The Met's Problem with Ableism

Disability within the Metropolitan Police Service

You wouldn’t know from looking at me, but I’m disabled. Not disabled in the way I understood it when I was a young child, in a wheelchair because I am paraplegic, or having a lack control of my body because of a condition like cerebral palsy. I believe it was those sorts of conditions that framed the label ‘disability’ historically. However, the world, and the law, has moved on and is much more nuanced now, and I’m not sure the Metropolitan Police Service has.

There is now a legal definition under the Equality Act of 2010. Disability is to have a physical or mental impairment, and the impairment has a substantial and long-term adverse effect on the person’s ability to carry out normal day-to-day activities. That does define the condition I have.

I have Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), in essence a progressive disease which means my exhalations are restricted. This also means if nothing else gets me first, I will eventually die of the disease. How long, who knows, but it is my job to make sure that it progresses as slowly as possible, to let other things like old age get a chance to get in there first.

It also means that I can’t get as much oxygen as I used to and can have a build-up of carbon dioxide in my lungs. I find that I literally can’t get out of breath, because I can’t speed up my breathing. Well, I can speed up my in-breath, but the out-breath is very stubborn. Don’t get me wrong, there was a time when I constantly sounded like Darth Vader, and getting out every single breath was physically demanding, but I’m not there now. It is where things will eventually get to again, and I dread its return.

I used to be a Police Officer, and am recently retired due to my ill health, my disability. I couldn’t contemplate doing Officer Safety Training now; it requires too much oxygen. Walking up a hill is bad enough, I gear down, change my paces to smaller ones. I also realise that anxiety is baked into the condition. We’ve all had a bad experience when we can’t breathe, maybe playing in a pool with a sibling, being pushed under, when panic sets in rather quickly. Well, it is like that but a constant slow version of it. I am almost always fatigued. That’s not tired or sleepy, I get that still when I get up early before work, or stay up too late. It’s the feeling of lacking the energy to push forward, and it’s not something I would have understood before.

These are some of the things that make my COPD a disability; it has a substantial and long-term effect on me and it isn’t going away. It also hit me all of a sudden, it wasn’t a slow build up like most people. I smoked till 2015, which is the strongest predictor of getting COPD, and grew up in a cloud of my mother’s smoke. But it was after having Covid that things took a sudden downturn. There was a three-month build up and then three of the worst months of my life, until finally I got the right treatment to stabilise me, getting me to about where I am now.

The Metropolitan Police Service, or the Met, was good to start with. I was placed on recuperative duties, and no real pressure was placed on me. I ended up working in a ‘Duties’ department through Covid, trying to ensure staffing levels within a number of custody suites, which was obviously busy. I also recognised that I no longer risked being assaulted by detainees, so there were good and bad aspects.

It wasn’t until after my diagnosis that things took a sharp turn for the worst. I will qualify that by saying I was successful in a claim at an Employment Tribunal, where I self-represented at the full merits hearing. It was exhausting; in breaks I would hook myself up to my oxygen concentrator and ration energy drinks to get through the day. However, I got through it, and the Judge and Panel found in my favour.

What emerges from the judgement is an understanding of how the Met goes wrong in its dealing with disabled people, how it does institutionally discriminate. And I know the current Metropolitan Police Commissioner doesn’t like the term, because it has become politically charged as he sees it, but actually institutional discrimination is a great descriptive formulation that should be explained and used.

People almost always think of discrimination in the worst possible terms, the Transatlantic Slave Trade, the Rwandan Genocide or the Holocaust. These involve the hatred or belief in the lesser value of the ‘other’ as the cause of discrimination, with the discrimination being high harm. However, discrimination comes in a wide spectrum.  For example, when I overheard a friend say to another, ‘Don’t be a Jew’ when they went to pick up a fallen five-pence piece, I don’t think he was engaging with the meaning of the sentence, nor was there significant harm. It still remains a discriminatory thing to say, engaging with the stereotype that Jews are focused on money and are greedy, which itself arises from jobs which were forced on Jews during the Middle Ages, when Jews were not allowed to own property but were allowed to lend money.

When people fight against the label of institutional discrimination, it seems to me they are fighting against the accusation of individuals believing that others are of a lesser value or there is hatred of them. Most officers have seen it, when an incident involving the police is reported within a racist framework, or when a report of discrimination comes out, all officers get labelled as racists, or discriminators. I don’t believe that institutional discrimination requires hate or superiority in any way or form. It is simply the presence of a differential treatment that is baked into systems which prejudices outcomes. If you took out the humans and let the system itself make the decisions, those outcomes would still discriminate against certain people.

