LAST WEEK, the BBC in its headline reported a “hidden culture” of racism and misogyny in the Metropolitan Police. In its article announcing its findings, the BBC said that “Serving Metropolitan Police officers called for immigrants to be shot, revelled in the use of force and were dismissive of rape claims in footage captured by a Panorama undercover reporter.”

But even the BBC’s article confirmed that its own headline was misleading. It goes on to note that: “The evidence of misogyny and racism challenges the Met’s promise to have tackled what it called ‘toxic behaviours’ after the murder of Sarah Everard by a serving police officer.”

The article lists, among other horrific examples, a male sergeant dismissing evidence of a domestic abuser stamping on the stomach of a pregnant woman; other officers discussing the murder and castration of immigrants for as little as “overstaying their visa”; one male officer offering to provide a statement blaming an arrested man after another officer broke the man’s leg and describing immigrants as “scum” and an “invasion”; another describing how to snap an arrestee’s finger tendons in order to take fingerprints by force; and another on his first meeting with the undercover reporter, happily recounting how he had repeatedly “whacked the shit” out of a restrained man and got away with it.

But the idea that there is anything “hidden” about racism, misogyny and the glorification of violence in the Met Police is astonishing. 

The Metropolitan Police’s racism and misogyny is not a “hidden culture” — it has been obvious for years. Yet here we are in October 2025, seeing yet another exposé of what we have always known: Britain’s largest police force operates as an instrument of state violence against black and working-class communities.

The BBC mentioned the appalling 2021 murder of Sarah Everard by a Met officer, though not the fact that the same officer had committed indecent exposure six years earlier with no action from Kent Police and did the same on at least two other occasions, or that vetting of his application to join the force had missed earlier assaults; nor that his record and behaviour were so extreme that he was known to colleagues as “the rapist.”

The fact that police refused local women permission to hold a vigil for Everard on Clapham Common and attacked and arrested them when they gathered to remember her anyway also escaped mention, as did the fact that the Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services “exonerated the police [who handcuffed the women and dragged them off], while criticising politicians and others for expressing their opinions on what had happened.”

But the issues have been pervasive for years, not just limited to a few “rogue officers,” as the Met tried to describe Everard’s murderer — and they have been anything but hidden. In early 2023, a Centre for Women’s Justice (CWJ) report noted the “horrific misogyny and racism within the Met Police,” citing cases such as that of David Carrick, a serial rapist as an armed police officer, the “disgraceful” misogyny, harassment and racism of Charing Cross police — at the same station featured in the latest BBC report — exposed in 2022 and the five police who took “selfies” — two of them later jailed — with the bodies of murder victims Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman.

The CWJ concluded that unchecked racism and abuse of women had gone on in the Met Police for “at least 50 years.” Each time these scandals are uncovered, police bosses blame “rogue” individuals and promise action to address any “cultural” issues within the police. Then little or nothing is done until the next one.

The recent BBC Panorama investigation into Charing Cross police station has stripped away the final veneer of respectability from an institution that has systematically terrorised marginalised communities for decades. But this revelation is not news — it is confirmation of what black and racialised communities have testified to for generations.

Muslim Women’s Network UK (MWNUK) agrees. Responding to the latest BBC revelations, MWNUK said: “Such behaviour is not new — it is a long-standing, entrenched problem … Women and minority communities have long been aware of discriminatory behaviour within the police — the Panorama investigation has merely provided the evidence to prove it.”

Nor is the problem, or the destruction of trust that it causes, limited to the Met police. A poll by domestic violence charity Refuge found that “53 per cent of women in England and Wales said that the police had made not much or no progress in addressing problems of sexism and misogyny among police officers over the last year. More than a third (39 per cent) said they had not much or no trust in the police to handle the issue of violence against women and girls and a quarter (25 per cent) said their trust in the police to handle violence against women and girls had gone down over the last year.” 

The charity criticised the continuing inaction against police officers who act in such ways toward women and minorities.

