More than 30 years after the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence, London’s Metropolitan Police have named a new suspect. A BBC investigation identified Matthew White as a sixth suspect, raising questions about why it took police two decades to properly investigate White, who died in 2021.
As Deputy Assistant Commissioner Matt Ward remarked, the police made numerous mistakes in their initial investigation of the attack. These mistakes have continued to resonate throughout discussions of racism (and police responses to it) in British society for the last three decades. This news comes just three years after the police officially marked the case as “inactive”, and at a time when trust in the police is low, particularly among people of colour.
Here’s what was always known: on April 22 1993, 18-year-old Stephen Lawrence was stabbed to death while waiting for a bus in south-east London. Lawrence and his friend Duwayne Brooks were targeted in an unprovoked racist attack by a gang of white youths.
