Stephen's legacy

Stephen Lawrence was murdered 10 years ago. The case - and what it told us about our society - became a landmark in race relations. But, asks Brian Cathcart, are things any better now?

Can it really be 10 years since he died? It was April 1993: John Smith led the Labour Party, the EU was still called the EC, Prince Charles and Diana, Princess of Wales had just split up and the story of the moment was a cock-up at the Grand National start line. If, like me, you think of Stephen Lawrence's murder as somehow more recent, that is probably because of the uncomfortable truth that, back then, most of us scarcely noticed it.

When it actually happened, the murder of a black 18-year-old at a bus stop by white boys who called him "nigger" was not much more than a one-day news story. Years would pass before the British public and political classes registered the true enormity of the events in Eltham. The tipping point, the moment when awareness began to dawn, probably did not come until 1997, the year New Labour came to power.

That was when Doreen Lawrence told an inquest that the case carried the bald message for British black people that "your lives are nothing". That was when the Daily Mail called the prime suspects "murderers" on its front page. That was when the Police Complaints Authority confirmed what the Lawrences had said all along – that the police investigation had been incompetent.

From then on the story was headline-scale: the inquiry, with its high emotions and dramas; the Macpherson report, with its finding of institutional racism; the ensuing controversy and backlash. A humiliated police force reacted with a mixture of contrition and anger; the wider world, after properly expressing its shock, eventually moved on to the next thing.

Did it all make a difference? Did the Lawrence case bring about any lasting alteration in Britain's racial landscape? The most interesting answers emerge when we look back beyond the tipping point, when we see how the world reacted in 1993 and ask another question: would it respond in the same way now?

It would be wrong to imagine that, back in 1993, no one cared or paid attention. Stephen Lawrence was confirmed dead in hospital at almost 11.20pm on Thursday 22 April, too late for the news to make the morning papers. But by 10am the next day The Independent had a reporter in the Lawrences' home, and its rivals were close behind.

That afternoon there was an angry meeting of councillors and community leaders at Woolwich Town Hall, and a well-attended press conference at the local police station. The word was out that this London borough was the "race-murder capital of Britain", and no one was in any doubt about the extent of the outrage in the local black community.

It was a story – not a front-page story, and not one to top the bulletins, but still a national event. That it disappeared from the news agenda within 24 hours owed a lot to an IRA bomb exploding that Saturday in the City of London; but it also reflected a simple truth – few people in the news media or the wider public expected the Lawrence story to lead anywhere. Racism, like poverty, was a problem that didn't go away no matter what you did, so – to put it brutally – it didn't seem worth doing much.

And so it began.

Just four days after Stephen's death, any hope of catching the murderers had, in all probability, been already wrecked by monumental police incompetence. Vital tip-offs were ignored or misunderstood, any leads that were recognised as such were investigated at a creaking pace, and the surveillance operation was so ham-fisted as to be a waste of time. Were it not so awful, it would be the stuff of situation comedy. Within 10 days, Stephen's parents suspected something was badly wrong, and called a press conference. Doreen Lawrence said: "If it was the other way around and a white boy had been killed by a gang of black men, they would have arrested half the black community in the area. But nothing has been done, there have been no arrests and the police won't tell us what is happening."

Two more days, and the couple met Nelson Mandela at his London hotel. "The Lawrences' tragedy is our tragedy," he said, going on to add that it reminded him of conditions in apartheid South Africa, "where black lives are cheap". It was almost certainly these words that finally precipitated the arrest of the four initial prime suspects: Neil and Jamie Acourt, David Norris and Gary Dobson (the fifth, Luke Knight, was arrested some weeks later). This came two whole weeks after the initial flood of tip-offs. The police would later say they had taken a strategic decision to delay the arrests, but the public inquiry concluded that this was nonsense. The case had been allowed to "drift"; as Doreen Lawrence later pointed out, it took a foreign statesman to force some action. Searches of the suspects' homes produced nothing, however, and the police questioning was ineffectual. If these were the culprits – and virtually the whole, mostly white neighbourhood was telling the police they were – they had been given ample time to cover their tracks.

All of this made little impact in the media. The Lawrences' press conference attracted scant attention and the Mandela event not much more. The arrests were widely reported, but then a blanket of silence descended: the suspects were minors, so their names and other details couldn't be disclosed. By then, it was all over, bar the shouting. Since the charges were soon dropped and the family's subsequent private prosecution of the five suspects would collapse, no one would ever be convicted of Stephen Lawrence's murder.

