BAPA history booklet

He was a member of the UK Police Counter Terrorism Board as well as the
Professional Reference Group for Police Leadership, with national lead for the
High Potential/Graduate Entry Scheme. He has been an assessor for Senior PNAC
and HPDS for a number of years.
He was also the Chair of the British Police Cricket Club from 2005 to 2011.
Anil says he always wanted a career in public service, and a career in protecting
people and their rights was challenging and worth considering. ‘Going to work
and not knowing what the shift held in store - and how I/we would deal with
those incidents – made it anything but a routine job. My initial posting to a busy,
urban station got me hooked’.
‘I was lucky to work in good team in my early years. The challenges came, not
from any public reaction, but when I applied for specialisation and promotion.
Racist language, whether direct or disguised as humour, was both overt and more
common in those days. It would be many years before the service would recognise
institutional racism as an issue. Someone who was willing to challenge unfairness,
particularly in policing, was probably a tag that I retained for the rest of my
career – and probably came at a price.’
Anil believes the service has taken big strides in addressing many of the problems
that were endemic a couple of decades ago – both in terms of equal
opportunities and service delivery.
In 1989, he was one of four officers (one Black and three Asian) who accused the
Nottinghamshire Force of racial discrimination in the workplace. It was the first
such case to be brought by serving officers in anywhere in Europe, eventually
becoming the longest running Employment Tribunal in the UK. Their victory in
that case became a watershed for equality in employment, and was a catalyst for
subsequent changes in policy and procedures. Channel 4’s Dispatches reconstruction
(Oct 1990) of the case gave it a national profile.
His most lasting memory, however, comes from a routine policing job as a
constable. Following the arrest of a couple of young offenders, Anil found a
hoard of stolen items in their garage, including a number of garden gnomes! He
scoured through carbon copies of paper crime reports and identified that they
had been stolen from a local address. With a couple of these gnomes under his
arms, he knocked on the door. An old lady saw me and collapsed in tears on the
doorstep. Her late husband had collected these over the years and had been a
happy memory for her till they were stolen. She sent me a Christmas card every
year until she herself passed away. That, to me, is quintessentially what policing is
about.
Anil would say the following to anyone considering a career in policing:
‘Policing is a challenging career but a good officer makes a difference to people’s
lives. Often, this is at some of their most significant moments.
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