Race

"I am delighted to be the Equality Champion for race at Sussex Police. I am committed to delivering a quality service to our communities and look forward to working with partners, our ethnically diverse communities and colleagues in the force to achieve this.

I am really keen to continue to better understand our local communities and ensure we deliver the service they need. I know that by improved engagement and consultation we can achieve this."

- Superintendent Adam Hays, Equality Champion for Race Equality work in Sussex Police.

Priorities

• Improving our culture of inclusion and increase awareness and understanding of diversity and equality through the delivery of professional development awareness and training. Colleagues will have confidence to share their diversity data, particularly for non-visible differences, which will inform our processes and policies. Colleagues will be supported to challenge, overcome and reduce discriminatory behaviours or practices.
• Understanding, engaging and increasing satisfaction and confidence across all communities and victims of crime. Engaging with our communities to understand their concerns, improving communication, accessibility and building trust and confidence to ensure all communities have a voice, and are more confident in reporting hate crime and incidents, and be kept informed at each stage. 
• Attract, recruit and retain a diverse workforce. Ensuring robust analysis of workforce data to identify areas of concern or disproportionality to inform organisational priority, delivery of positive action interventions and organisational training and development needs.
• Progress understanding and address disproportionality in use of police powers. Work transparently with communities to progress understanding of disproportionality in the use of police powers, and engage effectively to tackle the concern this raises in our communities.

Our work in this area

As a public service

Priority areas in service delivery for Race Equality include the application of Stop and Search and tackling Hate crime. Gaining insight on public experiences is central to developing our approach.

A key part of this work involves engaging with people in our communities and regular consultation with our external Race Advisory Group (RAG). The RAG acts as a joint internal and external reference group.

The group has helped to inform a range of policing activities; including our strategy for recruiting a representative workforce, and scrutiny around the delivery of police stop and search powers.

If you would like to help Sussex police improve its service by becoming a member of the RAG email us at [email protected]

Community Engagement Advisors (CEAs)

The role of CEA was developed in 2013 throughout Sussex. Similar to other liaison officer roles, they receive specialist inputs to raise their knowledge and understanding, and create awareness in Race issues. CEAs act as a point of contact for ethnically diverse communities, building relations to increase trust, confidence and encourage reporting of crime.

As an employer

The diversity staff support group for Race is the Race Equality Network. This is led by Detective Constable Mo Dando. The Race Equality Network provide support for ethnically diverse employees in the workplace and is a network to identify organisational challenges and opportunities in the recruitment, retention and progression of ethnically diverse staff and officers. The RAG also supports the organisation by challenging our policies and processes around ethnically diverse recruitment, retention and progression.

If you work at Sussex Police and would like to become a member of the Race Equality Network email us at [email protected]