Ex-Scotland Yard detective Peter Bleksley shares his thoughts on West Yorkshire Police lurching from crisis to crisis

Picture the scene. You are a senior police officer. You’ve served for over twenty years, during which it has been proven at every rank that you’ve held that you are an accomplished leader who genuinely cares for those who serve below you.

You have also been fearless in leading from the front and applying the law fairly, evenly, honestly, and without fear. Your name is Superintendent Peel. You earn around £95,000 a year.

As part of your remit, you have to oversee and liaise with something called a ‘Hate Crime Scrutiny Panel’, which is largely made up of people who have an over-inflated sense of their own self-importance.

At a meeting of this panel, the chair, a woman who is not afraid to call a spade a spade, accuses your police force of attempting to appease Muslims. This comes on the back of a murderous attack on a synagogue and a whole raft of other antisemitic crimes.

A) Listen carefully to this woman’s concerns before informing her that your force enforces the law even-handedly across all communities, regardless of faith, colour, creed or any other factor?

OK, back to reality, and guess what West Yorkshire Police (WYP) actually did when faced with the scenario above?

You’ve guessed it, they sacked the chair of the panel because Muslim police officers who had been present at the meeting complained about her.

I wonder if those officers are members of the National Association of Muslim Police, an organisation that has found itself at the centre of an antisemitism row recently, which prompted the National Police Chiefs' Council to express concerns.

I suspect WYP also sent her packing because no senior officer of theirs would have been able to deliver option ‘A’ above.

You see, West Yorkshire Police have form when it comes to behaving stupidly or appallingly around certain members of their Muslim community.

In 2023, they presented certificates to two imams who had connections to an Islamic institute over which there are huge concerns regarding extremism.

This was clearly a very stupid thing to do, yet WYP tried to brush this off by claiming they didn’t know who would be put up by organisations to receive certificates. Hey, West Yorkshire Police, try checking.

It was WYP who presided over the Batley Grammar School debacle, when Muslims forced a schoolteacher into hiding, where he still remains, over allegations of blasphemy.

We don’t have blasphemy laws in Britain, yet instead of standing up to a mob, and standing firm on behalf of a teacher, WYP caved in and a teacher had his life ruined.

We are seeing many examples of our police, across the length and breadth of the country, caving in to the demands, gripes, and complaints of Muslims on a regular basis.

We all know how many police forces looked the other way while young white girls were systematically raped by Pakistani rape gangs. And I think I know why this is…

Quite simply, I believe that senior police officers in Britain today are scared of upsetting Muslims.

Not only because they are terrified of being accused of racism, but also because they also know that if radical Islamist Muslims rise up, they would not be able to cope and the army would need to be called in to prevent citizens from taking matters into their own hands.

Before the easily-offended rise up from reading their copies of The Guardian or posting 'refugees welcome’ on BlueSky to accuse me of all sorts of nonsense, let me remind you that the Islamist threat in Britain makes up 75 per cent of the MI5 workload.

As for Superintendent Peel, he is sadly a work of fiction and rarer than rocking-horse poo in modern policing.