What’s New? The Police Were Always Like This

What’s New? The Police Were Always Like This

The BBC reported today that the Metropolitan Police are misogynistic and racist. My reaction, like so many others, was simple: what’s new?

For anyone racialised in Britain, this is not breaking news. It is a daily reality. The institution built to “protect” us has never protected us. It polices us. It questions our right to exist in public space, our right to drive, to walk, to stand still, to call for help.

What you might not realise is that it is not just the Met. Thames Valley Police are no different. They may not be caught in as many headlines, but they operate by the same rules: protect their own, disbelieve the racialised complainant, shut cases down before they even open.

I know this because I lived it. I reported a racist incident to Thames Valley Police. What did I get? An “investigation” carried out by one of their own officers against one of their own colleagues. No one spoke to me. No one asked for my account. Somehow, without my voice even entering the room, they concluded that he was not racist.

A year later, after chasing them again and again, nothing was resolved. No justice. No acknowledgement. Nothing. Just silence. The case evaporated, and with it, any pretence that the police care about the truth.

So when people ask me: what chance do racialised people have with the police? My answer is the same as it was the day I dialled the number: none.

Whether you dial 999 in fear or 101 in frustration, the result is the same: disbelief, dismissal, or silence.

If you want to understand how racialised people are treated in this country, look at stop and search. The numbers do not lie.

In England and Wales in the year ending March 2023, there were more than 529,000 stop and searches, a rate of nearly 9 per 1,000 people. But the distribution is nowhere near even. Black people were stopped at a rate of 24.5 per 1,000. White people? 5.9 per 1,000. That means Black people are about four times more likely to be stopped than White people.

Under Section 60, suspicionless stop and search powers that allow police to stop people without even pretending to have reasonable suspicion, the disparities are even worse. Black people are seven times more likely to be subjected to these random, humiliating searches than White people. This is racial profiling, written into law.

What do these searches actually produce? Not justice, not safety, not the prevention of crime. In 2022 to 2023, nearly 70 per cent of stop and searches ended in no further action. Seven out of ten times, the police found nothing. The person they stopped had done nothing wrong.

So, what is stop and search really for? To remind racialised people that they are suspects by default. To mark out Blackness and Brownness as inherently suspicious. To humiliate, to control, to perform dominance in public.

The impact is brutal. Every racialised person I know has a story: stopped while driving because they “fit the description.” Searched outside a shop for looking “out of place.” Pulled over, spoken to like a criminal, while White friends look on in disbelief.

In London, the figures are even sharper. Some boroughs see 40 stop and searches per 1,000 Black people. That is not policing. That is harassment dressed in uniform.

This is not about crime. It is about control. This tells racialised communities the truth we already know: the police are not here for us. They are here to police us.

Stop and search is only the front door. Once you step through it, the disparities deepen.

In 2022 to 2023, there were around 669,000 arrests in England and Wales. White people made up the majority, but when you look at rates, the picture changes. The arrest rate for Black people was 20.4 per 1,000. For White people, it was 9.4 per 1,000. Black people are more than twice as likely to be arrested. Asian and mixed-race people also face disproportionate arrest rates compared to White people. This is not incidental. It is structural.

What happens after these arrests? In the majority of stop and searches, nothing. Around 70 per cent end in no further action. The suspicion evaporates once the humiliation is done. Only around 14 per cent lead to arrest, and even fewer lead to conviction.

This means thousands of racialised people are being stopped, searched, and sometimes handcuffed, only to be released because they were guilty of nothing except existing. This is not crime prevention. It is the industrial-scale manufacturing of suspicion.

The reality is clear. Racialised people are over-policed and under-protected. We are targeted when it suits them, abandoned when we need them.

The violence does not end with adults. It reaches into childhood.

In 2023 alone, police in England and Wales strip-searched 3,122 children. Think about that number. Three thousand children were forced to remove their clothes, made to stand in front of officers, stripped of dignity as well as garments.

And the racial disparities are staggering. Black children are six times more likely to be strip-searched than White children. In some police forces, Black kids make up a quarter of those searched, despite being only a fraction of the youth population.

This is the reality of policing in Britain: children criminalised before adulthood, traumatised before they can even sit GCSEs.

When the Child Q case broke, a 15-year-old Black girl was strip-searched at school while menstruating, without an appropriate adult present. There was national outrage. But Child Q was not an exception. She was the tip of an iceberg.

