When I was assigned the story of a new report on structural racism in the Metropolitan police force yesterday, I was prepared to launch into what has had to become a standard Canary reaction. A new report shows, for the umpteenth time, that the Met is structurally racist. In other news, the sky is blue and water is wet. Beyond that, these reviews – whilst important in themselves – are used as a substitute for actual change, rather than a motivator for change.

The thing that surprised me was that this review – ‘30 Patterns of Harm‘ by Dr Shereen Daniels – made that acknowledgement already. Not only in its wording, but in its structure, it works to centre Black knowledge-making without apology.

Met police told: ‘we are here, again’

It should not have required another Black person, shaped by decades of navigating systems that confuse volume for credibility, and objectivity for truth, to write another review on the London Metropolitan Police Service.

But we are here, again, because of the refusal to believe Black people when we speak of harm, of injustice, of deep unfairness. The thing is, it is not just a pattern in policing. It is a condition of institutional knowledge-making. Our truths are not seen as valid unless translated. Our insights are not trusted unless they come wrapped in the language of official evidence. And even then, only certain kinds of evidence count.

But this review was not built in that tradition.

The review makes it plain that there are no set of recommendations, no roadmap, that Met bosses can use as a checklist to declare that racism is now fixed. It knows that the problem is far deeper than that.

Likewise, Dr Daniels also states repeatedly that the report isn’t meant to be skimmed. The truths it contains are meant to be sat with and absorbed. The nature of journalism as a job, and the article you are now reading, means that it is by nature a summary.

However, I’d also like this, ideally, to function as a prompt. I mostly leave the quotes here unexplained, as they speak for themselves. However, I do try to situate them in their context. If you feel at all moved to do so, please read the report here. It is genuinely worth the time.

And if you find yourself flinching – not at the findings, but at the framing, the word choices, the challenge – ask yourself: what made it necessary to write this way in the first place?

That discomfort you feel is not a flaw in writing. It is a reflection of the conditions it was built to disrupt.

The report is divided into three parts. Each fulfils a different role: anchoring intent, mapping harm, and surfacing implications.

The first establishes the Black positionality of the review, and maps its approach to systematic racism. Next, the second section contains the “pattern dossiers”, mapping the ways in which systematic racism is organised in the Met. Then, the third section reflects on the ways in which the Met could react to this knowledge – both positive and negative.

Part A – Position

This review was commissioned by the Met. It marked a rare institutional admission: that its aspiration to become an anti-racist organisation was not matched by a clear understanding of the structural nature of the problem it was trying to solve. Despite a flurry of activity – evolved ‘race’ action plans, revised statements, clearer language, the set up of a dedicated internal team – there was little confidence that these efforts were hitting the mark. The institution was busy, but not grounded and external pressure was demanding more. It required the Met to reinterrogate the very assumptions shaping its view of the problem and I was hired to help them do that.

Dr Daniels’ research is obviously far from the first such investigation into the Met’s racism. However, it was the first to take place not as a reaction to a specific scandal – like the murder of Stephen Lawrence – but as a wider examination.

Nevertheless, it acknowledges both work the previous reviews and the things that Black Londoners already knew. Part of the frustration, particularly in activist circles, is that the conclusion is so often something that anyone could have told you. The cops are racist, we know. 30 Patterns acknowledges that, and the harm of being told it again.

When institutions respond to complex or uncomfortable problems, such as public trust issues, misconduct, discrimination, or harm, they tend to follow a well-worn playbook. • First, initiate a review. • Ask fresh questions. • Commission new data. • Gather experiences, often painful ones. • Interview the public or staff, particularly those most affected. • Show that something is being done. • Produce a report. Sometimes, those steps are taken with good intentions. But the pattern itself rarely changes. And when the issue is systemic racism, especially anti-Blackness, this approach does something else entirely. It recycles the harm.

Part of the reason why the report rejects the data-driven ‘academic’ approach is that it also acknowledges that “neutrality is not impartiality”. Too often, that appeal to neutrality merely reflects dominant norms – in this case, whiteness.

Whiteness gets to decide what is valid and credible. Then, inevitably, the conclusions drawn also reflect that whiteness. 30 Patterns is trying to do something else.

