Britain’s second largestpolice force has been accused of discriminating against white men bysetting itself targets to recruit and promote more black and femaleofficers.
West Midlands police chiefs have pledged toincrease the proportion of new recruits from “black or minority ethnic”groups to 12 per cent and women to 42 per cent.
Underthe new arrangements, agreed yesterday by the local police authority,the targets will grow by two per cent every year until 2012.
The force has been warned it is walking into a potentially illegal and costly minefield of political correctness.
Former West Midlands police superintendent and city councillor John Mellor described the move as a terrible mistake.
Mr Mellor, 80, who spent 34 years as a police officer and sat on national policing boards, said: “The people who should be promoted or permitted to enter professional organisations should be of the right calibre. The colour of their skin is immaterial.
“When I was commander, I had African, Caribbean and Asian officers who rose to the top because they were intelligent and they got there on their own merit.
“We don’t want targets, we want people who can do the job and do it properly. The police authority will have taken legal advice on this but given the problems other forces have had with targets like these I think this is a terrible mistake.”
The controversial recruitment strategies were devised after the 1999 Macpherson Report into the murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence, which labelled the police institutionally racist.
Forces across the country were ordered by Whitehall to recruit ethnic minority officers in direct proportion to the make-up of their community. Since then the number of ethnic minority officers nationwide has doubled, but it is still only around four per cent, compared with seven per cent in the population as a whole.