By Solat Chaudhry
Content Warning: The following article describes violence and alludes to bodily harm.
The night of the incident I was on duty with a traffic police officer as former PC 578 Chaudhry.
Over the radio, we received a call from an officer in distress. It was an assistance call which means ‘I’m in severe trouble’.
When you hear a call like that everybody goes silent, everyone knows what it means.
The Police radio operator came on air : “Accrington to Patrol, who is it? Where are you?” Silence. Nothing.
After what felt like an eternity, we began to hear something in the silence. It’s the Officer, we could hear him struggling over the radio. We heard him shout “Queen Street! Queen Street!”. All our attention was suddenly on Queen Street, but quickly we realised that there were three Queen Streets in our area of operations.
One in Clayton-le-Moore, one in Accrington, one in Great Harwood. So, we went straight to Great Harwood and went to Queen Street. Saw nothing. The other patrol went to Accrington. Saw nothing. So, through the process of elimination and desperately racing against the clock we rushed to Clayton-le-Moore.
We got to there and we couldn’t see anything, there was no sign of our man, it was just quiet. From one of the buildings, an older Asian gentleman came out, he could only speak Punjabi, and in Punjabi he said, “Go down the street, turn left, up the alley, your Officer is in the third garden. He’s being beaten.”
When we got there, I was confronted by a scene that will stay with me for the rest of my life. One of my colleagues was on the floor, a huge man towered above him, readying his fingers to gouge his eyes out.
We managed to restrain the instigator, got the situation under control and our colleague to safety. If we had been there any later, the damage would have been severe. By giving us directions, the gentleman who pointed us where to go likely saved our colleague’s eyesight and possibly even his life.
However, the story didn’t start that night. The story started about 5 years before that when a recruiting sergeant came round to my house to recruit me to the force. He said to me, “Look, we need people from diverse backgrounds. We need diverse skills and abilities.”
My diversity meant that I was able to communicate with the man who told us where to go, it meant that we saved precious time that would have been wasted trying to find the colleague on our own whilst trying to overcome a language barrier.
There’s no doubt that 90 seconds saved, saved his eyesight.
People with different backgrounds bring a completely different understanding and different perspectives, they can tap into a different set of networks, and a different understanding of the niche needs of people from different minority backgrounds. Those opportunities, that understanding if it’s properly harvested, can broaden the potential for what is possible. When you embrace diversity, every kind of diversity, it will surprise you in the multitude of ways that it enriches and empowers.
In my story, diversity meant tapping into vital information that saved a colleague from severe injury. In education understanding diversity of learners can really help teachers and lecturers connect with people from different backgrounds so you can get better results, better inspections, and better prospects for learners.
In a charity, it means better connections and better trust within the community you serve. In a business, it means more creativity, more collaboration and a greater wealth of insight.
Again, and again the resounding case for all sorts of diversity is absolutely clear: diversity will enrich not only your life from the benefits of learning about different perspectives and different things and having greater knowledge about different things, but it can enrich you in terms of a business, in terms of the bottom line as well.
