Here we provide our definition. In the period from the Scarman inquiry of the early 1980s through to the last few months, the accepted wisdom was that police racism existed but it was a case of 'a few rotten apples'. To root out racism, all that was needed was a combination of better training and more black coppers. Those who argued that racism was endemic to the very institutions of the police, courts and prisons were branded as rabble rousers. In the wake of the Lawrence inquiry, the rabble rousers have been vindicated.
Institutional racism is now flavour of the month.
The response from the police has been a carefully managed exercise in public relations which aims at giving the impression of change while doing nothing new. Met chief Paul Condon tries his best to reassure the public that he is committed to ending police racism. Meanwhile, some chief constables have followed a strategy of admitting the existence of institutional racism, in the hope that by admitting it nobody would notice if they didn't do anything about it. Whilst the 'rotten apples' analysis of the Scarman inquiry may have been implicitly rejected, its proposed solutions are all the more popular. More racial awareness training.