British policing has a nationwide association for Muslim officers and other staff. It is called the National Association of Muslim Police, or NAMP. The question is not only why Muslim police officers want to organise separately on the basis of their faith. The more serious question is why police leaders have allowed such an association to influence the work of the police.
NAMP does more than bring its members together. On its website, the association lists influencing national policing policy among its areas of work. It says it turns the experiences of Muslim officers into national policy and presents its views to the Home Office, the National Police Chiefs’ Council and the College of Policing—the body that develops professional standards and guidance for British police forces.
It would be bad enough if this were merely the association’s own misguided idea of its role. But British policing does, in fact, work with NAMP. In 2021, the College of Policing published guidance on prayer and prayer facilities for Muslim staff, developed jointly with the association. The following year, they produced Ramadan guidance together. That guidance is not confined to arrangements for staff who are fasting. It also makes recommendations about the treatment of Muslims in police custody, searches and the police’s contact with Muslim members of the public.
In other words, an association established to represent Muslim interests within policing has helped write guidance on how police forces should carry out parts of their work. British policing has not merely tolerated NAMP’s existence. It has invited the association in and treated it as a partner in shaping the future of policing.
It says a great deal about the direction England has taken that the police have allowed a Muslim interest group to influence one of the institutions on which the rule of law rests—an institution empowered to use force against citizens on the state’s behalf. It also helps explain the crisis of legitimacy the country now faces. How can the public trust the police to act according to the law and the same principles towards everyone when they give one particular section of the population a special say in how the police operate?
Nor does NAMP concern itself only with prayer facilities and working hours. The association has challenged the use of terms such as “Islamism” and “Islamist terrorism”, arguing that they link Islam with terrorism and fuel hostility towards Muslims. Its attempt to remove these terms from the language of the authorities shows how far its ambition to influence policing extends.
Not even a new report from the think tank Policy Exchange, examining police staff associations and their implications for police impartiality, has prompted any apparent reconsideration of that relationship. One of the cases discussed in the report concerns a document published on NAMP’s website and written by its then vice-president, Khaldoun Kabbani. It portrayed Zionism as hatred of Muslims, described the Israeli military as a “Zionist terrorist group”, and cast doubt on accounts of Hamas’s terrorist attack on 7 October 2023.
NAMP removed the document and said it had not commissioned it and that it did not represent the association’s official position. But the document had appeared on its website, at a police.uk address. Even the National Police Chiefs’ Council has described some of its contents as antisemitic and acknowledged the anger and shock caused by the publication of such views on a national policing association’s website. Yet there has so far been no public indication that this has prompted a reconsideration of the relationship with NAMP.
For British Jews in particular, this is no abstract question about how the police are organised. The government has committed more than £250 million to protecting Jewish schools, synagogues and communities because the threat to them is serious. They depend on a police service that is supposed to protect them, yet that same service has given a faith-based police association a place within its own structures. An antisemitic document was able to remain on the association’s website, and its removal has brought no further public reckoning over the association’s role.
Against that background, the police chiefs’ assurance that the document does not reflect the position of British policing is like putting a sticking plaster on an open fracture. The police have undertaken no searching examination of their own principles or of NAMP’s continued role as a partner. Until they do, the crisis of legitimacy will deepen—and British Jews may well feel that the fox has been put in charge of the henhouse.
