Credit;PA
Eleven out of 14 of the strip searches recently referred for investigation by the Metropolitan Police involve Black children, new figures have shown.
Following the Child Q and Olivia scandals, where two teenage girls were strip-searched whilst they were menstruating, the Metropolitan Police referred a further 12 cases of child strip-searches for investigation.
These cases involved ten boys and four girls, aged 14 to 17, who were either strip-searched by officers in custody, or were subject to More Thorough Intimate Part searches (MTIP) outside of custody.
Out of the 14 cases, five are currently being probed by the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC), six are being looked into internally by the Met Police and three are still pending a decision over how they will be investigated.
Eleven of these cases involved Black children, two cases involved White children and one case related to the search of an Asian child.
Before this data was released by the Met, Mr Desai wrote to Assistant Commissioner, Louisa Rolfe OBE, expressing his concerns about the conduct of officers carrying out these strip searches and the disproportionality of their use against Black children.
In his letter, he called for the Met Police to routinely publish detailed data around child strip-searches and to provide updated information around the training being given to officers and the disciplinary procedures in place when guidance is not followed.
In response, the Assistant Commissioner gave an outline of the new safeguarding guidance and confirmed the Met’s commitment to tackling disproportionality and publishing data around strip searches.
At a previous meeting of the London Assembly Police and Crime Committee, the Deputy Assistant Commissioner for Local Policing, Laurence Taylor, said “There are too many strip searches in custody, there is disproportionality in those searches and we need to understand why there is disproportionality and what we can do about that”.
Labour’s London Assembly Policing and Crime Spokesperson, Unmesh Desai AM, said:
“These figures are alarming and follow the pattern we have been seeing when it comes to the disproportionate use of strip-searches against Black children.
“The egregious failings exposed by the Child Q and Olivia scandals have rightly sparked public outrage. This has prompted the Met to finally commit to improving it procedures and addressing the problem of disproportionality.
“To properly scrutinise the Met’s progress on this, we need full transparency under the new Commissioner. So, I am pleased that Met have responded to my calls and will now publish all the data that they hold on the strip-searches they carry out on children.
“Londoners need to feel confident that the Met are only conducting these searches where they are absolutely necessary and with the dignity and safety of the child as the number one priority”.
The Metropolitan Police has today contacted the London Assembly Police and Crime Committee to correct inaccurate information that they previously provided regarding the ethnicity of the children who underwent police strip-searches that have been referred on for investigation.
The corrected data that the Met Police has now issued is laid out below:
“We should have refined those 11 cases ref’ed as relating to Black children to more properly explain that in seven cases the subject of the search was Black, in four cases of mixed ethnicity.
7 cases – our records show the subject of the search as Black.
4 cases – our records show the subject was of mixed ethnicity.
2 cases – our records show the subject of the search as White.
1 case – our records show the subject of the search as Asian.”
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