Comment by Justin Gest:
Policing under the veil in Yorkshire
Having police officers wear Islamic dress might be gimmicky, but the 'In Your Shoes' exercise shouldn't be dismissed.
Two South Yorkshire
police officers and a police community support officer
spent a day in Islamic dress, hijab headscarves and niqab veils, as part of an effort to improve officers' cultural sensitivity and relations with local Muslims.
Taken around a neighbourhood by a set of local Muslim women, two were completely covered in loose black fabric with only narrow slits over their eyes, while another wore an ornate gown and a colourful headscarf.
Ever since, the officers have been harassed more than the women they sought to understand. According to the Daily Mail, critics have "
lined up" to denounce the scheme as a waste of police officers' paid time and unnecessary. I don't know what kind of
crime spree took place through Sheffield while these three officers were learning about community members' lives, but it hasn't produced the press that this (admittedly gimmicky) effort did. In any case, the manufactured outrage is largely baseless.
If you ask a set of Muslim youths to identify the most common sources of discrimination, the typical response is to point to third-party social rejection and interactions with police officers.
Police officers represent the point where government policy and discourse impact affected parties – where the rubber hits the road. In this way, they are collective ambassadors of the British legal system and public sphere. Officers have the power to determine individuals' perceptions of how just, equal and well-intentioned public policy is.
Their sensitivity to, comfort within, and understanding of their local community is therefore crucial.
While this "In Your Shoes" scheme produced a nice photo opportunity (as well as some adverse publicity) I expect that it also had a major effect on the perceptions of the participating officers.
According to the Daily Mail, a police spokesman said the officers "believed they were being monitored by security staff when they went into a shop and were stared at in the street. But she admitted that they were unsure whether this was down to their clothing or being overly conscious of their appearance."
Welcome to the life of a niqabi British Muslim. They're unsure too.
And it is this regular uncertainty about social judgment that complicates daily existences. Muslim males report similar insecurity about fellow Britons' impressions when they board public transport in a prayer gown or carry a backpack.
An awareness of British Muslims counter-paranoia to the British government's paranoia about terrorism should not stop the government's preventative policies, but it should inform their creation and implementation. And I believe it will in South Yorkshire.
Besides, each article citing the outrage over the dress-up scheme has quoted one concerned person in particular. The suddenly-prolific Douglas Murray, director of the Centre for Social Cohesion, said: "You just couldn't make it up. … This is a complete waste of police time and taxpayers' money. It's not the duty of police to empathise with particular sections of the community."
Right. Who wants their local police officers to have a humane side anyway? Of course, this is the same director of the Centre for Social Cohesion
who wrote that the post-7/7 "war on terror" should entail "winding up the groups and mosques that have made Britain the central Islamist-terror meeting point in the west. For too long we have afforded rights, which we have fought for generations to achieve, to people who do not believe in such rights and only use them to abuse us and our society." Social cohesion, indeed.
For real social cohesion in a diverse and dynamic Great Britain, police officers and all of us would do well to try to understand our neighbours as much as we expect them to understand us.
Source
Justin Gest is co-director of the Migration Studies Unit and Ralph Miliband Scholar in Political Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research examines socio-political alienation among Muslim minorities in western democracies.