Decades of ‘systemic racism’ within London’s Metropolitan Police mean discrimination is ‘embedded’ into its systems, leadership and culture, a new review of the force said Friday — 26 years after another report reached similar conclusions.
The independent probe, commissioned after a landmark 2023 study found the Met — Britain’s biggest force — ’institutionally racist, sexist and homophobic’, warned its racism impacts internally and in public-facing policing.
It also permeates into other forms of discrimination, the 126-page report concluded.
Authored by Shereen Daniels, a leading expert on human resources and addressing systemic racism within complex organisations, it tries to ‘diagnose’ why the force has struggled to reform despite decades of similar warnings.
A string of scandals in recent years have rocked confidence in UK policing, in particular the 2021 kidnap, rape and murder of Londoner Sarah Everard by serving Met officer Wayne Couzens.
‘This is not an account of individual incidents but a diagnosis of the structures that makes racial harm a consistent recurring pattern,’ Daniels said in a statement unveiling the report, named ‘30 Patterns of Harm’.
‘This entire body of work demonstrates how institutional racism operates in practice,’ she added.
‘It traces how racial harm becomes built into systems, behaviours and leadership norms that normalise discrimination and protect the organisation from consequence.’
The Met welcomed the report and said it ‘recognises the scale of the challenges it sets out’.
‘This is a moment that calls for reflection, and further change,’ it said in a statement.
It comes 26 years after the Macpherson Report found the force institutionally racist in the wake of the 1993 murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence, recommending dozens of reforms.
More recent scandals have shone a fresh light on enduring racism, homophobia, sexism and misogyny.
As well as the Everard case, another officer, David Carrick, was jailed for life in 2023 for dozens of rapes and sexual assaults stretching back two decades.
Just last month, the BBC aired footage from seven months of undercover filming at a central London police station that showed officers making sexualised, racist and misogynistic comments.
They also expressed anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim views and revelled in the use of force. Following the revelations, five officers were sacked.
Daniels — managing director of the consultancy HR Rewired — mined internal Met materials alongside public records for her report.
‘Viewed together, these reveal how the organisation’s systems and culture align to maintain, rather than dismantle, the conditions that cause racial harm,’ she concluded.
She found internally, officers use gender, class, religion and other factors — alongside race — to decide ‘who is seen as credible or confrontational protected or punished invited in or pushed out’.
Meanwhile ‘on the street’ similar biases shape ‘who is stopped, searched, escorted home, or forced to the ground’.
Arguing the Met ‘cannot mark its own homework’, Daniels said reform must be measured ‘through verifiable and felt change in the lived experiences of Black Londoners, officers, staff and volunteers’.
Embattled Met commissioner Mark Rowley, who became the capital’s top cop in 2022 after his predecessor was criticised for failing to advance reforms, called the report ‘powerful’.
He acknowledged ‘it calls out that further systemic, structural, cultural change is needed’.
Rowley insisted existing initiative were helping it ‘make progress’ but conceded ‘there is still much more to do’.
