The entire incident that led to the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence on April 22, 1993, likely lasted no longer than 20 seconds. However, its impact on the capital, our communities and faith in policing has endured for decades — and it is not over yet.
Today the Metropolitan Police has taken the extraordinary step of naming a major suspect in the murder. Matthew White, who died in 2021 at the age of 50, is now the sixth suspect, following an investigation by the BBC.
Five men were arrested in the aftermath of the attack, with two of them, Gary Dobson and David Norris, handed life sentences in 2012 after being found guilty of murder. But these latest revelations raise fresh concerns over the Met’s decision three years ago to end its investigation or move it into “an inactive phase”, in the words of then Commissioner Dame Cressida Dick.
The BBC investigation reveals that following the murder, White’s stepfather approached a Met detective, saying he believed a relative of his had been present at the time Lawrence was stabbed to death. Scotland Yard today acknowledged that the relative was “subsequently misidentified”, calling it “a significant and regrettable error.”
In 2013, White was arrested for a second time but further Crown Prosecution Service advice concluded that no further action should be taken. Then, in 2020, a year prior to his death, White pleaded guilty to an attack on a black employee just a few hundred yards from the site at which Lawrence was killed. The BBC reports the victim was told he would be “Stephen Lawrenced”.
Attuned to incompetence
The list of police failings is shocking yet unsurprising. From the botched initial investigation to failures spanning 30 years, taking in credulous officers, a failure to follow evidence and share descriptions. It’s little wonder then that Stephen’s father, Dr Neville Lawrence, told the BBC: “They must be able to find a decent police force who could investigate.”
Londoners have grown attuned to police incompetence and allegations of corruption. To that end, Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley has placed reform — and ridding the Met of hundreds of officers who should never have been in the force in the first place — at the centre of his job. But the scale of the challenge, as set out by the Casey Review and now following these revelations, seems to grow larger.
Indeed, only in 2020, two decades on from the publication of the Macpherson Report which found the Metropolitan Police guilty of institutional racism, the police watchdog announced it had submitted evidence to the CPS over whether four former police officers, who were in senior roles at various times during the first few weeks of the murder investigation, may have committed criminal offences of misconduct in public office.
It is becoming clearer that the Met is some way off from being the force that can be relied upon by all Londoners. Indeed, the problems are, as the Macpherson Report and Casey Review state, institutional. As such, the gulf in trust between police and citizens shows little sign of narrowing.
Without the tireless campaigning of his family it is difficult to imagine any sort of justice for Stephen. But the reality is none of this should ever have been necessary.