The truth is that Britain’s police treat Black children as adults, as threats, as problems to be contained. They are denied the innocence that White children are afforded as a birthright.

So when we say the police are racist, we do not mean only in the way they stop our cars or dismiss our complaints. We mean in the way they strip our children of safety and dignity.

When the system brutalises you, the instinct is to complain, to seek justice through the mechanisms supposedly designed for accountability. But in policing, the complaint system is not a path to justice. It is a labyrinth built to exhaust you.

In 2022 to 2023, more than two thousand two hundred complaints of racial discrimination were made against police forces in England and Wales. And what happened to those complaints? Almost nothing.

Take the Met. Between 2019 and 2023, there were 146 complaints about racial discrimination. Only 15 were even referred for professional standards investigation. The rest were brushed aside.

That is just the data we have. Many forces do not even record ethnicity consistently. Complaints vanish into thin air.

Even inside the police, the picture is grim. Surveys show more than half of Black police officers and staff have experienced racism from their own colleagues. If officers in uniform are not protected from racist abuse inside the force, what chance do ordinary citizens have outside it?

My own experience with Thames Valley Police is a case in point. I reported a racist incident. They investigated themselves. They did not call me, and they did not listen to my testimony. They simply declared their colleague innocent. Case closed.

This is how the system works. The police are judge, jury, and defendant all at once. They are accountable to no one but themselves.

The result is predictable: racialised people lose faith. Complaints feel futile. Silence feels safer. The system relies on that exhaustion. It is designed not to deliver justice but to deny it.

When the media declares, with feigned shock, that the police are misogynistic and racist, it presents the problem as one of a few bad apples, a culture gone wrong, something that might be fixed with reforms, training, or another inquiry. But this is not new, and it is not accidental.

Policing in Britain was never designed to be neutral. From its very beginnings, it has been about control. The first police forces were built to discipline the poor, to protect property, to maintain order in a society defined by inequality. Across the empire, British policing exported surveillance, brutality, and racial hierarchies. Colonial policing was not about safety. It was about domination. Those logics never disappeared. They were repackaged and brought home.

This is why racialised people experience policing as violence, not protection. The stop and search on the street, the arrest at double the rate, the strip-search of children, the dismissal of complaints, these are not glitches in the system. They are the system working exactly as intended.

Every few years, a new inquiry or review is announced. The Macpherson Report in 1999 named the Met as institutionally racist. The Casey Review in 2023 described the same problems, almost word for word, twenty-four years later. Between those reports, we saw countless promises of reform, endless strategies, diversity schemes, unconscious bias training, and listening exercises. And yet here we are, in 2025, with the same headlines, the same scandals, the same refusal to change.

Because the police do not want to change. Change would mean dismantling the power they hold. It would mean being accountable to the people they currently criminalise. It would mean admitting that their legitimacy is built on sand.

And they do not change. They issue statements. They shuffle leadership. They put more Black and Brown faces in glossy recruitment brochures. But the structure remains: racist, misogynistic, violent.

What chance do racialised people have with the police? Let us answer plainly: none.

When I reported my case to Thames Valley Police, I held onto a fragile hope that someone would listen. That my voice would matter. That the system would live up to the slogans on its website about fairness and justice. That hope died quickly. My voice was not heard. The complaint went nowhere. The silence spoke louder than any apology ever could.

And I am not alone. Every statistic, every inquiry, every report shows the same: racialised people are stopped more, searched more, arrested more, strip-searched more, dismissed more. We are criminalised, infantilised, and ignored.

So no, the police are not failing. They are succeeding at the very thing they were designed to do: enforce racial hierarchies, protect their own, and silence those who challenge them.

The question is not whether the police can change. They will not. The question is how much longer society will tolerate institutions that tell us, in every stop, every dismissal, every silence, that we are not meant to belong.

We already know the truth. The police were always like this. The only shock is that anyone still pretends to be surprised.

References and Sources

· UK Home Office: Stop and Search, England and Wales, year ending March 2023

· Youth Endowment Fund: Stop and Search Toolkit

· House of Commons Library: Stop and Search Statistics, March 2024

· Gov.uk: Ethnicity and the Criminal Justice System 2022

· Independent Office for Police Conduct: Complaints Statistics 2022–23

· Metropolitan Police FOI: Race Discrimination Complaints 2019–2023

· Guardian: Half of Black British police report racism from colleagues

· Guardian: Thousands of children strip-searched by police

· Guardian: Police six times more likely to strip-search Black children

· [Macpherson Report 1999]