His comments come as the Met today defends itself against allegations of victimisation and discrimination of a Muslim police community support officer (PCSO) at an employment tribunal. Asad Saeed claims white officers framed him by alleging he threatened a vagrant in a restaurant, for which he was dismissed. He was later reinstated on appeal.
Tiplady stressed that the force's rapid response to claims of racism at the station showed it would not tolerate such behaviour.
"I am offended by the fact we have got this bad incident but I'm reassured that it happened more than two years ago and that, having established that it had gone on, the manager dealt with it and one or two people have had their futures curbed as a result," he told HR in an exclusive interview.
"It's daft of me to say that individual cases of racism or sexism are not going to happen. They will in an organisation of 55,000 people. But an organisation that deals with such incidents swiftly and robustly is an organisation that is not institutionally racist. If we are institutionally racist, then frankly so is the rest of industry."
The accusations that senior officers at a Belgravia police station allowed a "culture of apartheid" and that white officers refused to travel in the same van as black officers are embarrassing for the Met. Commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson declared that the force was not institutionally racist at a conference to mark the 10th anniversary of the Macpherson report earlier this week.
Tiplady added that "we have got something wrong" with regards to PCSOs, who like police staff are subject to employment law, unlike rank-and-file police, who are employed under separate regulations. While there are only 4,500 PCSOs compared with 14,500 Met staff, more than half of all serious discipline cases involve PCSOs.
"I have no doubt that anyone who has been fired as PCSO has been fired for a good reason ¬- for misconduct of such a serious level that we cannot tolerate it. But we have got something wrong when half the discipline cases affect one quarter of a particular work group."
According to Tiplady, security PCSOs - those who walk the streets providing reassurance to the public and who are largely based in Westminster - are subject to most disciplinary action.
"It is a tedious job and I cannot disconnect the fact that boredom is a factor in some of that misbehaviour," Tiplady said. But, he added, supervisory arrangements and training had been changed to make the job more interesting and that 800 PCSOs became fully-fledged police officers last year.
"In the past 10 months, 52% of recruits to Hendon were from PCSO positions," he said.
