Culture of Met police means racial harm 'inevitable' - review

The "racial harm" the Metropolitan police inflicts on black people is "institutionally defended", with its leadership and culture protecting the force from real change, an internal review has found.

- Vikram Dodd Police and crime correspondent

The report by Dr Shereen Daniels, published today, draws on internal documents and evidence, with the Met responding by accepting longstanding evidence of racism and discrimination within the force.

Daniels told the Guardian the review was the first into the Met's "anti-blackness" to focus on the institution itself rather than an individual scandal and concluded the force's design "made it inevitable that racial harm keeps reoccurring".

The report, called 30 Patterns Of Harm, comes two years after the Met was savaged by Louise Casey's inquiry, which found it to be institutionally racist, a finding the commissioner refused to accept, while accepting systemic failings.

The report says: "Anti-black outcomes in policing are not random. They have been built in. And they have been named, again and again, by families in grief, frontline officers, unions, activists, whistleblowers, campaigners and formal investigations."

On the key flashpoint of stop and search it finds the Met causes pain in black communities and says suspicion is the starting point. "The Met doesn't wait for wrongdoing. It waits for justification," it says.