BLACK PEOPLE are being disproportionately subjected to strip searches by the police in comparison to their white peers, a Freedom of Information Request has revealed.

In the past five years, the Metropolitan police were found to have conducted 172,093 strip searches with 57,733 (33.5%) of these searches taking place on black people when they make up just 11.7% of the London population. 

In comparison, White British people were subjected to just 45,947 (27%) of strip searches in comparison while making up 44.9% of Londoners.

The shocking figures come after three Met officers remain under investigation for their part in strip searching a then 15-year-old girl while in the knowledge that she was menstruating. 

The girl, known as Child Q, was wrongly accused of carrying cannabis while sitting her exams at her school in Hackney, east London.

No other adult was present during the search and the child’s mother was not contacted.

According to a safeguarding review by the City & Hackney Safeguarding Children Partnership, racism “was likely to have been an influencing factor.”

Figures show 9,088 strips searches were carried out on children, including 2,360 on children under the age of 16 between 2016 and 2021.

Calls are now growing from MPs, campaigners and prominent black Britons across sport and entertainment for the officers and teachers involved in the case of Child Q to be sacked and prosecuted.

Leroy Logan, a former Police Superintendent at the Met, described the officers actions towards the schoolgirl as “totally disgusting.”

“What has been shown for the last five years with strip searches is the excessive use of it, and black people are three times more likely to be strip searched than white people,” he told The Voice.

“So, it was clear that was also stacked against Child Q that she was going to be strip searched and because of the adultification of black youngsters, who are treated more like adults than young people, and so they don’t have the necessary safeguarding and attendance of appropriate adults.

“If you think about what they presented with [the three Met Officers] a young girl in school and you think it’s one of the safest places, it should be the schools.

“She was alleged to be smelling of cannabis, she’d already been searched for other stuff. For me, there was not enough evidence to carry out nothing more than an outer clothing search and then then the officers carried out an intimate search, which is totally disgusting and totally inappropriate, and breaching the codes of practice.”

The Guardian reports that three out of the four officers called to the school are now under investigation by the police watchdog after being able to carry on full policing duties after the incident.

Following Cressida Dick’s resignation as Met Commissioner last month, who Mr Logan accuses of being “wedded to the culture, he believes that the next person to take on the top job needs to be prepared to challenge the “toxicity in the culture” across the forces.

“What those officers did is reflecting the culture of the organisation fuelled by institutional racism and other systemic failures like institutional sexism, it’s making it more hostile so that Child Q was subject to a double whammy of being black and female,” he said.

“The new commissioner has to have an understanding of systemic failures, this culture change needs to lead through to ethical leadership to hold the whole organisation to account.

“It’s quite clear that if the mother of this child hadn’t pushed things as she did, taking her to get special treatment, asking for a review, it [the Child Q case] would not have come to light.

“And I wonder how many other youngsters, black or white, but more than likely black have been subject to this type of draconian behaviour. It does nothing to instill confidence in the police and erodes trust in such a significant way.”