Modifiers on the perception of Blackness

Beyond that, it also acknowledges that Blackness is not itself a monolith. Dr Daniels includes ‘modifiers’, detailing the ways that Blackness and other factors intersect:

Modifiers include gender, class, colourism, neurodivergence, migration status, age, disability, religion and accent or language. They work silently but constantly.

Inside the Met they decide who is seen as credible or confrontational, who is protected or punished, who is invited in or pushed out. On the street they decide who is stopped, searched, escorted home, or forced to the ground.

As an example of the care the report takes with these intersections, Dr Daniels acknowledges transness and non-binary identity not just in the sections on queer identity, but also in the section on misogynoir. Too often with this kind of document, transness is siloed as a queer identity. Instead, 30 Patterns also recognises it as interacting with perceptions of Black womanhood.

The primers on ‘modifiers’ are each separated into the effects that, say, disability and Blackness can have both within the police force and on the street. The examples given are illustrative but not totalising.

Inside • Reasonable adjustments take longer or are dismissed entirely, especially if the condition is not immediately visible. […]

On the street • Black disabled people, particularly those with mental health conditions, face rapid escalation in encounters including handcuffing, restraint or detention.

Part B – Pattern dossiers

(W)hen institutions treat systemic racism as dysfunction, the response becomes managerial: new policies, updated training, procedural reviews. But when systemic racism is understood as structured, as something the institution has been designed to accommodate, the work becomes deeper, slower, more uncomfortable, more intentional and far more urgent.

Part of what makes this report feel like something different is its engagement with why the Met is still racist. We’ve seen decades of evidence of Met bigotry. We’ve heard repeated vows to change that also fail to acknowledge the problem. Then, surprise, the Met is bigoted again:

The Met’s communications function is not designed to surface truth. It is designed to manage risk. Strategic communications operate as an institutional firewall, redirecting critique into perception work and recasting systemic issues as misunderstandings. Language becomes a tool of containment: specific terms are avoided, discomfort is softened, and messaging is curated to preserve legitimacy rather than name harm.

Systematically, 30 Patterns works through the ways in which the Met is set up to perpetuate its own anti-Blackness. That includes its public address, its engagement activities with Black communities, or its inclusion of Black officers. The whole machine works to legitimate and carry out racism, even whilst appearing to work on fixing the problem. In fact, it does so by appearing to fix the problem:

Community engagement in the Met is often designed to manage risk, not redistribute power. Engagement activities prioritise perception over transformation. “Listening exercises” follow public harm but rarely inform decision-making. Black residents are asked to participate in processes where the outcome is already decided, their input filtered or discredited when it challenges institutional comfort. What is presented as co-design is often just pre-approved messaging with community endorsement attached.

‘Doing the work’ and un-doing the work

The visual display of data becomes institutional theatre: clean, coded, and detached from the harm it masks. In practice, dashboards reflect what the Met is willing to count, not what communities need to understand. They surface activity, complaints are logged, officers are trained, and sessions are held, but rarely pose the structural questions: to what end, what has changed, and for whom?

Part of the continued response of the Met to its own racism is to engage in activities. The Met is racist, but it’s doing anti-racism training. It’s doing workshops. It’s listening to the community. This is an exercise in doing an exercise, in looking busy. That looking-busy is a knee-jerk reaction to a structural problem. As such, it will never work.

Whenever racism, disproportionality, or community harm surfaces, the Met defaults to behaviour-change training. Workshops, e-learning, and micro-nudges are presented as cure-alls, signalling activity while shielding the system from redesign. When the Met treats racism as a problem of misunderstanding rather than design, it can focus on training, track how many people attend, and claim progress, all without having to change the structures of power that allowed the harm in the first place.

Many of the findings of the report will be familiar. ‘Stop and search makes suspicion into routine’. ‘Strip search makes doubt into domination’. ‘Adultification makes black childhood an impossibility’. ‘Algorithmic policing automates racialised suspicion’. These are things we know. They’re still true.

However, others are less routine. That’s not to say that they haven’t been explored before, sometimes many times, but they’re still not often seen in this kind of report. ‘Authorised language strips systemic racism of its meaning’, for example, examines the ways in which the Met’s phrasebook functions to rob the language used against it of its power.

