Is the Met "Institutionally Racist"?

I find it useful to separate out the various aspects of reality that are relevant to this, and especially using the aspects suggested by the Dutch philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd. He distinguished fifteen irreducibly distinct ways in which human reality functions, ranging from mathematical, natural, cognitive, social and societal aspect. The final three, the societal ones, impact all we do. They are:

• The juridical aspect, which makes right and wrong, justice and injustice, appropriateness and inappropriateness meaningful. When we judge, we function personally in the juridical aspect. When we legislate, we function collectively in it.

• The ethical aspect, which goes beyond right and wrong, justice, etc. to goodness, and in its purest form is characterized by self-sacrificing love. It is the aspect that makes us understand the difference between self-giving and selfishness, openness (voluntary vulnerability) and self-protection, trust and suspicion, volunteering and demanding to be reimbursed, generosity and meanness, and so on. It could be called "attitude".

• The pistic aspect (Greek for believing, committing), which makes all kinds of faith and commitment meaningful, including believing, assuming, presupposing, taking for granted, expectations, aspirations, committing, and also, in its largest form, religious or ideological faith and commitment. its opposite includes things like betrayal, traitorship, cowardice, hidden agendas, false beliefs and idolatry. The pistic aspect is operative in our way of seeing things: worldviews, paradigms in science, etc. and these can be either true (in line with reality) or false. It could be called "mindset".

The ethical and pistic aspects are those that operate deeply, invisibly, in the human heart and in what we call culture. They impact all we do, say and think - e.g. by hidden agendas versus openness, generosity versus meanness. A toxic culture is usually found when the people with influence are selfish and they idolize some aim, aspect or artefact at the expense of all else, being willing to sacrifice all else for it, including the welfare and wellbeing of those 'under' them.

The Met was pervaded by a toxic culture in which both their ethical and pistic aspects were dysfunctional. Ethical aspect: They operated with an attitude of self-protection and also some rivalry with other forces - wanting to be the biggest and best. Pistic aspect: They operated with a deliberately-chosen, politically-inpsired mindset of, for example, treating environmental activists as almost like terrorists (and thus infiltrating them, living a lie by maintaining false marriage-like partnership with activists - the scandal a dozen years ago). That the Met trained with the Army gave them the a mindset-flavour that people are enemies rather than citizens. They believed they were superior to those they were supposed to be serving, and glorified things that come with that, such as violence and misogyny (in the Clapham Police, 2025). Racism tends to be pervasive in such a culture, and those who stand up for decency tend to be laughed at, vilified, shouted down and even hindered in getting promotion.

To in "institutionally racist" is about instituion, which is not the same as culture but is meaningful in the juridical aspect. It would be so if the rules by which the members of the Met operated were racist. To be institutionally racist therefore means that the rules by which they operate (including the law of the land) discriminated against certain races of people. Apart from a minority of rules, this does not seem to be the case.

Dysfunctional culture is worse than being institutionally racist or anything else, because it is the culture that spreads derogatorily rather than by logic or argument, and gives a nasty, vicious flavour to all that is done.

That is what the Commissioner of the Met has to contend with. But his masters in the Government do not seem to recognise the difference, focusing too much on the juridical and ignoring the aspects of self-giving love and true faith and commitment.

See Also

• Dooyeweerd's Aspects, especially
  • The Pistic aspect
  • The Ethical aspect
  • The Juridical aspect

• Importance of the Heart (from a Christian perspective)
• On Culture (Mindset and Attitude) in Economics

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Created: 2 October 2025. Last updated: