Injustice over teenager's murder shown to be a result of police incompetence and corruption as much as institutional racism
I read Sir William Macpherson's inch-thick report on the Stephen Lawrence murder at Easter 1999 because it had quickly become a political football and I wanted to form a first-hand opinion. The annotated pink volume is on my desk today because I sensed it might come in handy. So it does, yet again, with the publication of the Ellison review. With Theresa May announcing another judicial probe amid renewed dismay, I plan to hang on to it.
At the time I thought that Macpherson's report had got the balance wrong in heaping so much of the blame on what it famously called "institutional racism" (a phrase adopted from the US Black Power movement) in the police and wider British society. It did so at the expense of the other two components of his inquiry, police incompetence and possible corruption among investigating officers, which protected the suspects.
One of the gang was the son of Clifford Norris, then a feared local gangster, now a broken, impoverished drunk according to the Daily Mail, his son behind bars. It's all there in the original (badly-written) Macpherson report for anyone to find, but, good liberal that he was, Macpherson chose to major on the racist component.
So Mark Ellison QC's brisk conclusion that the police were less than frank with the Macpherson team about ex-detective sergeant John Davidson's suspected corrupt links – the Guardian's crime correspondents have been pursuing this for years – was welcome to me. Even so, today's Guardian coverage focuses on Ellison's findings against the undercover police operation to penetrate and discredit the Lawrence family – another recurring campaign by the paper.
Stephen Lawrence was 18 when he was stabbed at that bus stop in Eltham, just eight days older, so I noticed at the time, than my eldest son, who is now 39 and very much alive. All those touched by the case have felt its reverberations, good and ill, for 20 years. Doreen and Neville Lawrence are long since divorced. She is a peer of the realm and two of the five original suspects – young Norris and Gary Dobson – are serving jail sentences for the crime.
It wasn't that there weren't racist assumptions swirling round the police handling of the case in 1993, amply vindicated since. (Here's a Guardian timeline and here's a very long but thorough background essay which Brian Cathcart wrote for Granta magazine in 1997.)
But it wasn't just about racially tinged assumptions and responses. There were lots of cops at the crime scene that night, including senior ones anxious about retaliation and further aggro on the streets. The police were pretty hopeless and remained so during crucial early stages of what quickly became a high profile case, even poorly trained to use their new-fangled computers, so Macpherson noted.
The nastiness arose when the cops found they weren't dealing with a dead gang member from a dysfunctional home, but with the exemplary teenage son of a respectable, God-fearing couple. Stephen's mum turned out to be an exceptional woman whose campaign forced her into the mainstream news via a spectacular PR coup just two weeks after Stephen's death: a meeting in London with the visiting saint, Nelson Mandela.
It was a bonus fluke that the Daily Mail which (so the undenied Fleet St yarn goes) set out to do a hatchet job on the family, only to learn that Neville Lawrence knew Paul Dacre. A man who has wielded a paintbrush in the editor's house must be OK, right? And so it went on. At almost every turn in the next 20 years the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) played it badly – up to and including today's on-air silence – while the Lawrence camp played it smart and with dignity.
We know now that the case had been tainted in two ways, the investigation apparently penetrated by corrupt behaviour (it didn't take the new team long to trace on-the-run Clifford Norris to a south coast hideaway by tailing his wife), the family's campaign by police spying of a kind now widely exposed elsewhere.
After all the other police disasters, we might have hoped the Met had got its act together. After all, successive police commissioners of the period – Condon, Stevens and Blair – are with Baroness Lawrence in the Lords too. But it's still a mess and public confidence is still weak, deservedly so. The superior Scarman report after the 1981 Brixton riots made recommendations too. Progress has been slow.
What of Macpherson's many recommendations. I never liked "institutional racism", too sweeping for my taste or complex for 90s Britain, implicitly dismissive of all the individual goodwill that surely exists between most of us in greater measure than the opposite impulse.
With hindsight I was wrong to regret Macpherson's proposal to overturn the ancient "double jeopardy" rule to allow an acquitted accused (the private Lawrence prosecution had failed) to be charged and tried again on the basis of fresh evidence. Startling innovation in the forensic handling of DNA has led to some spectacular cold-case results.
But Macpherson's suggestion that an incident the victim - or someone else – perceives to be racist, regardless of the intention of the perpetrator, seems to have taken hold in ways that are not all benign and spread to other areas of the criminal law with negative results that can erode respect for the impartiality of the law. Sexual behaviour, another sensitive space fraught with potential misunderstandings which people have to negotiate, is one such example. Liberals should avoid well-meaning illiberalism.
On Radio 4's Today, I heard a Network Rail official apologising to the father of another dead teenager, Charlotte Thompson, killed with her friend, Olivia Bazlington, when struck by a train at an unsafe level crossing at Elsenham in Essex in 2005. There was no racial dimension to this story but official attempts to blame the victims – it went on for years – sounded eerily similar to the Met's approach to the Lawrences. So did the level-headed steadfastness of the dead girl's father, Reg Thompson.
In our undeferential, 24/7 wired world, officialdom has a tougher-than-ever job to do, and it's not always wrong. But it can't hide behind the old stonewalling dodges. In the Age of Transparency and ubiquitous smart phone computers, it just won't work. Reported by guardian.co.uk 2 days ago.