I will give you an example of institutional discrimination. There is no general provision of kosher food for persons detained by the Metropolitan Police Service, or at least there wasn’t when I was there. There is a local arrangement with a Rabbi who will provide kosher food if a person who keeps kosher dietary laws is arrested, but that is a charitable donation. If a custody suite is unaware of that arrangement, if they have a religious Jewish person detained, that person would be discriminated against as they can’t have suitable food provided. I would argue that the arrangement itself is discriminatory, as no other group requires such an arrangement. No person in the custody command of the Met, Met Detention, can be shown as racist as a result of this lack of provision, but the institutional discrimination is clear.

In much the same way, the Met has an ableism problem. It doesn’t hate people who are disabled, or think of them as lesser humans. It just doesn’t look after people with health challenges as it should do, and that is the experience of all the people I have spoken to with health and disability challenges during my career.

It is quite easy to understand really; everyone who joins the police as an officer is expected to have minimum health standards, and be able to do such things as be on patrol for hours on end and detain other individuals. As a result, most officers are in reasonable health, and until age catches up with them, most have limited personal experience with ill health or disability which would enable them to empathise with those who are ill or disabled. I believe that this limits the capacity of the Met in their dealings with disabled staff, whether this disability is long standing or develops during a person’s service.

This is compounded with another issue that is an integral part of the police, we expect officers and members of the public to follow instructions. With members of the public, if we are giving instructions, rather than making requests, it should be due to there being a lawful power behind us, and so there is often consequences for the individual who does not follow the instruction. Within the service, officers are expected to follow lawful orders irrespective of their own beliefs or thoughts.

It is the same in most jobs really, but in the Police, I think it is fair to say that this is a heightened expectation, similar to orders in the army or other disciplined service. As a result, if someone’s working conditions need to change, or a new task needs to be done, then an officer is expected to follow orders, accept the change, or do that task.

But what if the demand itself is unreasonable for an individual with a disability? More often than not that person is labelled as a problem, someone who puts up obstacles, in the Met.

I witnessed an Inspector who needed some property to be reviewed, catalogued and moved in a station I was working in. He instructed a disabled officer to do this task, which for a non-disabled officer would have been a reasonable instruction. However, in requesting it to be done he didn’t ask if the officer was able to complete the task, if she would require any support or reasonable adjustment. You could see a look of being trapped come over the officer’s face, and she became very short with the Inspector. Her fear of negative consequences caused this unusual tone to her normally mild and pleasant manner.

Speaking to the officer later, it became apparent that she had previously raised finding such tasks difficult, and that some pressure had been exerted on her to comply with such instructions.  She was left with the choice of doing the task and likely being in pain for a number of days thereafter, raise her concerns just to be ignored and pressurised into doing the task, or refuse and have to deal with the consequences of that refusal. All options clearly seemed to carry their risk causing her visible discomfort. The officer expressed to me that all she wanted to do was complete her allotted work to the high standards she maintained and be left alone.

The Inspector did not hate the officer; he just didn’t understand her or his responsibilities under the Equality Act 2010. To his mind, she was a ‘taskable’ officer, meaning that asking her to do this job would not leave a critical role unstaffed, who he could give orders to like any other officer. However, had he approached her in an open manner, asking her would she cope with the task rather than giving the instruction, she could have responded with what she could do with regard to the task, what support she might need, or why it was not appropriate for her at all. However, that is not the way the Met works; officers are given instructions from those in higher ranks and they are expected to unquestioningly carry them out.

The discrimination I faced whilst working for the Met demonstrated this tendency to the extreme. The issues that caused me to make an Employment Tribunal claim surrounded a work roster that was being imposed upon me that was not suitable to my condition, either at the time or in the long run, and without any form of meaningful consultation. The unsuitability of that working roster is now the position of the Met, in so far as a Met employed Selected Medical Practitioner has agreed that I am unable to work full time and as a result I have been retired.

There is a requirement to make reasonable adjustments for a person with a disability, and for public institutions to attempt to engage disabled people in public life. In my case, the starting purpose of the changes to my roster were for the practical reason that suited the needs of the department in which I was working; at that point, no one hated me or wanted to make my life more difficult. However, it didn’t suit my needs as well as failing to give me a required notice period. As the judgement states, “The Claimant was entitled to the minimum 28 days’ notice. Moreover, he was entitled to have the extant OH recommendations heeded’. I made representations to a number of superiors, as well as utilising grievance procedures, that these changes were not suitable. The roster change was reversed, however in the process I had dared to challenge the authority of the relevant officers by my actions.

In what the Employment Judge stated was very unusual and unexplained behaviour, the same e-mail that returned my roster to what it had been also had an instruction to change it again to the new roster, even though my needs still hadn’t been considered, but with the intent to give me the required notice. Incidentally, due to the underhanded way the second change was made, the relevant Inspector again failed to give me the required notice.

