Performing Anti-Racism in WMP

Performing anti-racism in WMP: Project Seshat

Supported by Assistant Chief Constable Mike O’Hara and other senior officers, Project Seshat* continues our partnership with West Midlands Police (WMP) and creative practitioners Jennifer Davis, Yasmin Dawes and Keiren Hamilton-Amos. As part of WMP’s commitment to the national Police Race Action Plan (PRAP) and becoming an anti-racist organisation, we collaborated to develop a programme of innovative arts-based workshops delivered as part of WMP’s Race Action Plan. While nationally, the PRAP has been much criticised, the WMP Race Action Plan is described by Assistant Chief Constable Mike O’Hara as critical to improving trust and confidence in the Black community and is supported by the WMP Black and Asian Police Association.

Underpinned by Warwick research data and building on pilot sessions run by the team in 2024, the aim of the project is to expand the work of the Race Action Plan in dynamic and creative ways, changing officers’ perceptions and understanding, and therefore impacting behaviour towards Black and Black Heritage communities and colleagues. Through a series of four x 3-hour workshop sessions delivered January - June 2025, officers from across West Midlands Police explored their own perceptions and experiences of race in the context of their own daily practices as a police officer; how policing is and might be experienced by communities of colour; the racism experienced by their own Black and Black Heritage police colleagues; and how the police as an institution responds to racist and disproportionate policing. In addition to the WMP delivery team, we were supported by an Advisory Group of 15 Black and Black Heritage police officers and staff from WMP.

Using methods such as forum theatre and creative writing, the sessions allowed officers to explore complex and sensitive issues in a way they rarely have the opportunity, encouraging them to understand and empathise with experiences different from their own through an alternative medium. The sessions drew on a range of research and creative material, including extracts from our earlier collaborative work, After Preston. Whilst it sounds alien to policing, this is a deliberately non-traditional approach to explore the effectiveness of creative practice as a training and development tool, which academic evaluation found to be effective in the field of policing during the Coventry City of Culture project and continuing activity, and is supported by wider research into this area of practice.

The fifth and final session was a sharing of work created by officers during the workshop sessions, performed by professional actors. The themes, methods and thinking behind what the officers had created was explored through a Q&A with the audience of officers and members of the Advisory Group.

Using Vevox questionaires, session observations and interviews with participants and all sections of the design and delivery team, we are now conducting a detailed evaluation of the project – both as a creative methods approach within policing and how this resonates with our earlier research; and its success in supporting the work of WMP Race Action Plan and behavioural change. Dr Ruth Bernatek, our project researcher and newest member of the Warwick team, is leading on this. We plan to use this as a further evidence-base for a wider roll-out of Project Seshat alongside our other work with police using creative methods, such as Empathy by Design.

 

*Seshat (pronounced Sey-shat) is the Ancient Egyptian goddess of writing, knowledge and wisdom. The name provides a link to African heritage and ancestry, and nods to the fact that Ancient Egypt was an advanced and self-sustainable African civilisation which is rarely taught in Western education systems. Having a project name ensures the work has a distinct identity within WMP.