The Periscope Post

Scotland Yard Commander Ali Dizaei has been jailed for four years following his conviction on corruption charges, making him the most senior police officer to see jail time for corruption in 30 years. Dizaei was found guilty of using his position to attempt to bully and ultimately frame a web designer with whom he’d had a personal conflict.

Police corruption is certainly an element in this story, but the bigger context, as several newspapers have highlighted, is race: Opponents of Iranian-born Dizaei, former president of the National Black Police Association, claim that he used race as a kind of bulletproof vest of political correctness and that his rise through the ranks was hastened by the Met’s attempt to overcome its image of being “institutionally racist.”

Dizaei has been branded a “criminal in uniform” by the prosecution, but Hugh Muir writing in The Guardian today says that it will be minority officers who ultimately pay the price for Dizaei’s criminal conduct. While it’s laudable that Scotland Yard finally cleaned up the mess they made in investigating Dizaei after concerns over his integrity came to light years ago, Muir wrote that “the case of Ali Dizaei is clouded by context and history.”

“Many minority officers don’t feel like celebrating because they still face an uphill battle to progress their careers in the police force, and whatever they thought of Dizaei personally, they saw him as someone with nerve enough to articulate those concerns. With his conviction, they see themselves suffering collateral damage,” he says.

Andy Hayman, former assistant commissioner at Scotland Yard, wrote in The Times today that the investigation into Dizaei and his ultimate conviction proves that the Met doesn’t have to be scared of dealing with racially sensitive issues. Dizaei and his supporters claimed that he was the victim of a “racist witch hunt”, Hayman writes, but the investigation showed him as he really was:  A bully with a badge. Dizaei’s conviction shows “that the police can afford to be less frightened about dealing with racially sensitive issues [because] it is no longer the case that the default position of a jury is to assume that the police are racist.”

The Telegraph, in its editorial about Dizaei’s conviction, writes, “As the country’s most high-profile black officer, Dizaei had the opportunity to set an example for other ethnic minority officers. Instead, he arrogantly took it upon himself to engage in a guerrilla war with his employers that only helped poison race relations in the force.”