The Met’s control of narrative is not confined to public statements. It operates through internal scripts, preferred vocabulary, and strategic euphemism, defining what can be said, and therefore what can be seen. Language becomes a governance tool. Some terms, like “systemic racism” or “systemic failings” appear in external materials but are quietly policed in internal use. Others “whiteness (as a logic not an identity)” “anti-Blackness” “institutional racism” – are absent altogether.

Part C – Not conclusions, per se

This next section is not to overwhelm or persuade. It is here to help you notice what’s already visible, if you are willing to see it. The patterns do not add up to a toolkit. You cannot copy/paste them and then call it your London Race Action Plan version 2.0. They surface something more uncomfortable still: good intentions, busy strategies, even sincere efforts, can live quite comfortably alongside structural harm. That coexistence is no accident; the system was designed to accommodate it. And when Black people, the ones who often feel the harm first and hardest, have raised the flag, the Met has chosen, time and again, to look the other way.

The final section examines what the patterns discussed in the previous section might reveal. These aren’t conclusions in the traditional sense. Rather, they explore the logic behind the patterns: what it says and what questions we might pose in reaction.

I don’t want to give you the conclusions or the questions. Again, read the report if you can.

Suppose the Met treats this review as a reputational threat, a short-term crisis, or a branding challenge to be managed. In that case, it will re-enter a cycle that has defined its institutional history: absorb critique, rename the problem, reissue commitments, and re-legitimise its own authority without shifting its architecture. That pattern is not just failure. It is complicity.

Structural language must not become a shield for institutional self-protection. There is a growing risk that the vocabulary of harm will be adopted but not enacted. That individuals and departments will quote from this report to signal alignment, while continuing to reproduce the very conditions it exposes. When that happens, fluency becomes a substitute for change.

30 Patterns was commissioned by the Met. That, in itself, could make it suspect – even dangerous. Dr Daniels enumerated, at great length, the ways the Met uses reports and reviews as a substitute for actual change. It would be hypocritical to assume that this report is immune to the same abuse.

This review cannot be actioned in the traditional sense. It does not lend itself to implementation plans, branded initiatives, or PR strategies. What it calls for is a different approach, one that treats transformation not as a programme, but as a long-term structural reckoning.

The report refuses to give a neat checklist of actions that the Met can point to. It wants to avoid the pitfall of tickbox recommendations and activities that lead to workshops, that lead to declarations of improvement. It acknowledges that the Met desperately wants to declare racism ‘over’:

The task now is not to absorb the critique, but to let it reshape the Met’s internal logic. This is what actualising commitment looks like: resisting the urge to perform transformation and choosing instead to become it.

Instead, Dr Daniels has provided a clear, detailed map of how the Met went wrong, and how it keeps going wrong. That could be deeply useful, or it could be ignored, or worse. What the Met does with that map is up to it:

Treating this review as a structural map, not a symbolic milestone. Even though it was commissioned, its existence does not prove change has taken place. Its publication and circulation is not the intervention. How it is used will determine its value.

That’s it for now

This is the end of the article. It feels odd to put that on what is nominally a news story, but this wasn’t exactly an ordinary bit of news.

I want to sign off with a couple of acknowledgements. First, as you probably noticed immediately from my author photo, I’m white. It shouldn’t always fall to my Black colleagues to write this kind of article, but the fact that I’m writing it also inflects the ways I interpreted the work. Again: read the report if you can.

Finally, I should also acknowledge that a report commissioned by the Met, making recommendations to the Met about how to improve, makes the assumption that the Met should exist. The Canary has frequently taken the position that the police (and the carceral justice system as a whole) doesn’t need reform, but abolition. I agree with that.

However, I won’t sit here and dismiss the work in 30 Patterns because it works from a more immediately actionable position. I can read about the ways that Black police officers are discriminated against and write ‘sorry, please quit’, and my editor will probably publish that too. As with a lot of other sentiments, 30 Patterns also pre-empted this in its ‘Note to Black officers’:

I recognise the calculation and I’ve named the cost. You were asked to show loyalty to an institution that withheld its own. It demanded discipline and service yet offered you no shield when racism shaped the very processes you were told to trust. That contradiction is not yours to fix and it never was.

Yet you too have choices to make.

Featured image via the Canary

By Alex/Rose Cocker

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