Discrimination against black people is “baked” into the leadership, culture and governance of the Metropolitan Police, an internal review has found.
The independently commissioned review, authored by Dr Shereen Daniels, surveyed 40 years of evidence of how racism had affected black communities, as well as black officers and staff.
Baroness Doreen Lawrence, the mother of murdered black teenager Stephen Lawrence, said that she welcomed the review but it contained “nothing I did not already know”.
Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley said the “powerful” report “calls out that further systemic, structural, cultural change is needed”.
The review, commissioned from the consultancy HR Rewired, concluded that darker-skinned Met staff were “labelled confrontational” while lighter-skinned employees might receive quicker empathy and leniency.
Dr Shereen Daniels said that systemic racism was “not a matter of perception”, adding that “true accountability begins with specificity”.
“The same systems that sustain racial harm against black people also enable other forms of harm. Confronting this is not an act of exclusion but a necessary foundation for safety, fairness and justice for everyone,” Dr Daniels said.
Baroness Lawrence said that discrimination “must be acknowledged, accepted and confronted in the Met”, adding that racism was the reason why her son had been killed and why the police had “failed to find all of his killers”.
She added: “The police must stop telling us that change is coming whilst we continue to suffer. That change must take place now.”
Imran Khan KC, the Lawrence family’s barrister, likewise said that the report’s conclusions were “little surprise”, adding that Sir Mark Rowley should resign if he did not “recognise, acknowledge and accept” its findings.
He added: “This Report lays out in shocking clarity that the time for talking is over, that promises to change can no longer be believed or relied on.”
The report is the latest to highlight racism within Britain’s biggest police force, after Louise Casey’s 2023 review – commissioned after the murder of Sarah Everard – concluded that the Met was institutionally racist, misogynistic and homophobic.
Reviews conducted decades ago have criticised discrimination within the Met – including the 1999 Macpherson report that called the force “institutionally racist” after the mishandling of Stephen Lawrence’s case.
Earlier this year, secret BBC filming found serving Met Police officers calling for immigrants to be shot and revelling in the use of force.
Several officers have since been sacked, after Sir Mark Rowley pledged to be “ruthless” in getting rid of officers who are unfit to serve.
The president of the National Black Police Association, Andy George, said Friday’s report was the latest in a long line of reviews “which have highlighted the same issues again and again”, and action to address them had not been taken.
“There is a culture of denial, dismissal, of almost waiting for the spotlight to be on – and as soon as the spotlight goes, then it’s business as normal,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
He criticised Sir Mark’s response to the report: “He said the same things in Baroness Casey’s review, he said the same things after Panorama… the words are fine, what we’re not seeing is action to back that up.”
Following the publication of the latest report, Sir Mark Rowley said: “London is a unique global city, and the Met will only truly deliver policing by consent when it is inclusive and anti-racist.”
He added that the force would “go after the patterns of discrimination that show up in our operational work, and within the organisation by identifying and addressing their root causes”.
