Director of Research at ThinkLabour. Interested in politics and data. Interested in how people think about politics and data.
Christabel Cooper
Feels like I'm going a bit mad. Much of the commentary claims the guidance says police shouldn't treat people equally. It actually says they don't always have to treat everyone the same, with the explicit aim of achieving equal outcomes. Treating different people differently is...er... common sense.
It's a more complex argument than most of the contributions we've had so far, but imo a better one, because of that.
Really worth reading @thinklabour.bsky.social's new political economy piece. It sees technology as an engine of growth but in order to save social democracy not ignore it, as Blair's essay did. It proposes a bigger state, but one that stays in its lane and lets business get on with what it's good at
The ultimate aim is to not to privilege one group above another, it's literally the opposite - to ensure that everyone, regardless of race, religion, gender, disability or sexual orientation, receives the *same* level of service from the police.
And last week we had the "two tier policing" discussion when there is no actual evidence of this phenomenon (other than police continuing to stop and search brown people at a disproportionate rate).
And let's be clear, that suspicion is often pretty reasonable - we don't have to refer back decades to find evidence of institutional racism among the police, it's right here in Louise Casey's 2023 report www.met.police.uk/police-force...
