After Stephen Lawrence

Stephen Lawrence was only eighteen when he was murdered. Born and bred in Southeast London, he lived with his parents, Doreen and Neville, his sister Georgina, and his brother Stuart. He had ambitions of using his academic talents to become an architect, and bringing a positive impact to his community.

Those ambitions were stolen from him in a racist attack at a bus stop by a group of white youths. He was stabbed to death on 22 April 1993. I was yet to be born.

The legal battle for justice for Lawrence and his family, however, continued well into my youth. Five suspects were arrested after the initial investigation into Lawrence’s murder, but none were convicted at the time. Constant campaigning from Lawrence’s family saw a public inquiry launched into the Met Police’s failings with regards to the case in 1997, culminating two years later in the publication of the 350-page Macpherson Report which described the Met Police in that now familiar phrase, ‘institutionally racist’.

The investigation into Lawrence’s murder, the report found, was profoundly flawed, stained not only by racism but also by incompetence and alleged corruption. Police had failed to offer first aid at the scene of the crime, failed to follow leads, missed chances to arrest suspects. It took another thirteen years for two of Lawrence’s killers, David Norris and Garry Dobson, to be convicted and jailed, after which the Met announced there would be no further prosecutions for the 1993 attack.

Recent events in the Met suggest how frighteningly little has changed. In March 2021, a nineteen-year-old university student, Richard Okorogheye, was reported missing to the police. His mother, Evidence Joel, said she felt the police did not take the search for her son seriously, and two officers later received misconduct notices from the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) after they failed to pass on information relating to Okorogheye’s sickle cell disease. His body was found more than a week later in a pond in Epping Forest.

Evidence Joel’s experience during the search for her son is one part of a broader culture. In June 2020, police officers took selfies with the bodies of murdered sisters Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry, and referred to them on an internal Whatsapp group as ‘dead birds’. Officers responded to the shooting of Black Lives Matter activist Sasha Johnson with a mocked-up t-shirt featuring the words ‘black lives splatter’. The IOPC recently published in full a thread of messages sent by a team based at Charing Cross police station, which included a string of racist comments, as well as sexist and homophobic ones. On a broader level, black people remain 8.9 times more likely to be subject to stop and search than white peers, and in London, three times more likely to be subject to the use of restraint techniques like wrist locks.

The IOPC, the police conduct watchdog, has its own problems. Figures show that less than one in ten officers investigated by the Office for gross misconduct—the sternest disciplinary charge—ends up being dismissed. 641 officers in England and Wales were charged with gross misconduct between 2015 and 2020; only fifty-four lost their jobs. The IOPC’s predecessor, the Independent Police Complaints Commission, was founded in response to the Macpherson Report in 2004. That the watchdog itself now comes intermittently under fire for being ineffectual at best and a whitewash at worst is indicative of the limits placed on progress since.

The Macpherson Report and its seventy recommendations was vital, was Huda Elmi wrote in Tribune in 2019, in popularising ‘a concept of racism that was not driven by personal attitudes or behaviour but produced through systematic patterns of injustice across the state and wider society’. That finding was dismissed by certain political actors at the time, but the ‘few bad apples’ line broadly no longer flies. The Tories recently attempted to stoke division by declaring, in the wake of 2020’s Black Lives Matter protests, that institutional racism is now over.

Meanwhile, measures are pushed through that suggest the ruling class has actually learned little since Stephen Lawrence’s death beyond how to change its language. In 2021, the government’s new Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act, better known as the Spy Cops Bill, expanded the capacity of the state to conduct undercover work free from accountability—a power that was used to spy on and allegedly try to smear the Stephen Lawrence family’s campaign for justice in the 1990s, and intentionally hidden from William Macpherson, according to former undercover police officer Peter Francis.

The British state is in fact in the process of doubling down on authoritarian power in various forms, from restricting our right to protest to criminalising refugees to voter suppression. These are all measures that will hit black people and people from other minority backgrounds the hardest, while allowing state powers to operate with increasing impunity. Black households are also being disproportionately impacted by the cost of living crisis. Taken together, the lesson is that institutional racism is ultimately a question of power—and the redistribution of power into the communities deprived of it is crucial to bringing it to a genuine end.

Stephen Lawrence Day is marked on the anniversary of his death to celebrate his life and legacy, and the positive steps that have been taken since that night in 1993. But Stephen’s story has also become a shadow looming over black communities across Britain in the last three decades—a sharp and painful reflection of justice withheld by the state and its actors from those deemed unworthy of it. Only changing that dynamic by pursuing empowerment from the bottom up will help people like Stephen Lawrence get the justice they truly deserve.