Britain's police blinded by colour

By Colin Keaveney

On 22 April 1993, Stephen was standing at a bus stop in Eltham, South East London, when he was accosted by a group of white youths. As his friend looked on aghast, the young Londoner was stabbed twice. He quickly died of his wounds.

More than five years on, a public inquiry into the Met's (London's Metropolitan Police) handling of the case has not only revealed a shocking chronicle of negligence, but also raised questions about institutional racism in the police force.

The inquiry has raised serious questions about the handling of the investigation. For example, why did police fail to give Stephen any medical attention? Why, upon arriving at the crime scene, did Detective Inspector Philip Jeynes fail to order a mobile search of the area (Stephen's friend had furnished a description of the killers and they were probably still on the streets)?

It was such omissions that made Neville and Doreen Lawrence, Stephen's parents, suspicious at the time. They decided to pursue the matter to the intense annoyance of the Met.

In the autumn of 1993, an internal police review, described as a "whitewash" by the Lawrence inquiry, declared the investigation to have been beyond reproach.

Five years later, the most plausible answer for Detective Inspector Jeynes's inactivity is that he did not seriously entertain the possibility that Stephen was the victim of an unprovoked, racially-motivated attack. Indeed, several officers refused to accept that the murder was racial, despite the fact that the killers were heard to shout out the word "nigger". Even more sinister is the fact that the police only picked up the suspects for questioning two weeks after the murder. And none of the five white youths was questioned about his attitudes on race, although some of them were known to have committed racist acts in the past.

Both the criminal prosecution and the civil action by Lawrence's family against the suspects subsequently failed.

Even if justice was not seen to have been done, the Stephen Lawrence inquiry has succeeded in revealing that race still matters in Tony Blair's New Brittania. It is a fact borne out by other evidence. According to the British Social Attitudes Survey, attitudes to race have remained largely unchanged over the last 15 years. To the question: "Would you describe yourself as prejudiced against people of other races?", four out of 10 Britons said "yes." It was virtually the same percentage in the early 1980s.

Despite legislation outlawing discrimination at the workplace and the declared intentions of successive governments to promote racial diversity in key professions, statistics still betray a racial lag. For instance, the figures for 1996-1997 show that only five per cent of those entering primary teacher-training colleges came from ethnic minorities. Even more alarming, the Afro-Caribbean community into which Stephen Lawrence was born remains the most economically fragile in Britain, and black school leavers are four times less likely to find a job than their white counterparts.

Yet if such statistics are numbing reminders of the rootedness of racism in British society, the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry is an indicator of change. The telling comparison in this respect is with the investigation into the race riots that rocked the inner cities in the early 1980s. Whereas the chairman of the 1981 inquiry, Lord Scarman, refused resolutely to be drawn into the wider issue of institutional racism, the chairman of the Lawrence inquiry, Sir William MacPherson, has tackled it head-on. On the opening day of the concluding part of the inquiry, he suggested that "it might be good for the Home Office and everyone else involved to take on board the perception of the black community and assume it is right, rather than make excuses and assume it is wrong." Furthermore, MacPherson rejected attempts by Sir Paul Condon, the chief of London's Metropolitan Police, to depict his force's failures in the Lawrence case as the result of a few bad racist apples in an otherwise salubrious barrel. The inquiry, MacPherson insisted, would concentrate on "collective failure" rather than on individual malice. His stand is all the more significant as it directly concerns an institution that has long been an object of scorn and suspicion for black Britons: the police force.

There are some signs that tackling institutional racism in the police is set to become a priority. Home Secretary Jack Straw announced to the Labour Party conference on 1 October that targets were to be set to reflect the racial mix of Britain in all areas of the criminal justice system, including police, prisons and the immigration service. And unlike his counterpart at the Met, the police chief of Greater Manchester admitted to the Lawrence inquiry that there was indeed institutional racism in his force.

This admission by a senior police officer was as unprecedented as it was overdue. However, while Neville Lawrence welcomed the police chief's statement, he wanted to know what he was actually going to do to solve the problem, now that it had been recognised. Likewise, Darcus Howe, a veteran of the black movement in the 1960s, demanded that Jack Straw go further than merely setting targets and implement detailed strategies for the recruitment and advancement of ethnic minorities.

Such caution is warranted, for while statistics show that recruitment from minorities is up since Condon took over at the Met in 1993, the Black Police Association complains that a culture of casual racism still pervades the force and that many of the white officers remain "uneasy" around blacks. Condon himself had to admit that racial stereotyping was behind the overwhelmingly disproportionate number of black people stopped by police.

Moreover, the Lawrence case exposes how the lessons of the past can be forgotten unless they are accompanied by serious political and institutional commitment to change. For while Condon admitted that racial awareness training for police officers (one of the key recommendations of the Scarman inquiry) had failed in the Lawrence case, an expert witness revealed that none of the 60 officers involved in the investigation had received such training in the first place.

The struggle of Neville and Doreen Lawrence to have justice done and the truth told about police handling of their case has refocused the debate on racism in a dramatic way. In the 1980s under the Thatcher government, the debate had shifted from anti-racism to equal opportunities. This trend arguably continued into the 1990s with a noticeable business sense to have a diversified workforce. Even the police understood the need to boost minority recruitment. But with establishment voices now denouncing institutional racism in the police, more and more people are coming to accept that recruitment drives are only part of the solution. A fundamental change of ethos is what is needed.

There is a danger, however, that the impetus for the reform of Britain's police forces will be lost. This danger is illustrated by the implacable logic of the remarks made to the Lawrence inquiry by the Greater Manchester chief constable. Having admitted "institutional racism," he quickly qualified his statement, implicitly letting himself and other senior officers off the hook: the police force is drawn from society, he pointed out; racism is pervasive in society; therefore, the police are inevitably racist. Should this type of logic prevail, the Lawrence inquiry will have been for naught.

For Neville and Doreen Lawrence a vital question remains: What is going to be done concretely to make the police guardians of every Briton's rights, regardless of colour?