I read Sir William Macpherson's inch-thick report on the Stephen Lawrence murder at Easter 1999 because it had quickly become a political football and I wanted to form a first-hand opinion. The annotated pink volume is on my desk today because I sensed it might come in handy. So it does, yet again, with the publication of the Ellison review. With Theresa May announcing another judicial probe amid renewed dismay, I plan to hang on to it.
At the time I thought that Macpherson's report had got the balance wrong in heaping so much of the blame on what it famously called "institutional racism" (a phrase adopted from the US Black Power movement) in the police and wider British society. It did so at the expense of the other two components of his inquiry, police incompetence and possible corruption among investigating officers, which protected the suspects.
One of the gang was the son of Clifford Norris, then a feared local gangster, now a broken, impoverished drunk according to the Daily Mail, his son behind bars. It's all there in the original (badly-written) Macpherson report for anyone to find, but, good liberal that he was, Macpherson chose to major on the racist component.
So Mark Ellison QC's brisk conclusion that the police were less than frank with the Macpherson team about ex-detective sergeant John Davidson's suspected corrupt links – the Guardian's crime correspondents have been pursuing this for years – was welcome to me. Even so, today's Guardian coverage focuses on Ellison's findings against the undercover police operation to penetrate and discredit the Lawrence family – another recurring campaign by the paper.
Stephen Lawrence was 18 when he was stabbed at that bus stop in Eltham, just eight days older, so I noticed at the time, than my eldest son, who is now 39 and very much alive. All those touched by the case have felt its reverberations, good and ill, for 20 years. Doreen and Neville Lawrence are long since divorced. She is a peer of the realm and two of the five original suspects – young Norris and Gary Dobson – are serving jail sentences for the crime.
It wasn't that there weren't racist assumptions swirling round the police handling of the case in 1993, amply vindicated since. (Here's a Guardian timeline and here's a very long but thorough background essay which Brian Cathcart wrote for Granta magazine in 1997.)
But it wasn't just about racially tinged assumptions and responses. There were lots of cops at the crime scene that night, including senior ones anxious about retaliation and further aggro on the streets. The police were pretty hopeless and remained so during crucial early stages of what quickly became a high profile case, even poorly trained to use their new-fangled computers, so Macpherson noted.
The nastiness arose when the cops found they weren't dealing with a dead gang member from a dysfunctional home, but with the exemplary teenage son of a respectable, God-fearing couple. Stephen's mum turned out to be an exceptional woman whose campaign forced her into the mainstream news via a spectacular PR coup just two weeks after Stephen's death: a meeting in London with the visiting saint, Nelson Mandela.
It was a bonus fluke that the Daily Mail which (so the undenied Fleet St yarn goes) set out to do a hatchet job on the family, only to learn that Neville Lawrence knew Paul Dacre. A man who has wielded a paintbrush in the editor's house must be OK, right? And so it went on. At almost every turn in the next 20 years the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) played it badly – up to and including today's on-air silence – while the Lawrence camp played it smart and with dignity.
We know now that the case had been tainted in two ways, the investigation apparently penetrated by corrupt behaviour (it didn't take the new team long to trace on-the-run Clifford Norris to a south coast hideaway by tailing his wife), the family's campaign by police spying of a kind now widely exposed elsewhere.
After all the other police disasters, we might have hoped the Met had got its act together. After all, successive police commissioners of the period – Condon, Stevens and Blair – are with Baroness Lawrence in the Lords too. But it's still a mess and public confidence is still weak, deservedly so. The superior Scarman report after the 1981 Brixton riots made recommendations too. Progress has been slow.
What of Macpherson's many recommendations. I never liked "institutional racism", too sweeping for my taste or complex for 90s Britain, implicitly dismissive of all the individual goodwill that surely exists between most of us in greater measure than the opposite impulse.
With hindsight I was wrong to regret Macpherson's proposal to overturn the ancient "double jeopardy" rule to allow an acquitted accused (the private Lawrence prosecution had failed) to be charged and tried again on the basis of fresh evidence. Startling innovation in the forensic handling of DNA has led to some spectacular cold-case results.
But Macpherson's suggestion that an incident the victim - or someone else – perceives to be racist, regardless of the intention of the perpetrator, seems to have taken hold in ways that are not all benign and spread to other areas of the criminal law with negative results that can erode respect for the impartiality of the law. Sexual behaviour, another sensitive space fraught with potential misunderstandings which people have to negotiate, is one such example. Liberals should avoid well-meaning illiberalism.
On Radio 4's Today, I heard a Network Rail official apologising to the father of another dead teenager, Charlotte Thompson, killed with her friend, Olivia Bazlington, when struck by a train at an unsafe level crossing at Elsenham in Essex in 2005. There was no racial dimension to this story but official attempts to blame the victims – it went on for years – sounded eerily similar to the Met's approach to the Lawrences. So did the level-headed steadfastness of the dead girl's father, Reg Thompson.
In our undeferential, 24/7 wired world, officialdom has a tougher-than-ever job to do, and it's not always wrong. But it can't hide behind the old stonewalling dodges. In the Age of Transparency and ubiquitous smart phone computers, it just won't work. Reported by guardian.co.uk 2 days ago.