Dealing with diversity issues at police assessment centres

Any candidate for the police service must be aware of the emphasis placed by the service on weeding out any behaviour whatsoever that can be termed as racist, sexist or homophobic. No right-thinking person would disagree with this.

What most people find difficult to believe is the very wide-ranging definition of “inappropriate behaviour” and “respect for diversity” that the police service professes to believe him. Clearly, any candidate who uses insulting words, phrases or behaviour at assessment centre should be failed. The difficulty arises for many candidates because they do not realise what the police define as inappropriate conduct. For example, the use of a phrase such as “these foreigners” when dealing with an issue in a role-play could well be considered as displaying a racist attitude and therefore result in an automatic fail.

Candidates may find for example that in some of the documents they are given to read before a role-play, that a senior manager is referred to by the name of “Jay”. It the candidate then enters the role play where they meet someone other than “Jay” and constantly refers to this manager’s gender as being male, they will be marked down. This is because of course the name can also be used by a female. It will be argued therefore that by assuming that the manager is male, the candidate is biased towards sexist behaviour. It is not the purpose of this book to debate whether this is going too far or not but such issues need to be borne in mind by candidates.

There are numerous other examples. In the North of England it is normal for people to address others as “love” or “duck”. Visit Liverpool or Manchester for example and chances are you will be addressed by one of these two terms several times within the space of an hour. Using them in an assessment centre however will be seen as patronising and potentially sexist. Therefore they could be the cause of a failure. To be fair of course, I know a lot of females who really resent a complete stranger calling them “love”. I can completely accept that they view the term as being patronising. This is the reasoning behind it being deemed sexist.

When I speak about these issues on a course, I can see the looks of disbelief on candidates’ faces. I have a theory that the average candidate still believes that the last thing the police want is people who will challenge such “minor” issues. There are those who still believe the police service “looks after its own” and would not wish anyone to join who was going to start criticising people for using such phrases as the ones above. I can assure you after 15 years in the police, that these beliefs are completely false. Candidates need to accept that any comments that can in any way be construed as being sexist, racist or homophobic, will result in failure. If you do not subscribe to this belief, and actively follow it at the assessment centre, then you will fail.

As far as the police service is concerned, respect for diversity is the single most important core competency being assessed. Consider this. There are seven areas of core competency, which will be described shortly. In six of them, candidate’s marks are averaged out and if the average mark is above the required level, then the candidate will pass. In the competency area of diversity, a single grade D will result in an automatic fail even if every other grade achieved on the day by the candidate is a Grade A.

I cannot stress strongly enough that if you are not prepared to act on this essential piece of information, you have dramatically reduced your chances of passing the assessment centre.

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