By Paul Wilson

Rocking The Boat

Rocking the Boat chronicles the career of a black police officer’s extraordinary and unprecedented determination in challenging an occupational police culture steeped in racism.

In the year 2020, considerable attention is being paid to the issue of institutional racism in US law enforcement. However, these are not the first time and the only country in which this same issue has become relevant and pressing. As a black police officer in the UK between 1983 and 2010, Paul Wilson was in the centre of a similar wave of interest and was personally involved in many of the institutional changes that were suggested, debated, opposed and fought in the UK during this time.

Through the eyes of the man responsible for the adoption of the term “hate crime” by the Association of Chief Police Officers; for the first Black Police Association and for his renowned report and oral testimony to the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry – arguably the most influential case on race relations in the UK – this book explores the growing visibility and the many turns and challenges in the fight against institutional racism within the London Metropolitan Police Force.