LONDON, UK – A landmark internal review of London’s Metropolitan Police Service (the Met), published Friday, November 7, 2025, has concluded that the force’s own culture and leadership make inflicting “racial harm” on Black people “inevitable.” The report, authored by Dr. Shereen Daniels, asserts that anti-Black outcomes are not accidental but are “built in” to the institution, which then protects itself from meaningful reform.

The review, titled “30 Patterns Of Harm,” was commissioned by the Met itself to scrutinize its response to decades of evidence of racism. It is described as the first of its kind to focus specifically on the institution's systemic “anti-blackness” rather than isolated incidents. Dr. Daniels stated that her work “examines the institution itself, showing how the Met's systems, governance, leadership and culture produce racial harm, whilst simultaneously protecting the institution from reform.”

In response, the Metropolitan Police welcomed the report, acknowledging the scale of the challenge and accepting the long-standing evidence of racism and discrimination within its ranks. Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley called the report “powerful” and conceded that “further systemic, structural, cultural change is needed.” However, Commissioner Rowley has continued to avoid the specific term “institutionally racist,” a label he has previously described as political and ambiguous, drawing criticism.

A History of Failed Reforms

This latest report adds to a long and troubling history of inquiries into racism within the UK’s largest police force. It follows the damning 2023 review by Baroness Louise Casey, which found the Met to be institutionally racist, misogynistic, and homophobic. That inquiry was commissioned after a serving officer, Wayne Couzens, kidnapped, raped, and murdered a young woman named Sarah Everard in 2021, shattering public trust.

Even further back, the 1999 Macpherson report, which investigated the police failings in the murder case of Black teenager Stephen Lawrence, famously concluded the force was plagued by “institutional racism.” Dr. Daniels' review suggests that despite numerous reports over nearly 50 years, a deep-rooted institutional defensiveness has prevented substantive change.

Baroness Doreen Lawrence, the mother of Stephen Lawrence, said the new report contained “nothing that I did not already know,” adding that “racism was the reason why the police have failed to find all of his killers.”

Disproportionate Policing in Focus

A key area of focus in the report is the disproportionate use of police powers against Black communities. The review states that the Met treats “blackness itself as probable cause” and that the tactic of “stop and search converts streets into checkpoints.” This finding is supported by official statistics. Data from the UK government and the Mayor of London's Office for Policing and Crime (MOPAC) has consistently shown that Black people are significantly more likely to be stopped and searched than white people. For the year ending March 2023, there were 24.5 stop and searches for every 1,000 Black people in England and Wales, compared to just 5.9 for every 1,000 white people. The report argues this isn't random, stating, “The Met doesn’t wait for wrongdoing. It waits for justification.”

Global Relevance and Lessons for Kenya

While the report focuses on London, its findings resonate with international debates on police brutality, systemic racism, and the urgent need for law enforcement reform. For Kenyans, who have contended with their own long-standing issues of police misconduct and calls for accountability, the Met's struggles offer a critical lens. The Kenyan police service has its origins in a colonial force designed for citizen containment rather than public service, a historical parallel that informs present-day challenges.

Efforts at reform in Kenya, such as the police vetting process established under the 2010 constitution, have faced significant hurdles and yielded mixed results, highlighting the immense difficulty in transforming an entrenched institutional culture. The findings from London underscore that sustainable change requires more than surface-level fixes; it demands confronting deep-rooted systems and biases, a challenge familiar to reformers in Nairobi and beyond. The Met's public commitment to becoming an “anti-racist organisation” will now be tested against the report's stark diagnosis that its very design makes racial harm a recurring reality.