Scotland Yard surrendered to the racist killers of Stephen Lawrence who are still walking free, his father has said, as he demanded police reopen their investigation and hunt them down.
Neville Lawrence said the police decision three years ago to close the investigation into the remaining gang members who escaped justice for the 1993 attack was made because black life was viewed as cheap.
Saturday is the 30th anniversary of the murder that shamed the Metropolitan police and brought about national soul searching on race. Stephen’s mother, Doreen, will attend a memorial service, while her ex-husband will lay flowers at the site in south-east London where his firstborn child was murdered.
Neville Lawrence condemned the betrayal of the promises of change after his son’s death, and continuing police failings on race.
New research for the Guardian shows that in the two decades since an official inquiry into the Lawrence case, black people were selected by police to be stopped and searched 2.7m times more than if they had been treated the same as white people. The vast majority uncover no wrongdoing.
For Lawrence, one of his priorities is getting police to restart their pursuit of the three or four white youths who took part in the attack at a bus stop on 22 April 1993. Two men – David Norris and Gary Dobson – were jailed for murder in 2012, but police believe more were involved in the attack, in which Stephen was racially abused, then surrounded and stabbed twice.
Stephen’s parents fought for the police to take the case seriously and in 1999 the Macpherson inquiry found that institutional racism in part explained the Met’s failings. In 2020, the Met announced an end to the active hunt to find the remaining killers.
Lawrence said he wanted the murder hunt reopened, warning that it gave the racist killers confidence and deterred new witnesses and testimony. “It sends out a message that they are OK, you don’t have to worry about anyone coming for you.”
He said of the Met: “They have more than surrendered, they have told them they are safe. They have told them: we are not going to come for you. Black life is cheap.”
He added: “I can’t see us becoming involved with the Met again. If we found something really consequential, how could we trust that they would do the right thing?”
The Met said: “Stephen’s murder will be subject to periodic review to see if matters can be progressed with the passage of time and advances in technology and forensic.”
Lawrence said progress on race had been reversed in the last 13 years of Conservative government. “The system has gone back to where it was, because they don’t care. They don’t have any feeling for the black community.”
Confidence between police and minority ethnic communities is undermined by stop and search, especially among black people. Analysis for the Guardian shows that black and Asian people were subjected to nearly 2.7m more stop and searches in the 22 years after the Macpherson inquiry report in 1999 than if the police had treated them the same as white people.
Disproportionality in stop and search was 10 times worse for black people in 2017-18, but this has now come down to five times worse, analysis of the last official figures shows.
In 2010-11, the numerical equivalent of 10% of the black population of England and Wales were stopped. By 2021-22, that had fallen to 3%, but this was higher than figure for white people of 0.6%.
To mark the 30th anniversary, the Guardian commissioned fresh research and repeated an exercise first carried out a decade ago. The research, based on analysis of official figures, showed that the differing rates in stops of ethnic groups resulted in black and Asian people experiencing 1.478m excess searches in the decade after Macpherson.
That figure was obtained by comparing the rate at which white people were stopped with that for other ethnic groups, and their respective share of the population.
The new research shows that from 2010-11 to the last official figures in 2021-22, there were another 1.2m excess stops of black and Asian people. This came despite a significant reduction in police use of stop and search overall. In 2010-11, there were 1.2m stops where ethnicity was recorded, compared with just over 512,000 in 2021-22.
The data was analysed by a team including Dr Krisztian Posch, of University College London, and Amal Ali, of the LSE.
Nationally, black people were 5.45 times more likely to be stopped than white people in 2021-22. But there were big variations. The highest disproportionality was in Dorset, at 13.59 times, followed by the City of London (10.23 times), Warwickshire (8.57 times), West Mercia (8.46 times) and Sussex (8.3 times).
The rate for the Met was 3.43 times, and the force is reeling from being found to be institutionally racist by another inquiry, this time by Louise Casey for the Met. Her report last month also found it to be institutionally misogynistic and homophobic.
Lawrence, in a Guardian comment article, condemned the Met commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, who said he would not use those descriptions about Britain’s largest force.
“Reform is not impossible, but if the person in charge of the organisation refuses to accept changes, then how is the force going to change?” Lawrence said. “If I was in trouble today, I wouldn’t call the police for help. Absolutely not. I have no confidence I would be treated with fairness or respect.”
In a statement, Rowley said progress had been made but huge problems persisted. “It is now clear that we did not dig deep enough to confront the cultural and systemic failings that allow discrimination to propagate. This failing has undermined the experience of our increasingly diverse workforce and compromised the trust of Londoners and our ability to protect them from crime,” he said.
“We have let Black communities down. They feel over-policed and under-protected. We are still not sufficiently representative of London, Black officers and staff still face discrimination and are not always sufficiently supported to progress within the Met. There are disproportionalities and systemic biases in our use of policing tactics and our support to victims of crime. We are deeply sorry for these failings.”
Rowley committed the Met to being “anti-racist” but made no mention of accepting that the force was institutionally racist.
The London mayor, Sadiq Khan, condemned equivocating on accepting institutional racism. “While progress may have been made, the Met remains institutionally racist,” he said. “This is a reality we simply can’t ignore or equivocate on. Rather, we must confront this truth and recommit to eradicating racism from the Met and from every other sector and sphere of our society.”
