ABSTRACT
In 1982 I published a paper in collaboration with Paul Gorman, a Detective Inspector of Police, on ‘Conservatism, Dogmatism, and Authoritarianism in British Police Officers’. 1 It reported the results of a carefully controlled investigation into the attitudes and personalities of police officers, and provided the first hard evidence that many experienced constables were virulent racists. The evidence came largely from standardized psychological tests, but the prejudices were most vividly illustrated in the short, open-ended essays that we asked the police officers to write on the subject of ‘Coloured Immigration’. Here are a few quotations from the essays: ‘Certain members of the coloured population that I have met are OK but the majority of youths of the W. Indian community are savage ignorant vicious thieving bastards’; ‘The immigration should be stopped immediately to prevent our towns and cities from becoming infested with coloureds’; ‘Over 50% of trouble caused today either by niggers or because of them. Most of them are just Dirty, Smelly back ward people who will never change in a month of Sundays. In my opinion most niggers especially Rasters should be wiped out of distinction.’
