found that he had used racist and discriminatory language when discussing foreign gangs and had said he had “never met an honest Albanian”. He wasn’t dismissed; he was reduced in rank from sergeant to constable.

There is nuance here which shouldn’t be discarded. The panel said it couldn’t find evidence to support the proposition that Weale himself was racist and noted his previous work dealing with hate crime. But it nevertheless found that the language he had used was racist, discriminatory and capable of perpetuating racial prejudice. Kent Police’s head of professional standards said discriminatory language and behaviour were unacceptable and had no place in the force.

Then came former PC Owen Mills.

A Kent Police misconduct panel found in March 2026 that, while Mills was a student officer, he had said during a discussion about abortion that he “would abort the baby if he knew it was black”, or words to that effect. The panel found that the comment had been made and described it as “overtly racist”.

The panel went further. It concluded that the language was intentional and deliberate, displayed an underlying discriminatory belief, and assessed both the harm and Mills’s culpability as high. His conduct amounted to gross misconduct. Because he had already left policing, the available disciplinary action was a finding that he would have been dismissed had he still been serving, which the panel imposed.

Accuracy matters here too. A separate allegation that Mills had suggested police officers should wear Ku Klux Klan-style white hoods was not proved. Nor was an allegation concerning sexually motivated conduct. The panel found the abortion remark proved; it didn’t find every allegation against him proved.

Two cases cannot establish that an entire organisation is institutionally racist.

They establish something narrower, but beyond sensible dispute: racist conduct has existed among Kent Police officers and has resulted in findings of gross misconduct.

Then there are the complaints

The Independent Office for Police Conduct’s figures for the year to 31 March 2026 record 179 allegations of discriminatory behaviour involving Kent Police. Of those, 84 concerned race — 47% of the discrimination allegations recorded. There had been 83 race allegations in 2024/25, while the 2025/26 average among Kent’s group of most similar forces was 60.

But there’s an important piece of context. Nationally, race accounted for 48% of discrimination allegations, almost identical to Kent’s 47%. Kent therefore wasn’t unusually high on that particular proportional measure.

More importantly still, these are allegations, not 84 findings of racial discrimination.

The IOPC says the discriminatory-behaviour category includes cases where discrimination was involved or was perceived to be involved, as well as possible discrimination identified during the handling or investigation of a complaint. Complaints can relate to an individual officer or to the organisation. Describing the 84 as “proven cases of racism” would therefore be wrong.

What the figures establish is that race continues to arise repeatedly in complaints about Kent Police. Whether any particular allegation was substantiated is a different question.

A police force which doesn’t yet look like the population it serves

Representation gives us a different measure because this time we’re looking inside the organisation.

At 31 March 2025, Kent Police recorded 4,162 police officers. Of those, 157 were recorded as ethnic minority officers and 79 had declined to state their ethnicity. Kent Police’s own published proportion of ethnic-minority police officers was therefore 3.77%.

Using the same broad ethnic groupings, Kent Police’s report records the 2021 Kent and Medway population as 88.6% White. The Black, Asian, Mixed and Other broad groups therefore comprised 11.4% of the population. On those measures, the ethnic-minority share of Kent Police officers was roughly one-third of the corresponding population share.

The gap also appears in promotion data. During 2024/25 Kent Police recorded 118 police-officer promotions. Ethnic-minority officers accounted for 2.54%, which equates to three of those promotions. None of the three chief-officer promotions, 11 chief-inspector promotions or 26 inspector promotions recorded in the table involved an ethnic-minority officer. One of four chief-superintendent promotions did, as did two of 74 sergeant promotions.

Recruitment presents a somewhat better picture. Kent Police appointed 280 police officers in 2024/25, of whom 17 — 6.07% — were ethnic minority. The previous year it had been 14 of 273, or 5.13%.

None of this proves that Kent Police discriminates when recruiting or promoting officers. The existing workforce, eligibility for promotion, applicant pools, length of service and other variables matter.

What the figures do establish is that the officer workforce remains markedly less ethnically diverse than Kent and Medway’s population.

And who gets stopped?

Kent Police’s own 2024/25 figures record Black people as 3.1% of the Kent and Medway population, but they accounted for 8.6% of stop-and-searches — 1,275 searches. White people represented 88.6% of the population and accounted for 75.8% of searches.

Of those 1,275 searches involving Black people, 289 resulted in arrest — 22.7%. Among White people, 2,063 of 11,181 searches resulted in arrest — 18.5%. These are “resultant arrest rates”: the proportion of searches ending in an arrest. They aren’t the population arrest rates used in Part Two.

There are limitations here too. Stop-and-search records count search incidents, not necessarily unique people, so somebody searched several times can appear several times. Population comparisons also use resident populations and don’t capture commuters, tourists, students or other visitors; the Home Office specifically cautions against treating force-wide resident-population rates as a perfect description of who is actually present when police powers are used.

Even with those cautions, Kent Police itself places the 3.1% Black population share beside the 8.6% stop-and-search share in its statutory report. The disparity is therefore not something we’ve manufactured by stitching unrelated figures together.

And it sits beside the separate Part Two finding that the Black population arrest rate in Kent during 2024/25 was 2.37 times the White rate.

