An investigation was launched after a black 15-year-old girl was searched at a school in London in 2020.
Black children in England and Wales are six times more likely to be searched by police, according to a report finding children have been abandoned by those sworn to protect them.
The report, released Monday by Children’s Commissioner Rachel de Souza, found that nearly 3,000 children were searched between 2018 and mid-2022, and more than half of searches were conducted without an appropriate adult present.
The investigation was launched after a black 15-year-old girl suspected of having marijuana was searched at a London school in 2020 by two female officers with no other adult present. The girl, identified as “Child Q”, was menstruating and no drugs were found. An earlier report said racism was a likely factor in the humiliating search.
“A girl’s courage to speak out about a traumatic thing that happened to her,” led to the report, which found “widespread non-compliance” with safeguards and evidence of a “deeply concerning practice,” de Souza said.
The findings follow a scathing report last week that showed the public had lost confidence in London’s Metropolitan Police and that the force was plagued by institutional racism, misogyny and homophobia and was not doing enough to weed out bad cops. That report came about after a cop raped and murdered a young woman in 2021.
Children as young as eight were searched in places that were often inappropriate, such as theme parks or vehicles, and sometimes even in public, according to the new report. In some cases, at least one officer present was of a different sex than the child being searched.
More than a third of the 2,847 searches were of black children, making them more than six times more likely to be searched based on population figures, the report said. White children were about half as likely to be searched.
De Souza called the inequality “completely unacceptable”.
The Runnymede Trust, a racial equality think tank, said the findings were “even harder to absorb” than the report on the Metropolitan Police, which has faced criticism in the past. The trust called for police to be removed from schools and their powers to search children revoked.
“Officers are often unable to justify the need for a search, nor are they able to report on the protective impact on the child involved,” the group said. “On the contrary. It also confirms that our policing crisis is not just limited to London. It is national.”
De Souza said strip searches may be necessary, but “robust safeguards” are needed to protect children.
She made 17 recommendations, including a call for the Department of the Interior to review search laws and policies and make specific changes to police and criminal evidence codes.
A spokesman said the Ministry of the Interior takes child protection seriously.
“Comics research is one of the most intrusive powers available to the police,” said the spokesman. “No one should be subjected to searches based on race or ethnicity, and safeguards are in place to prevent this.”
De Souza also called on the National Council of Police Chiefs to publish a plan to reform child body searches.
Chief Constable Craig Guildford said the council welcomed the inquiry and would consider the findings.