Police academy: 'You can't solve the issue of racism from the outside'

PCs Saiyra Khan and Louis Cater believe they can help policing change and improve

For trainee detective Saiyra Khan, the decision to become a police officer was a hard, but a vital one.

"You can't really solve the issue of racism within an organisation on the outside," she says.

She is one of 28 Greater Manchester Police (GMP) officers joining the 2023 detective academy intake, alongside 199 other new recruits from across England and Wales.

The programme trains the university graduates in core detective skills and makes them ready to join the front line in 13 weeks.

The course is run by Police Now, a Home Office-funded charity launched in 2014 which has a number of aims, including bringing more women and people from ethnic minorities into the ranks.

And while the issues that it hopes to overcome are not new to policing, it has found itself in the spotlight after crises in policing.

A number of high-profile convictions, including those of Met officers Wayne Couzens and David Carrick, and damning reports, such as Baroness Louise Casey's review of the Met, which found evidence of racism, misogyny and homophobia in its ranks, have seen public trust in the police dwindle.

And the problems are far from limited to the Met.

In 2020, HM Inspectorate of Constabulary revealed GMP, England's second-largest force, had failed to record about 80,000 crimes in a year and closed cases without proper investigation.

GMP Chief Constable Stephen Watson told the BBC two months after he took charge in May 2022 that it was making "great strides" in its efforts to improve.

The course saw an intake of 227 university graduate officers in 2023

BBC Radio Manchester was given exclusive access to follow PC Khan and her fellow GMP recruits through the National Detective Programme.

The 22-year-old from Manchester says while there were people from ethnic minorities in the police, she did not feel "they're as represented as people want them to be".

She says she was initially "scared" at the prospect of joining up, as "you do see a lot of racism within the police, but I just feel you can tackle it yourself from the inside".

"You can't really solve the issue of racism within an organisation on the outside," she adds.

Saiyra says she was initially "scared" at the prospect of joining up

Fellow GMP trainee Louis Cater says racism within policing did not deter him from signing up.

"It never made me reluctant to join [and] it never made me think twice," the 24-year-old from Wigan says.

"If anything, it made me want to join it more.

"It'll show the public that everyone is equal."

Richard Wood, who leads Police Now's detective academy, says he has been left "deeply saddened by some of the recent events".

"Policing has got some challenges at the moment, but this academy can only help to overcome them," the former detective adds.

In the four years the charity has been running the detective programme, 67% of trainees have been women and 15% have been people from ethnic minorities.

It says the next academy in 2023 will have 29% of recruits from a non-white background.

Louis says there are "many people, including myself, that think the police can change"

Clare Power, Police Now's director of recruitment, says she wants the new officers to help restore public trust, particularly within communities that have historically been wary of the police.

"Everything we do to attract people is talking about the realities of policing and what policing is driving to do," she says.

She says forces want "to be better" and "change in terms of what people want from policing".

"When you think about trust in policing and the different groups of people across the country, it's clearly really important that policing is representative of the communities it seeks to serve," she adds.

"People want to see people that look like them in their local police service, it increases understanding."

Anna says she is "determined to be a great detective"

More than 2,600 officers have been trained and developed through the charity's detective academy and graduate leadership programme since it began.

PC Anna Myerscough is one of 168 female recruits on the current detective programme.

The 22-year-old from Trafford says the work "that we're doing and what we're studying is so interesting".

"I'm just determined to be a great detective.

"I'm just eager to get out there and do it."

Mr Wood says the trainee detectives on his programme are "more representative [of society] than probably most of policing is", adding: "I'm not going to pretend that we're going to solve all the problems overnight... but it's certainly a step in the right direction."

Ms Power says she believes Police Now is succeeding in its aim to help transform policing and communities.

"Some of the culture [the new recruits] will go into, they will be driven to support policing to change and push policing to think differently," she says.

"That is not easy, but it needs to be done."

PC Cater says the intake at the 2023 academy shows that lots of "people with different ethnic backgrounds still want to join the police, even though there's many problems still occurring".

"There's many people, including myself, that think the police can change and that people like me with a minority background can make a difference," he adds.