No, the Met Police Is Not Structurally Racist

The London Metropolitan Police are no strangers to accusations of two-tier policing. While pro-Palestine protestors are allowed to chant antisemitic slogans in support of Hamas terrorists, Jews are warned by officers not to appear too “openly Jewish” in public. While eco-loons are free to obstruct roads and block emergency vehicles, anti-migrant demonstrations are pre-emptively banned. While theft has become functionally decriminalised, you might get a knock at the door for posting your opinions online. 

An independent report criticising the Met, published last week, did not touch on any of these issues. Instead, it accused the force of systemic racism. In “30 Patterns of Harm,” which was commissioned by the Met, human-resources ‘expert’ Shereen Daniels argues that the force suffers from institutional “anti-blackness,” which is apparently manifested through bias against people with certain skin colours or accents. “Systemic racism is not a matter of perception,” Daniels writes, “For almost 50 years, reviews of the Metropolitan Police have documented the harm experienced by black Londoners, officers and staff.” 

The Met immediately accepted these allegations and started begging for forgiveness. In its press release for the report, it laments the “wider societal inequalities that affect how black Londoners, particularly young black Londoners, experience policing.” What does this word salad really mean? Presumably, “experiencing policing” can be translated into “being arrested.” In which case, it is true that black Londoners are vastly overrepresented in arrest figures. From 2022 to 2023, black people were arrested at 18.1 per 1,000, compared with 7.0 per 1,000 for white people—about 2.6 times higher. Similarly, Daniels claims that stop-and-search “operates as a routine surveillance of black life” because young black Londoners are more commonly targeted. There are many complex reasons for why this might be the case. But disproportionality does not automatically equate to discrimination. To simply assert that police racism must be the sole reason that young black Londoners are arrested at a much higher rate than their white counterparts is an exercise in begging the question.  

This is one of the many problems with this so-called independent review. Daniels’s area of expertise is, according to her own website, “addressing systemic racism, particularly as it impacts black colleagues, within complex organisations and institutions,” with an aim to “embed anti-racism into strategy, governance, and workforce transformation approaches.” In other words, she is a professional activist. Are we really surprised that a person who sees racism everywhere has managed to find that the Met is racist? As the saying goes, when you’re a critical-race theorist, everything looks like systemic racism. 

One of the most stunning claims of Daniels’s review is that anti-black discrimination was “baked into the institutional design” of the Met. By design? She is not claiming only that racism has crept into the police force by accident over time, but that the system was deliberately created in order to oppress black people. This is, to be blunt, hysterical. 

No one should be taking this report seriously, not least the Met itself. The write-up includes a section on “queer identity,” stating: “Queer black people carry the weight of two systems of regulation: anti-Blackness and heteronormativity.” Apparently, “their bodies, partnerships, and self-expression unsettle the Met’s unspoken rules about masculinity, family and respectability.” This should be an immediate tip-off that the review is pure activist screed. It is filled with meaningless buzzwords that combine identity politics with corporate speak. In one section, which criticises how the Met’s “authorised language strips systemic racism of its meaning,” Daniels writes: “This is not a communications style. It is a system logic. Clarity becomes risk. Ambiguity becomes safety. Racial harm is downgraded into ‘differences,’ ‘challenges,’ or ‘areas of learning.’ Language loses its diagnostic power and is repurposed to preserve institutional or even personal comfort.” Setting aside the fact that this paragraph bears all the hallmarks of having been phrased by ChatGPT, what exactly does any of it mean? 

There is really no point in trying to engage in any of the ‘arguments’ made in this review. Scanning through the text, there is zero evidence provided for anything that Daniels claims. She is incredibly cagey about the kind of research she has done that led her to believe the Met suffers from systemic racism. She includes no graphs or statistics to back up any of her assertions. The report can’t even be said to be anecdotal, because she doesn’t appear to have obtained any anecdotes from real people. If she has, then she has made no effort to signpost this. There is no methodology section at all, as you might expect for any report that makes claims as bold as this one does. The closest I could find was this bizarre statement: “The methodology I’ve used comes from a different knowledge tradition. It is rooted in black intellectual history, structural critique, diagnostic consulting, and deep, often painful experience with institutional and organisational power. It was not added later. It shaped the lens from the start.” She does claim that “this analysis is grounded in a close and careful examination of more than 300 sources,” including “confidential Met files” and “public reports, reviews, and data sets.” What any of that involved or how she used that information is not clear. 

If that didn’t clear things up, don’t worry. Daniels elaborates later on: “The methodology I used does not announce itself loudly. It is embedded in every section, not just the structural patterns of harm. There is no dedicated chapter or diagram because the methodology was, and should never be, the focus.” She even goes as far as to suggest that demanding any kind of objective evidence is itself racist: “This review and subsequent findings did not employ a methodology in the traditional and accepted sense. It did not begin with a neutral hypothesis, and I did not perform the detachment often demanded of those who write about ‘race,’ where the expectation is that credibility requires distance, detachment and a voice scrubbed clean of any lived experience and personal knowledge. This racialised standard lets whiteness pass as impartial while casting black clarity as bias.” 

Given that the author herself has proudly admitted that her review is not based on impartial facts, why has everyone accepted this at face value? Met commissioner Mark Rowley immediately apologised and vowed to do more to tackle racism and continue “to deliver the largest corruption clear-out in British policing history to remove those who do not belong.” A spokesperson for London mayor Sadiq Khan also jumped in to agree that “there are still systematic and cultural issues within the force that have not been tackled” and that the authorities needed to “accelerate the pace of cultural reform and deliver the necessary structural change across the force.” 

This is both shocking and deeply depressing. The most powerful governing institutions in the UK’s capital city have simply capitulated to a report that accuses the Met police of systemic racism, and then refuses to give any real evidence for this. The entire review is empty, activist nonsense. More fool the Met for paying any attention to it at all.