Tuesday, 7 October 2025

The Police Will Not Change

 We have been told, once again, that the police are racist and misogynistic. Louise Casey said it last year in her review of the Metropolitan Police. The Macpherson Report said it in 1999. Before them, countless campaigners, mothers, families, and community groups said it louder and longer. But each time, the shock is performed as if we did not already know.

The truth is simple. The police will not change. They cannot change. Because this is not about a few bad officers or outdated attitudes. It is about a structure that was built on racism and sustained by racism. And if you want proof, you do not need to look only at the way the police treat us on the outside. You can see it inside the force, in its history, and in the long trail of fake reforms.

When police leaders say they want to diversify the force, they talk as though putting Black and Brown faces in uniform will change the culture. But the evidence tells us otherwise.

In 2022, a survey of Black police officers and staff across the UK found that more than half had experienced racism from their colleagues in the previous year. Some described being called slurs. Others spoke about being treated as tokens, sidelined for promotion, or punished for speaking up. The uniform did not protect them. It made them targets.

The Casey Review into the Met Police echoed this. Forty-six percent of Black staff said they had personally experienced racism at work. Black officers were 81 percent more likely than their White colleagues to face a misconduct allegation. Think about that: the people meant to be enforcing the rules of fairness are enforcing bias inside their own walls.

And what happens when they speak up? The same as happens when racialised citizens complain: denial, dismissal, silencing. Black officers are left isolated, their careers stalled, their dignity stripped away.

When the Met or Thames Valley put out glossy recruitment ads, with smiling Black and Asian officers on the posters, they are not selling change. They are selling illusion. Representation is not the same as transformation. Putting a racialised face in a uniform does not dismantle an institution built on racism. It simply decorates it.

And if the police cannot even protect their own Black staff inside the force, what chance do we have as Black and Brown citizens outside it?

Colonial Shadows: How Empire Built British Policing

To understand why reform always fails, we need to understand where policing came from.

Modern British policing did not emerge as a neutral service to protect everyone equally. It was built in the early nineteenth century to control the poor, to protect property, to keep “order” in a society defined by class and inequality. But more than that, it was perfected abroad.

In India, in Africa, in the Caribbean, the British police exported surveillance, violence, and racial hierarchies. Colonial policing was not about community safety. It was about domination. The techniques were clear: collective punishment, constant surveillance, the criminalisation of whole communities, and the assumption that the colonised were always suspects.

Those logics did not disappear when the colonies fought for independence. They came back home. Stop and search today echoes colonial suspicion. Immigration raids echo colonial surveillance. The treatment of Black and Brown children as threats rather than innocents is a direct continuation of how the British state has always policed racialised bodies.

When Black people in Britain are stopped and searched four times more than White people, when Black children are strip-searched at six times the rate of White children, this is not accidental. It is not the system “failing.” It is the system working as it was designed: to discipline, to control, to keep racial hierarchies in place.

Conversely, when people ask why the police are like this, the answer is not that they lost their way. It is that they never had another way.

Twenty-Four Years Later: The Myth of Reform

If the system is so broken, why has nothing changed? Because reform has always been theatre.

The clearest example is the case of Stephen Lawrence.

In April 1993, Stephen, a Black teenager, was murdered in a racist attack while waiting for a bus in south-east London. The investigation that followed was a disaster. Police failed to act on leads, ignored witnesses, and showed little urgency in bringing his killers to justice. His family, particularly his mother Doreen Lawrence, fought tirelessly against not just the murderers but the indifference of the police.

It took years of campaigning, public pressure, and inquiry before the truth was acknowledged. In 1999, the Macpherson Report finally concluded that the Met Police was “institutionally racist.” This was supposed to be the turning point. It was meant to change everything. The recommendations included better training, new accountability structures, stronger oversight. There were promises of cultural reform.

Fast forward twenty-four years to the Casey Review of 2023. The conclusion? Almost word for word the same: the Met is institutionally racist, misogynistic, and homophobic. The recommendations? Another list of reforms, trainings, and promises.

This is the pattern. Scandal. Inquiry. Promise. Forgetting. Repeat.

The Lawrence family’s fight exposed the rot at the core of British policing. It forced the country to use the language of institutional racism. But it did not change the institution itself. The killers were eventually convicted, but the culture that failed Stephen the culture that dismissed his family survived.

Every inquiry buys time. Every training session reassures the public. Every photo of a Black officer on a recruitment poster signals progress. But the structure remains the same.

Because change would mean dismantling the very logic of policing. It would mean admitting that the institution’s legitimacy is built on control rather than justice. It would mean accountability to the very communities it currently criminalises. And that is the one thing the police, as an institution, will never accept.

That is why reform fails. Not because the right ideas have not been tried, but because the institution is not meant to transform. It is meant to survive.

So where does this leave us now?

It leaves us with a truth that is even sharper. The police are not broken. They are not in crisis. They are functioning exactly as they were designed to maintain racial hierarchies, to protect men at women’s expense, to dismiss and endanger queer communities, and above all, to defend themselves from scrutiny.

The murder of Stephen Lawrence and the failures that followed exposed institutional racism to the nation. The murder of Sarah Everard by a serving officer laid bare the depth of misogyny inside the force. The testimonies of LGBTQ+ officers and communities show that homophobia is still alive in policing culture. These are not isolated failures. They are the system itself.

And yet, in the middle of all this, some voices try to claim that policing in Britain has gone “too soft” on Black and Brown people that there is somehow a two-tier system in our favour. The evidence shows the opposite. Black people are stopped and searched at more than four times the rate of White people. Black children are strip-searched at six times the rate of their White peers. Black officers themselves face more misconduct charges than their White colleagues. If this is what “favour” looks like, then it is a cruel joke.

When the BBC headlines say the police are racist, misogynistic, and homophobic, the establishment performs shock. But for racialised people, for women, and for queer communities, there is nothing shocking here. We have lived it, and we continue to live it.

The question is not whether the police can change. They will not. The question is whether society is willing to keep tolerating an institution that tells so many of us through every stop, every dismissal, every silence that we do not belong, and we are not safe.

 

References and Sources


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