My Life Of Fear On Whitley Streets

One of London’s top Muslim police officers has told of his fear when racist thugs threw a pig’s head in his garden while he was stationed in Whitley – what he calls “the BNP heartland of Reading”.

Ali Dizaei, chief superintendent in Hounslow for the Metropolitan Police, spent five years walking the beat in South Reading and Coley Park in the late 1980s. Chief Supt Dizaei later went on to the Met and was famously acquitted of two corruption charges at the Old Bailey, after a £7 million investigation that also saw him accused of drug taking, frequenting prostitutes, spying and using steroids.

The Iranian-born officer has now written a book, Not One Of Us, which attacks his accusers and contains allegations of racism inside and outside of the force during his time in Reading.

In the biography, Ch Supt Dizaei complains that of 15 probationary officers in the Thames Valley in 1986, he was the only one stationed in Whitley – which he describes as the BNP heartland of Reading.
He writes: “I was an Iranian immigrant and a copper – and in Whitley that was like being black twice over.”

His nightmare began when he was stationed in a police house in Hartland Road, which was overrun with rats and had been damaged by squatters.

When he bought homing pigeons, they were stolen, but flew back.

“I was upset, but not nearly as upset as when I came home one night and found, ‘Pakis out of Britain’, painted on my front door,” he adds.

The Muslim officer says that on another occasion a pig’s head was thrown into his garden. Chief Supt Dizaei says he later struck up a friendship with another officer living in Whitley, Denzil Macintosh, who also suffered racism when thugs defecated in a jam jar and threw it through his bedroom window while he slept.

“We were the only two probationers in Reading who weren’t white, and for some reason, we had been put in the area where we were absolutely guaranteed to be resented, threatened and abused,” he continued. “I resented the fact that Denzil and I were a two-man ghetto, suffering daily racist abuse, living in fear.”

The book also contains numerous examples of racism within the force, including one PC telling Ch Supt Dizaei that he had seen his wife walking up the road with a monkey under her arm – the monkey being his new baby.

Another section describes a PC who urinated on the road while listening to an Asian taxi driver’s description of being attacked by a passenger.

While working at Coley Park with a black officer, he said they were referred to as the “ethnic response unit”, which led to a brawl between him and another PC. Ch Supt Dizaei later set up a racial harassment forum, to help victims in the town.

He writes: “At the end of 1988 Shahin came to me: her family was being abused by a local racist gang, but it hadn’t been possible to gather enough evidence to make an arrest. She needed police protection. I pushed, and managed to get the installation of covert CCTV cameras approved outside her house. On Christmas Day 1988, those cameras spotted the gang putting a petrol bomb through her door.”

GetReading.co.uk