The politics of race, racism and policing has been a subject of controversy in some form in every post-war decade in Britain, making it a regular topic of public and policy discourse as well as social research from the 1960s. A principal theme across that span of time has been over-policing and the over-representation of black people through discriminatory policing. This has been a central element of debates about the nature of contemporary racism through the racialisation–criminalisation nexus (Gilroy 1987, Keith 1993). Sociology's contribution was to critique psychological and individualistic explanations based on prejudice and discrimination, in favour of cultural and structural models that identified a distinctive ‘cop culture’, through which the group solidarity of police officers combined with the everyday realities of police work to reproduce racist attitudes and practices (Holdaway 1996, Webster 2007, Reiner 2010).

Marxists and other critical sociologies took a more structural view of the police's role in ‘managing the underclass’ as part of their function within the state, which has been explored more recently in various cities in Europe, the US and beyond (Martinot 2003, Fassin 2013, Alves 2014, Camp and Heatherton 2016), where policing serves to keep young, usually male and often black, minorities and other marginalised groups in subjugated positions. In spite of sociological critique and many policy initiatives – such as more and different forms of police training, changes in the recruitment of officers, and employing more women and minority officers – the over-representation of black people, particularly males, in prisons, as subjects of policing and of criminal justice has been a dominant feature of race and criminal justice issues over many decades.

Sometimes, over-representation has been combined with attention to the under-representation of black (and Asian) people as employees in the police and in the criminal justice system, especially since the 1980s and the Scarman (1981) report. Nearly 20 years on from that, one recommendation from Macpherson (1999) to improve police relations with racial minorities was that all police forces should be mandated to increase the proportion of Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) officers serving in their ranks. In accepting this, the government set targets for all police forces in the UK to achieve a mandated number or proportion of BME officers in their ranks over a decade from 1999 to 2009.