Assistant Commissioner Special Operations, Metropolitan Police Lead, National Counter Terrorism
Anil Kanti Neil Basu QPM is Britain’s top south Asian cop. This pioneer is the national police lead on counter terrorism, and as an assistant commissioner in the Metropolitan Police he holds the rank of chief constable.
His brief is one of the toughest in the police, and it is he to whom people turn in times of a terrorist attack.
Basu joined the police in 1992, and he has always served in the Met. Despite it being labelled institutionally racist after the murder of the black teenager, Stephen Lawrence, Basu said he has faced more racism outside the police service than inside it.
His Bengali mother met his Welsh mother in the early 1960s, and he recalls that they would be stoned when they held hands walking through the streets. Basu’s father was a police surgeon, and his mother did not want him to join the service.
In 2019, he told MPs he had spent his life dealing with racism.
He made his comments while giving evidence to the Home Affairs Select Committee which was examining a controversial proposal from a cross-party group of MPs, that wanted to define Islamophobia as a "type of racism".
Basu is a great advocate of recruiting, mentoring and progressing black Asian minority ethnics to policing.
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