Autobiography and memoir

Forced Out by Kevin Maxwell review – prejudice between police

A former detective recounts in shocking detail how he was abused by fellow officers for his race and sexuality and the dangers he faced in fighting for justice

Black people’s antipathy towards the police in the UK starts at a young age, from the moment officers transform themselves from protectors to oppressors. Black police recruits are still considered by many to be self-loathing traitors. It’s a harsh reality captured by Michael Fuller, the UK’s first black chief constable, in his memoir published last year, which took its title from the cry he heard from angry black protesters during the 1981 Brixton riots, directed at his police officers: “Kill the black one first.”

Nearly four decades after the riots, Kevin Maxwell acknowledges those conflicts felt by black officers, but he writes that nothing would have deterred him from realising his boyhood dream. When he joined the force in 2001, Maxwell writes, his “policeman’s badge wasn’t just a shield, but a family crest”.

His book is full of dismaying revelations. The sergeant who brutally kicks and stamps on an already cuffed black suspect is later made a diversity champion. Bored with all the “political correctness crap”, coppers completing mandatory racial equality questionnaires photocopy each other’s answers. Maxwell doesn’t spare himself. He asks a black motorist who complains about regularly being stopped: “If you don’t like living in the UK, why don’t you go and live somewhere else?” At the station’s Christmas party he attempts to laugh off the comedian’s joke that he had been spotted performing oral sex on a prisoner. The “joke” barely disguises his colleagues’ suspicion of Maxwell, because not only is he black, he is gay.

The youngest of 11 siblings, brought up by a single mother on a Liverpool council estate, Maxwell transcended expectations. He was bright and keen, and quickly recognised by the police hierarchy as an ideal candidate to counter the 1999 Macpherson report, which found “institutional racism” within the force. But Maxwell was not so naive as to believe he’d entered a post-racial institution. To progress at work, he drew the lesson articulated by Fuller that: “Police racism was an ugly beast in the corner which I didn’t want to poke.”

Six years into his career, Maxwell’s growing unease peaked when, transferred to Special Branch and sent to Heathrow, he was tasked with interviewing terrorist suspects. His colleagues assumed that Maxwell should be the first to stop black or Asian people “as a ‘buffer’” before handing them on because “blacks don’t complain about blacks”. In Forced Out Maxwell argues that racial profiling at Heathrow was self-defeating. By targeting marginalised people whose “interactions with the state teach them that they are intrinsically suspicious and not worthy of society”, the police would not catch terrorists so much as help to create them.

After almost a decade in uniform, it dawned on Maxwell that he’d been in an abusive relationship. He had suppressed his grievances about being sidelined, and subjected to racial discrimination and homophobia. In the book’s second half, this realisation triggers a blizzard of correspondence, first to his police superiors, and subsequently to his local MP, the mayor of London and the home secretary. It signals an abrupt tonal shift in the memoir which thereafter reads like an extended crime report of the force’s assault on Maxwell’s integrity and mental health. The inevitable progress towards an employment tribunal exerts further emotional strain, even breaking up Maxwell’s marriage.

He is dogged in pursuit of justice: “I didn’t want to be another of those officers, settling out of court,” he recalls. Like many institutions challenged by an employee, the police management default to attack mode. “I just wanted acknowledgement of wrongdoing,” Maxwell writes, “yet they were going after me as though I had the code to a nuclear device.”

Relying on medical reports, emails from HR and bosses, logs and appraisals, Forced Out becomes a kind of true-life drama that can be a little overwhelming. Down the rabbit hole we go, of meetings, consultations, conference calls and broken confidences. Rather than distil the information, Maxwell invites readers to chart every turn in the force’s increasingly machiavellian approach (including leaking his details to the Sun). He succeeds at the tribunal in 2013, but is traumatised.

Maxwell wants us to know all the details of his personal case, including the counter campaign pursued by the police managers (who even tried to dismiss him after he’d already resigned). But he also wants to convey that we all have skin in the game.

He describes himself as a “cultural Catholic” and his tone throughout Forced Out is that of a supplicant on his knees in a confessional booth, hoping for absolution. He has nothing to be forgiven for. The end of Maxwell’s career is not only his and the police force’s loss, but all of ours.

• Forced Out: A Detective’s Story of Prejudice and Resilience is published by Granta (RRP £14.99).