The judgement is very telling in this matter. The Judge wrote, “On the second occasion that Insp W changed his roster, it was done as a show of authority, to put the Claimant in his place, because he had raised disability-related concerns about the first change to his roster”. It further reads, “…the irritation she demonstrated when he challenged her decision to change the roster, we consider this act to be a show of authority / power in response to him having made disability-related protestations to the changes. She was affronted that he did not simply accept her mandate and that he was raising disability-related concerns instead of acquiescing to the change”.

It is relevant that ‘authority / power’ are raised in the judgement. Acts of discrimination require the discriminator to have some form power over the discriminated, as is the case in a disciplined, rank-based organisation. This is part of what makes the police more susceptible to discrimination. Without this power imbalance, the person discriminated against would not accept the act. Equally, when an imbalance does exist and discrimination takes place, only a higher power, such as an Employment Tribunal, can correct the matter if the discriminator is unwilling to review their acts.

In writing this, I fully admit that one anecdotal story does not make an organisation such as the Met institutionally ableist. But I know that it is not just one story. I was placed on a team with numerous restricted officers in the subsequent period and I was now more attuned to issues faced by disabled officers as my experience enabled me to be more empathetic. I have come to the conclusion that the discrimination I faced was not unusual at all, but is in fact the norm in the Met for disabled officers, and officers suffer from extreme anxiety when dealing with the Met vis-à-vis their disabilities.

I would also point to a number of things which provide support to my belief in institutional discrimination regarding disability in the Met. For example, following the success of my claim against the Commissioner of the Metropolis, I advanced the position that a Preparation Time Order (PTO) should be given in relation to my claim. A PTO can only be awarded when a party has made a claim or response that had no reasonable prospect of success, or acted in some way unreasonably in their conduct surrounding the claim. My point was that there was no reasonable chance of success for the Met in defence of the claim.

In settlement, the Met agreed to this position and a sum of money was given for this purpose. This indicates to me that those in the leadership, and the legal team of the Met who defended the claim, were blind to the discrimination that I had faced. And this blind spot occurs as a result of the issues I have raised above; the lack of understanding which officers have in regard to disability, aggravated by the disciplined nature of and power imbalances in the Met.

Further to this, I also point out that the Met often settles such claims, placing disclosure restrictions on officers, as reported in The Express following the issue being raised by the Police Federation ( https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1736531/police-crime-whistleblowers-uk ). This again speaks of the power imbalances between claimants and the Met. Bringing such a matter to a tribunal is extremely taxing for victims of discrimination. Knowing this the Met sees offering a quick way out, with a bit of money, and the imposition of silence as the methodology of choice.

But why would an organisation attempt to silence a victim of discrimination? It is often said that it is to protect the organisation’s reputation. Forgetting that the Met’s reputation is in quite significant difficulty at the moment, the only way to excise discrimination from an organisation is to challenge it, observe it and learn from it. Silencing victims is the opposite of what a transparent, moral and courageous organisation should do. These are virtues the Met states it holds and exemplifies, but in regard to these matters it systematically falls short of these ideals.

The Met is not a business. It is a vital public service that provides societal stability, allowing the normal day to day activities of those it serves to continue as freely as possible. It holds a monopoly on its functions. Organisational reputation should therefore not be its focus, public service should. The fact that a well-functioning organisation that doesn’t discriminate is far more likely to have a positive reputation is also an inescapable reality.

And in a similar manner, in arranging for the settlement following my claim being successful, the Met further attempted to contractually silence me in the agreement we made. I refused; such silence would not have been imposed by the Employment Tribunal should the scheduled remedy hearing have taken place. More importantly to me, my challenge to the organisation remains to learn and take appropriate action as a result of my discrimination claim, and silence will not advance this aim.

It is this which makes the discrimination I faced a facet of institutional discrimination, and not simply the action of a number of poor leaders. The blindness that I have described, and the organisational need to protect itself, possibly also the leaders of the organisation who were involved, are part of the nuts and bolts of the Met.

The Met’s problem with ableism requires the attention that was given other forms of discrimination in the Casey Report. It needs officers to be asked to give their accounts of their experiences, to have an examination of the causes and possible solutions to the discrimination faced by disabled officers. Consideration needs to be given to the service provided to disabled members of the public, because if the Met is failing internally, I believe it is highly likely to be failing externally too.

There is a lot of pressure to reform the Met following the Casey Report’s publication, but I’m not sure if the pressure is being applied broadly enough to push the Met over the threshold of significant improvement, especially considering its self-protective nature. I am concerned that the Met lacks the courage needed to make the required changes, and without help we may lose this historically influential and world-famous organisation to some form of significant restructure, or indeed the Met being dissolved entirely into a number of smaller organisations. That to me as a loyal ex-officer would be a tragedy, even if it may also be a sad necessity.

https://www.gov.uk/employment-tribunal-decisions/mr-g-levy-v-the-commissioner-of-police-of-the-metropolis-3323840-slash-2021