Among the “burning injustices” identified by Theresa May on the steps of Downing Street on her first day in her new job was “if you’re black, you’re treated more harshly by the criminal justice system than if you’re white”.
A generation ago the Prime Minister’s assertion would have been a truism. But after a quarter of a century of race awareness training, diversity monitoring, a pursuit of the equalities agenda as dogged as the pursuit of any individual villain or class of villains, and a management culture across both the police and courts services that can sometimes seem politically correct to a fault, we can surely ask whether that really is still the case; and if so, why?