Again, disparity is not proof of discrimination.

But disparity is something which can be investigated and explained.

Kent Police itself says it wants to become “anti-racist”

Kent Police’s Diversity, Equality and Inclusion Strategy 2025–2028 says the force is fully committed to the Police Race Action Plan and intends to work with Kent’s Black community to build a police service which is “anti-racist, trusted, representative, fair, and inclusive.”

One of its four Race Action Plan workstreams is particularly relevant to this investigation:

“Not over-policed (Use of powers).”

Elsewhere, Kent Police commits itself to ensuring diverse communities aren’t over-policed or under-protected and to proactively rooting out discriminatory behaviour within the force. Its 2026 statutory report also says the team responsible for the Police Race Action Plan aims to address racial disparities in policing and improve outcomes for Black communities.

Those commitments aren’t an admission that Kent Police is institutionally racist.

They do demonstrate that racial disparity, Black communities’ confidence in policing, representation and the use of police powers are recognised by Kent Police itself as organisational issues requiring action.

The College of Policing gives us another example. Kent Police’s “I See You” programme began in March 2025 and is intended to improve Black communities’ trust and confidence in the use of police powers, increase engagement and improve retention of Black police officers and staff. The College lists the programme as a pilot and labels the practice “Untested”.

Feedback reported by the College has been positive. But there is also a significant limitation: it says a lack of tracking tangible outcomes has made it difficult to determine the programme’s success. For an initiative intended to improve trust, representation and policing outcomes, that measurement gap matters.

There is evidence pointing the other way

A proper investigation has to test the proposition rather than simply accumulate material which supports it.

His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services rated Kent Police “good” at using police powers and treating people fairly and respectfully in its 2023–25 PEEL assessment. Inspectors reviewed a sample of 165 stop-and-search records from calendar year 2022 and estimated that 88.5% had reasonable grounds recorded. Of 24 records involving people from ethnic minorities, 22 had reasonable grounds recorded.

That is significant evidence. It weighs against any simplistic assertion that Kent’s stop-and-search disparity means officers routinely search ethnic-minority people without reasonable grounds.

But its limitations matter too. The sample concerned searches carried out in 2022, not 2024/25, and only 24 of the reviewed records involved people from ethnic minorities. It therefore can’t, by itself, explain the later disparity between the Black population share and the proportion of stop-and-searches.

The evidence, in other words, isn’t one-way traffic.

So, is Kent Police institutionally racist?

On the evidence we’ve established, we don’t believe it would be responsible to state that as a proven fact.

Macpherson’s concept concerns collective organisational failure, policies, processes, attitudes and behaviour. Parliament itself later declined to apply an institutional-racism test to individual police forces without the kind of detailed institutional examination carried out by Macpherson into the Metropolitan Police or by Wendy Williams into the Home Office.

We haven’t carried out that sort of organisation-wide inquiry into Kent Police.

Nor can statistics tell us motive. Complaints aren’t findings. Workforce underrepresentation doesn’t, by itself, prove discriminatory recruitment. A disparity in police powers doesn’t prove every decision contributing to that disparity was racist. And HMICFRS has independently produced evidence that weighs in Kent Police’s favour.

But the opposite proposition — that there is consequently nothing significant to explain — is equally difficult to sustain.

We have proven racist gross misconduct, 84 race-discrimination allegations in a year, an officer workforce recorded as 3.77% ethnic minority against an 11.4% broad ethnic-minority population share, Black people comprising 3.1% of the population but 8.6% of stop-and-searches, and a Black arrest rate 2.37 times the White rate in 2024/25.

Those figures cannot simply be added together like numbers on a scorecard to produce a verdict of institutional racism.

They do produce something else: a case for explanation.

And that takes us straight back to Lammy. Where an apparent ethnic disparity exists, the answer shouldn’t be speculation from either side. It should be evidence. Explain it — or reform what produces it.

Then there is Dover.

Hundreds of anti-migration protesters, many masked, blocked roads around one of Britain’s most important ports. Kent Police attended. There were no arrests on the day. That doesn’t establish racial discrimination, and we can’t know from that event alone how police would have responded to a different crowd.

But after examining the arrest disparity, stop-and-search, workforce representation, complaints and proven racist misconduct, asking whether race ever affects the exercise of police discretion is hardly an unreasonable question.

Chief Constable Tim Smith (pictured), who has ultimate responsibility for the policing service delivered by Kent Police, should therefore explain what analysis the force carried out after Black arrests increased 78.9% in 2024/25; what it believes explains the Black-to-White arrest disparity; what analysis it has undertaken of Black overrepresentation in stop-and-search; what lies behind the representation and promotion gaps; and what measurable outcomes its Race Action Plan and “I See You” programme have produced.

And there is one final question.

Is the Chief Constable satisfied that hundreds of Black protesters, dressed and behaving as the Dover protesters did, would have received precisely the same policing response?

We don’t know the answer.

After three parts, that remains the question at the heart of this investigation:

Does Kent Police police everyone equally?

We’ll leave you to decide that.

The Shepway Vox Team

Dissent is NOT a Crime