Physically sick was how several senior British police officers described themselves feeling yesterday after watching a BBC television undercover documentary shown on Tuesday night in which several recruits expressed racist views of the most appalling kind.
The Home Secretary, Mr David Blunkett, who prior to the broadcast attacked the BBC over the programme, The Secret Policeman, had the good grace yesterday to add his voice to the criticism of the officers, describing their conduct as horrendous. Five officers, suspended in the morning, had resigned by evening.
Yesterday's reactions could hardly have been other than they were. After several decades during which various police forces in Britain have had to battle corruption within their own ranks, abuse of procedure, fabrication of evidence and naked perjury in the pursuit of jailing the wrong people (in some instances the wrong Irish people), the capacity to shock has been diminished. Nonetheless, what was shown to millions via their TV sets on Tuesday was truly shocking - the more so in that the programme was made and shown with the Stephen Lawrence case still fresh in most people's minds.
Mr Lawrence, it will be recalled, was the young black Londoner beaten to death in a racist assault. The investigation into his murder was so botched by Metropolitan Police officers that those responsible remain free. The significance of the Lawrence case was that examinations of the police conduct showed the London force to be infected with what was described as "institutional racism".
The television programme showed casual, and at times extreme, racism among a group of trainee officers from forces in North Wales, Cheshire and Greater Manchester. In the film, one officer was shown wearing a home-made Ku Klux Klan-style hood, saying he would bury an Asian under a train track and that Hitler had the "right idea". Stephen Lawrence had "deserved it" and his parents were "a f****** pair of spongers"; an ethnic Indian officer training with the others was also the target of abuse.
It is clear that the programme makers have done policing in the UK a service in exposing this sort of racism, dismaying as it is in recruits so young. Police forces in the UK will doubtless stiffen their in-house racism awareness training and reinvigorate recruitment drives among the ethnic minorities. But, just as in this State, casual lockeroom-type racial banter can create a climate of tolerance for intolerance that ends in tragedy. It will only stop through peer pressure.