‘Go Back To Your Own Country’ – PC Recounts Racist Abuse On The Job
A Greater Manchester Police officer of Chinese descent has spoken about his experience of being regularly racially abused on the job, including being spat at.
PC Michael Chiu spoke out after Greater Manchester Police Federation announced it was backing the ‘Protect The Protectors: Stop Racism Against Police’ campaign. The campaign aims to collect data on the scale of racial abuse against officers, raise awareness of what the police are facing, do more to protect officers and staff, and ensure offenders are dealt with appropriately.
PC Michael Chiu grew up in Northern Ireland; his family ran a Chinese takeaway and would regularly receive racist abuse. He said: “People would get really drunk and racially abuse you. At one point someone actually threw a firework at us. They lit a firework on purpose and it zipped through the front door, it zigzagged and exploded above me, as a part of a racial attack.”
But when he joined Greater Manchester Police three years ago, PC Chiu said he didn’t expect to get so much abuse as a police officer. He said: “When I was growing up, you admired the police, but you were also a little bit scared. I’d think, ‘Better be polite’. So I always had the feeling that, when you became a police officer, people would be respectful. That was not the case – I learned that very quickly.
“I remember being racially abused for the first time on the job. Someone spewed some nonsense at me, saying, ‘You dirty chink, go back to your own country’, that sort of stuff. My colleague said, ‘Are you going to arrest him for that?’, and I was like, ‘I don’t know’. My colleague arrested him, because I was in such shock.”
But PC Chiu said the worst incident was when he was spat at. He recalled: “We’d been investigating a theft from a vehicle and we were doing CCTV along the road, and out of the corner of my eye I saw a massive fight going on. I went to stop them and one of the men went on a tirade.
“It was like he switched targets, and I became the next victim, and just started racially abusing the hell out of me. Then at the end, when I was trying to get him to the cell, he turned around and spat at me, and it hit my face. I thought, ‘That is wrong, that’s very wrong’. I’d rather get punched in the face than get spat on.”
The man who spat at him went to court, but PC Chiu said: “He didn’t really get anything for it. Because he was of no fixed abode he didn’t even get told to stay out of the city centre. So I still see him, I walk past him on the street. It angers me a lot, but I’m not the prosecution service, I don’t make these decisions. I’m just a simple PC.”
Another offender told PC Chiu that he hoped he died of cancer, and at one point, PC Chiu was the victim of racial abuse three times in the same month. After that, he told his sergeant the continuous abuse was affecting him, saying: “I need to take a break from this and take some annual leave.”
PC Chiu said he understood that some ethnic minority police officers didn’t want to report racist abuse because it was a lot of work getting it through the Crown Prosecution Service. But he said: “I arrest for it because I’m tired of it being an accepted norm of ‘You just have to take it and move on’. No. I’ve become a police officer to try to stop this nonsense.”
He added it was right that police officers arrested people who were racially abusing their colleagues: “We’re not just here to help the public, we’re here to help our own colleagues as well. If no one else arrests for it, then they are just going to carry on getting away with it.”
PC Chiu said it was important that the Federation was backing the Stop Racism Against Police campaign, because it raises awareness of what is happening to ethnic minority officers on the streets. He said: “No one ever talks about it. People say: ‘Tomorrow will be different’. But no, it will happen again.”
He said there should be more support from the force and more consequences for racial abusers: “It should be treated more seriously and more needs to happen, rather than people just getting a slap on the wrist.”
The mental health and wellbeing charity The Thin Blue Line UK is supporting the Protect The Protectors: Stop Racism Against Police campaign. To access free and confidential support, go to www.thinbluelineuk.org.uk/