The moment cyclist Paula Craig hit the ground she knew she had been paralysed. She was knocked off her bike and broke her thoracic vertebrae, left wrist, a shoulder blade, fibula and two ribs. She also tore her left triceps and was hospitalised for five months.

 

Craig was right about being paraplegic. What buoyed her up was a visit from her employer’s chief executive, who assured her she would have a job when she recovered.

 

But what sort of job could she do? The chief executive – Lord Stevens, then Sir John Stevens, commissioner of the Metropolitan Police – could not work miracles or make choices for her. Craig, a detective constable, had been on the point of joining the Flying Squad after five years with the national crime squad and a wealth of police experience, including specialist work. She started with the Met 20 years ago.

 

The fitness enthusiast is today a detective inspector with a murder team. She is the only woman to both run and arm-cycle the London marathon. Craig is fully operational thanks to a combination of management support, ad hoc access arrangements (“They made the whole ladies’ loo a toilet cubicle,” she says) and sheer personality.

 

Craig also dumped self-pity and a little dignity in her quest for professional self-fulfilment. On one visit to a murder victim’s family home, where access was a “nightmare”, she allowed herself to be carried across the threshold by another officer. She controls operations at street level from her vehicle.

 

Craig pays tribute to her employer’s support, but legislation and regulation have been moving away from ad hoc, niche solutions dependent on individual understanding and local imagination. From 5 December this year the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) 2005 placed a duty on all public-sector authorities, including police forces, to “actively promote disability equality”. This Disability Equality Duty (DED) means bodies must build on existing good practice proactively, whether or not they are employing anyone with disabilities, rather than simply making adjustments for a particular individual.

 

Organisations had to publish a disability equality scheme by last week, setting out how they would assess the impact of existing and proposed activities on disabled people and an action plan for promoting equality. Disabled staff – including police officers – had to be involved in drawing these up, and the employer had to demonstrate they had taken the actions committed to.

 

For police forces, this is the second change in two years to do with how they handle staff disability. In 2004, the 1995 DDA was applied to police officers. It had hitherto only affected police support staff, but now “reasonable adjustments” had to be made for disabled police officers too.

 

The new DED involves both infrastructure and job design. The presumption is that a

force is actively anticipating the employment of disabled people and ensuring that obstacles are removed in advance. For the police, with a historic culture of able-bodied personnel tackling physically challenging villains, this is a major change of mindset and self-image.

 

Some would argue it’s been coming for a long time. But then it’s also taken a generation to overcome objections to fully operational roles for women. After struggling with a hearing impairment, David Lindley, deputy chief constable of Leicestershire Constabulary, now openly wears a hearing aid. But other rank-and-file officers, fearing the termination of their service or their removal from specialist units such as driving or firearms, concealed their conditions. They had good reason.

In 1993, Tim Savage, a constable with the Metropolitan Police, was banned from police driving because of a diagnosis of diabetes.

 

“I was fed up,” he says. “I didn’t think I would get that from a service I had given the best part of my life to. I thought that if I spoke to management, they would look at the facts as they related to me and would not be obstructive. I had been driving successfully for 10 to 12 years and I had a fantastic record. The average emergency call lasts three minutes – what did they expect to happen [to a diabetic] in that time?”

 

Savage says officers were deterred from declaring their condition and his own promotion was thwarted. “At constable level it is your skills that make you. Driving is one of the bigger skills – you are in demand if you have that.”

 

Blanket bans, he says, were “a monstrous idea” at the end of the twentieth century – and inconsistent. “You could drive for Essex Police as a diabetic, but not in the Met. I set up the Police Diabetic Association. Before that I had no inkling that there were other diabetics in the police force. The association has added to the pressure for change, but we would not have got anywhere without partners – for instance, Diabetes UK.”

 

Nevertheless, Savage, who recently retired after 30 years’ service, says the Met has responded “positively” since the DDA was applied to police in 2004. “There are now individual assessments and we have had the first ever recruits with diabetes. People joining now can look forward to a full career. The future looks far better than the past.”

 

PC Vicki Sherry, who has 18 years’ service with West Midlands Police, also experienced frustration when she declared a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis in 2002. She was immediately taken off dog handling and her dog was given to another force, because “if I wasn’t in control, the dog would just become a biting machine,” she says. “It was a wrench – the dog had lived with me and the family.

“After a period off work I came back but experienced difficulties in finding a suitable role. At first I was seen as a troublemaker, and some people couldn’t understand the disability because they couldn’t see anything wrong with me.

 

“I joined one of the force disability projects and learnt a lot about how I could help myself. But I would go to these meetings at force HQ, receive a lot of information and think: ‘That’s not happening where I work.’ At force level a new policy is taken on board, but by the time it gets to an individual station the management can put their own perspective on it.”

 

Others have gone down a more circumspect route. Inspector Julian Frost, of Bedfordshire Police, with 14 years’ service, runs a town centre team of police officers and community support officers. He concealed dyslexia in his early career, volunteering for extra investigations to avoid duties such as writing out statements. He also took work home so he could use an early, cumbersome spellchecker that he bought himself.

 

By the time Frost made sergeant, personal computers and spellcheckers were coming in. “I honestly believe that if my career had been happening 20 years earlier, I would not have been able to cope with the mound of paperwork,” he says. “As a sergeant I never ‘came out’, but I started to tell people informally. Then I applied to go on the high potential development programme run by the Home Office and I declared my difficulty.”

 

Consistency between officially independent forces is potentially an issue. At the time of writing, the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) was seeking agreement among all forces to adopt the Employers’ Forum on Disability’s guidelines on “reasonable adjustment”. It was also benchmarking this requirement against practice in other public services.

 

But how does an employer articulate the possible limits to a right of access to a fully operational post? Brian Paddick, who leads on disability at the ACPO and is deputy assistant commissioner for the Met, says: “We should be able to give people well-reasoned arguments based on their circumstances. The level of complexity in terms of the range of disabilities means it is difficult to give blanket guidance. For instance, a police community support officer’s role is to be in contact with the public. But if the chief medical officer recommends that they have no contact with the public, we will have to redeploy them.”

 

He adds: “We can’t afford to discard years of experience and people who are highly skilled simply because they have a disability. There is a business case for this – it’s not just entitlement. By broadening our minds, we have the potential to improve the quality of service to the public.”

 

The input that a highly trained officer such as Paula Craig makes to fighting serious crime is evidence of that. It would be criminal, you could say, to lose that expertise.

 

 

The National Disabled Police Association (NDPA) was set up in 2004 to ensure disabled police officers and support staff were treated fairly and consistently throughout the country. There are affiliates in many forces. In Bedfordshire, for instance, inspector Julian Frost sits on the national committee of the NDPA.

 

“Bedfordshire Police was revisiting the whole diversity agenda and I agreed to take part in a video,” he said. “Together with sergeant Simon Daize [who has multiple sclerosis], I set up an awareness group.

 

“We found that people had a perception that they needed to cover up their disability. The force treated the majority of cases very well. Where they were treated badly, it was because managers didn’t know what they were dealing with.

 

“We have helped Bedfordshire Police to develop a plan under the Disability Equality Duty. We are not cynical – there are a lot of lessons being learnt. The main one is that you can’t simply do nothing.”