These issues sit within a wider, still unaddressed, landscape of racial profiling and harassment by police, as my former parliamentary colleague Dawn Butler found out in 2020 when she was stopped by police in Hackney on her way to lunch with a friend, apparently because she was in a nice car. Rather than take action to prevent a recurrence of such profiling, the Police Federation of England and Wales criticised Dawn for “not allowing them to police London” and linked the incident to a rise in knife crime, stating: “The last time police officers were told to stop doing their job was around stop and search and knife crime went up by 71 per cent.”

The reality is, in 2024, black Londoners faced police use of force at a rate three-and-a-half times higher than white Londoners, despite comprising only 13 per cent of London’s population. This disparity has remained stagnant for four consecutive years, exposing the complete failure of every reform initiative.

The stop-and-search figures reveal an even more damning pattern of racial targeting: black people experienced searches at five times the rate of white people, while achieving the same arrest outcomes. Nearly 71 per cent of searches on black people resulted in “no further action” — making these encounters nothing more than state-sanctioned harassment designed to criminalise existence while black.

They also sit within a context of gross disparities in the treatment of crimes against women and particularly black and Asian women. Less than 4 per cent of rape cases lead to prosecution of the alleged offender; this is horrific enough but even this figure is skewed by the unequal handling of cases where the victim is black or from a minority. But research has shown that “if the perpetrator of sexual violence is white and the victim is from a black or ethnic minority group, the offence is 11 times more likely to be given a “no crime” label and therefore less likely to be prosecuted in comparison to cases where the victim is white.”

The disproportionate targeting of black and racialised communities serves multiple functions: it criminalises resistance, justifies mass incarceration, and divides the working class along racial lines.

These disparities reflect that the Met is only the most visible and easily exposed example of the institutional racism and misogyny that infects the whole British justice system and much of the Establishment in which it operates. This is so ingrained that a 2021 government “end-to-end rape review” was accused of ignoring the issue entirely.

The Panorama footage captured officers at Charing Cross station calling for “immigrants” to be “shot or left to die,” referring to Algerians and Somalians as “scum,” and bragging about breaking detainees’ fingers. One officer was filmed pressing pressure points on a 17-year-old autistic teenager held on the floor for two hours after throwing a pillow.

The Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley would have us believe these are isolated incidents committed by “rogue officers.”

It has been 26 years since the Macpherson inquiry declared the Metropolitan Police “institutionally racist” following Stephen Lawrence’s murder. Yet the 2023 Casey Review found the force remains institutionally racist, misogynistic and homophobic.

Rowley’s response exemplifies the intellectual dishonesty of police leadership. His response represents the violence of denial. Despite accepting Casey’s findings, he refuses to acknowledge institutional racism, dismissing the term as “ambiguous” and “politicised.” This semantic manipulation reveals the force’s fundamental unwillingness to confront its colonial origins and racist foundation.

Those police officers caught, disciplined, dismissed, and prosecuted represent only the visible tip of a vast iceberg of institutional corruption. Rowley’s so-called corruption clearout reveals only the scope of the problem, not the solution.

Rowley stands as the latest custodian of an unreformable institution. His refusal to acknowledge institutional racism while presiding over systemic abuse makes him complicit in every future violation. His promise to “fast-track” dismissals rings hollow.

The British state is still, in far too many ways, built on discrimination and contempt for its victims. The Metropolitan Police is the visible end of this bigotry and is self-evidently unfit for purpose, but in the shadows behind it sits an institutional weight of racism and misogyny that has all the inertia and unwillingness to move that you would expect of any malignant mass. Root-and-branch change is the only solution for the unfitness of police forces, but when the establishment is the same, what are the chances of that? 

The time for reform has passed. The time for transformation is now.

Claudia Webbe was previously the British member of Parliament for Leicester East (2019-24). You can follow her at www.facebook.com/claudiaforLE and x.com/claudiawebbe.