Making room for conflicting feelings will help police promote diversity and inclusion
Diversity and inclusion within the police creates opportunities but also meets resistance. Professor by special appointment and former police officer, Saniye Çelik, emphasises how ambivalent feelings about D&I are essential to the learning process and can lead to informed decisions and real change.
Although the police have been pursuing diversity policy for over 40 years, the road to full inclusion is still a long one. Police from a migrant background or with another gender identity than male or female often do not feel fully accepted. ‘The police force is becoming more diverse but it’s a slow process. Recruiting people is not enough; it’s equally, if not more important that they stay. And that is where things often go wrong. One in five police officers who leave has served under three years’, says Çelik, who was one of the few women starting out as a police constable in the 1990s.
Parking problems on a nudist beach
In her inaugural lecture, she describes how she and a female colleague were sent to resolve a parking problem at a nudist beach. It was a joke. ‘On the way back, we decided not to say anything at the station so our male colleagues would not get to have their fun. For me, it felt like teasing and a bit of a betrayal knowing that pranks like these were part of the job. Then at least. Now you have to think twice before doing something like that. The context has changed, as has the urgency of diversity and inclusion. That was a good 35 years ago.’
Ambivalent feelings as a learning process
Despite the steps the police force has taken to support diversity and inclusion, not everyone is pleased with the attention it receives. ‘There are plenty of police who think the subject is woke. But luckily there are lots of people who do see the need’, says Çelik. ‘You need to get this mixture of positive and negative feelings, so the ambivalence, out in the open. Explore the resistance. Then you’ll make better decisions as an organisation.’
Slow as they may be, the police are making progress and continue to pioneer within the public sector, says Çelik. ‘The rest of government is secretly looking over their shoulders to learn from them.’ The recent open letter by civil servants to the Minister of Foreign Affairs stresses the seriousness of everyday experiences of racism, discrimination and ethnic profiling. ‘What has been on the police agenda for years is now inevitably surfacing in other organisations.’
Underlying mechanisms
‘The diversity and inclusion narrative is based on emotion rather than research’, says Çelik. And that happens to be her biggest ambition: to get the police to develop more evidence-based diversity and inclusion policy. ‘So far I have mainly investigated whether there is exclusion in the police force. Do police officers leave the organisation because they do not feel at home? The answers are yes and yes, and we could do a further hundred studies on this. But what I now want to find out with my PhD candidates and research team is what the underlying mechanisms are and what the police organisation can do about that.’
Education
Ultimately, the new scientific insights should lead to interventions to help the police evolve. ‘Society is calling for justice and equality, as are our students, and the voices are getting louder. As a professor, you also have an important role in education. Ideally, you should integrate research findings into various degree programmes. Then not just the police force benefits but academic education too.’
The inaugural lecture Van willen naar zijn. De ambivalentie over diversiteit en inclusie can be viewed in a live stream on 22 November at 16:15.