The report, ‘30 Patterns Of Harm’, has been published some two years after the Met police was deemed by inquiry to be institutionally racist. The report identifies different patters of structural harm, and how systemic racism is organized within the Met, including how this impacts Black children. Thereafter, the report explains what these structural patterns make visible, in a series of racist logics. The report concludes with a call for what the Met must do now.
Details
The ways in which systematic racism impacts children directly are examined by the report and areas of structural analysis include, amongst others:
- The adultification of black children;
- Stop and search enforcing suspicion as routine;
- Risk logics of the police framing blackness as pre-threat;
- Use of force that reads distress as violence;
- Missing persons decisions ration urgency by race;
- Strip search converts doubt to domination.
Adultification
The report explains that black children are rarely seen as children:
“Within the Met, innocence is not a presumption automatically extended to them. Instead, they are read as older, stronger, and more culpable than their white peers. This shift in perception alters the institutional response: their vulnerability is downplayed, their actions are criminalised, and their needs are treated as strategic threats rather than calls for care.”
In this context, Black boys are routinely labelled as threatening. Terms like “intimidating,” “non-compliant,” and “aggressive” are applied in routine encounters. Meanwhile, Black girls are misread as unstable or hyper-sexual. Expressions of concern are dismissed as confrontation, not signs of vulnerability.
Use of Force – Distress is Interpreted as Violence
Consequently, use of force “outpaces actual risk.” The report observes that handcuffing, restraint and strip search are applied to Black children at disproportionate rates, and the distress of such children is “treated as defiance.” In this context, “emotional responses are escalated rather than met with care or de-escalation.”
Structural racism is borne out in administrative and institutional practices of the police force. The report notes that “child status is inconsistently recorded and racial bias shifts perceptions of age, erasing markers of childhood in official documentation.” In this context, disciplinary action is substituted for safeguarding and referrals are bypassed, “leaving harm unaddressed and institutional trust eroded.”
Strip Searches
The report explains that racism towards Black children shows up on the street, with these harms resulting in invasive strip searches under the false justification of maturity, with such searches disproportionately impacting Black girls, in particular.
Missing Persons
“Black boys are met with surveillance, force and punishment at ages where white peers are treated as mischief-makers.” Such violence is also exhibited in the use of TASER on Black children and missing children who are met with delay; structural safeguards for such children remain weak. “When harmed, Black children are less likely to be believed, and their trauma is often downplayed or ignored.”
Stop and Search
Where stop and search is concerned, the threshold for “reasonable suspicion” is elastic, “stretching to fit institutional instinct, shrinking when Black people seek redress.” The report explains that data aggregated from stop and search is recycled to reproduce racist logics and rationalize further searches. “The result is a loop that preserves power, erodes trust, and teaches Black children early that safety is not for them. Children are stopped in everyday spaces. School gates, bus stops, and shops become surveillance sites, not places of safety. Stops involving children often lack adult presence. Even those under 12 years-old are subjected to searches without safeguarding protocols.”
Risk Logic
The report explains that risk in policing “is never neutral”. It is authored, rehearsed, and defended through policy, training, and data. In the Met, “formal frameworks translate racial instinct into “professional judgement”, deciding “who will offend, who will lie, and who is expendable.” As such, this risk logic “frames blackness as pre-threat”. Consequently, the report explains that Black children “face higher thresholds for care”, while the Met “prioritises its own reputational protection.”
The report concludes with recommendations for change. The first of which is that the report sits where decisions are made at the centre of strategic governance. Additional recommendations include calling on the Met to stop interpreting critique as a form of reputational or personal threat and treating ‘diversity’ like it’s going to solve institutional racism. The various positive recommendations call for profound cultural change at an institutional level.
Commentary
The structural patterns described in this report expose an environment in which coercion of Black children becomes routine; one in which Black children are policed in structurally racist terms that deny them their safety and childhood.
Practitioners should use the findings of this report to bolster representations made on behalf of child clients from ethnic minority backgrounds, both when arguing against criminalisation and when mitigating at the point of sentence. The findings of this report will also be helpful to children wishing to bring civil actions against the Met police in relation to their mistreatment.