Black people are still not seen as deserving justice, while police officers in the UK’s capital are able to act with near-impunity, Doreen Lawrence has said, as the 30th anniversary of the racist murder of her son approaches.
Stephen Lawrence was killed in a racist attack by a gang at a bus stop in Eltham, south-east London, in 1993. Two men were convicted of the murder in 2012 but others remain free.
It was seen as a watershed moment when the Macpherson report on Scotland Yard’s failed investigation into the murder found the Metropolitan police to be institutionally racist. But, nearly a quarter of a century on, a second report by Louise Casey this year made strikingly similar findings.
“I don’t know how many more inquiries and how many reviews you need to have to say the same thing and still no changes, and still denials. Officers [are] able to be as brutal as they want, and nobody holds them to account,” Lady Lawrence told the BBC.
Only two of Stephen Lawrence’s five suspected murderers – David Norris and Gary Dobson – have been jailed for the crime. Lawrence added that she did not believe she would ever truly get justice, telling the broadcaster that without her family’s constant pressure, even those two convictions in 2012 would not have happened.
“Within the black community, how we’re treated, how crime’s investigated, we’re never seen as a group of people that should have justice. So everything that we’ve had, we’ve had to fight for – and continue to fight.”
The Casey report, commissioned in response to the abduction and murder of Sarah Everard by a serving Met police officer and released in March, denounced the force as a broken institution suffering from a collapse in public confidence – particularly among black people.
“The Met has yet to free itself of institutional racism. Public consent is broken. The Met has become unanchored from the Peelian principle of policing by consent set out when it was established.”
Lady Casey warned that “public consent is broken”, with only 50% of the public expressing confidence, even before revelations about the force’s worst recent scandals – placing the blame on its past leadership.
The new Met commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, has acknowledged past failings by the force, though he has insisted it is nowhere near as bad as when Macpherson reported in 1999.
But Lady Lawrence, who will mark the anniversary of her son’s death on 22 April, told the BBC Rowley could not be allowed to judge the Met’s progress – arguing that could only be done by the public. As long as police continued to deny their failings, there would be no change, she said, adding that she had heard “a lot of rhetoric” from Rowley, “but unless we see the changes ourselves, we’re never going to believe that”.
She added: “But, over the past – in Stephen’s case – 30 years, nothing much has changed.”
