Changes in Opportunity and Culture, 1986-2010 » The Stephen Lawrence Case and Institutional Racism

The murder and the failed investigation

On the evening of 22 April 1993, Stephen Lawrence, an 18-year-old Black student from south-east London, was attacked and killed by a group of white youths at a bus stop in Eltham. It was a racist attack. His friend Duwayne Brooks, who was with him, ran to get help. Stephen had hoped to become an architect.

The Metropolitan Police (the Met) investigated, but the case went wrong in several ways:

• Officers at the scene did not treat Duwayne Brooks as the victim and key witness that he was.
• The police were slow to act on information about who the attackers were. Suspects were not arrested for about two weeks.
• Stephen's parents, Doreen and Neville Lawrence, were treated insensitively and were not kept properly informed.
• In July 1993 the Crown Prosecution Service dropped the charges against the suspects, saying there was not enough evidence.

Key terms:

• Institutional racism: unfair treatment of people because of their race that is built into the way an organisation works, through its habits, attitudes and ways of doing things, even if no individual means to be racist.
• Private prosecution: a court case brought by ordinary people instead of by the state's prosecutors.
• Public inquiry: an official investigation, set up by the government, into something that has gone badly wrong.
• Recommendation: a suggestion for change made by an inquiry. The government decides whether to act on it.
• Double jeopardy: the old rule that a person found not guilty of a crime could never be tried for it again.

The family's campaign

Stephen's parents refused to give up. They pressed for a proper investigation and spoke to the press and politicians. In 1996 the family brought a private prosecution against three of the suspects. It collapsed when the judge ruled that the evidence of Duwayne Brooks identifying them could not be used, and the three were found not guilty.

This was a campaign by a family, not a large organisation, but it did what pressure groups often do: it used publicity, the courts and politicians to force the issue. In May 1997 Labour won the general election. The new Home Secretary, Jack Straw, announced a public inquiry in July 1997.

The Macpherson Report, 1999

The inquiry was led by Sir William Macpherson, a retired High Court judge. It heard evidence from the family, the police and others, and published its report on 24 February 1999. It found that the Met's investigation had been marred by professional incompetence, a failure of leadership and institutional racism. This was the key point. The report did not say that every officer was racist. It said that the Met as an organisation had failed to give a proper service to the Lawrence family because of the colour of their skin, through unthinking prejudice, ignorance and stereotyping.

The report made 70 recommendations. They included:

• Any incident should be recorded as racist if the victim, or anyone else, thinks it was racist.
• Police forces should recruit and keep more officers from ethnic minorities.
• All officers should get training in racism awareness and cultural diversity.
• Complaints against the police should be investigated independently.
• The double jeopardy rule should be looked at again for serious crimes.

What changed, and what did not

This links to the whole topic. The Race Relations Act (1965), taught in The Bristol Bus Boycott and the Race Relations Act 1965, made some forms of discrimination illegal, but laws alone had not removed unfair treatment. The Lawrence case showed that in the 1990s institutions themselves could be a barrier to equality, and it pushed the government to act on this.

Exam-style question

This is a Paper 2, Section B type (b) question, worth 8 marks. Give two causes, each with specific evidence, and show how each one led to the outcome.

Explain TWO causes of the Macpherson Inquiry being set up in 1997. [8 marks]