The Metropolitan Police eventually admitted a "systemic failure" had occurred in its ranks – surely an admission few would dispute. But why had it occurred? As the public inquiry concluded six years later in February 1999, it was an entire mindset that was at fault, a way of viewing things that was by no means exclusive to the police. At its heart was the conviction that only a small minority of obviously bad people could be racists, accompanied by a reflex of outraged denial when anyone suggested otherwise.

This is the pivot on which the whole Lawrence story turns, and 10 years on, the measure of how far things have changed must be how far we as a society have understood how misguided it was. The mindset expressed itself in a hundred ways, but few were more potent or damaging than the stubborn reluctance – again not restricted to the police – to accept that Stephen's death was indeed a "race murder".

From the first day all sorts of rumours circulated, in Eltham and further afield, about Stephen Lawrence: he had raped a white girl; it was a drugs thing; it was a gang thing; he had provoked white youths by shouting insults. There were also rumours about his friend Duwayne Brooks, who was with him when he was killed and who heard the attackers use the word "nigger". These rumours had a purpose: for those who wanted one, they provided an excuse to deny that this young man had been murdered because he was black. All you need is the smell of something dubious around the victim and the effect is achieved.

But in the Lawrence case, remarkably, it turned out that no such refuge was possible. The events of 22 April 1993 and their background had such a terrible and unusual purity that it was actually possible to prove the innocence of the victims. There had been no rape, there were no drugs and Stephen and Duwayne were not in any gang. Two independent witnesses saw everything they did in that part of Eltham that night, and they provoked no one.

More than that, the circumstances of the murder, as they became clear, lent power- ful support to the race motive. It was a stranger attack, completely unprovoked, in an area known for hostility to black people; all the attackers were white and of the five young people at the bus stop, only the two black ones were attacked. Add the use of the word "nigger", and by any sensible estimation what you have is a race crime.

One of the most depressing spectacles of the public inquiry, however, was the procession of detectives who still argued that the murder was just a piece of thuggery, that the killers would have done the same to a white boy, that you couldn't tell exactly what was in their heads when they attacked. Tom Cook, a former deputy chief constable on the inquiry panel, was driven to exasperation. If a man goes into a post office with a gun and demands money, he said, you don't need to see inside his head to know his motive is robbery.

Another way in which the mindset showed itself was in the response that accepted that the murder was a tragedy, but insisted it should not be politicised. Anti-racism groups and local politicians were wrong, it was said in the press and elsewhere, to use the case in arguments about policing and race relations; they had their own agenda, which was scarcely compatible with the needs of a grieving family. When an anti-BNP march near Eltham ended in violence between mainly black protesters and police, "race activists" and "black radicals" were accused of "hijacking" the tragedy of Stephen Lawrence's murder and even of hindering the investigation.

This notion of political manipulation stuck to the case for years, and yet it is as wrong-headed as it is insulting to the Lawrences (who have minds of their own, thank you). The murder was a political event. How could it not be? If you were black in south-east London, the killing made you afraid. Stephen was stabbed, after all, because of the colour of his skin, and by local estimation he was not the first. Your children's skin was the same colour; they might not be safe. You might not be safe; as the posters would later say: "You could be next." This is precisely the sort of thing for which we need politics.

You can argue that one of the factors that let the police down was their failure to recognise the political status of the crime. They struggled to take the politics out of it, urging black people to be calm and briefing newspapers about the activities of radicals, and they insisted that the case be treated like any other murder. Yet it wasn't like any other murder. It may not quite have been an assassination, but it was certainly an assault on a whole community, and for that reason it deserved a higher priority, more resources and more thought than other murders. It didn't get them.

These two things – the denial of the motive and the refusal to accept that what happened was more than a random street event that could be dealt with by normal procedures – had practical consequences. Even if the investigation had been competent, it would have eroded trust in the police among the ethnic minorities, whose point of view was not heard and who were entitled to conclude that, as Mandela put it, their lives were cheap.

But the detectives also closed their eyes to race. Incredibly, no witness in the case, and no informant, was ever asked for information about the suspects' racial attitudes. When the suspects were interviewed, one of them raised the question of race, and he was told it wasn't relevant.

And the reflex of denial ran deeper. It may have taken the Lawrences only 10 days to work out what was really going on in the incident room, but it took six angry years to drag out the facts. The attitude of many officers was captured in one memo to Scotland Yard: "Our patience is wearing thin on 3 Area, not only with the Lawrence family and their representatives..."

Once, and only once, was the case subjected to internal police reassessment, but that was an extraordinarily and – the inquiry found – transparently flawed affair. But the upper ranks, believing what they wanted to believe, rather than taking seriously what a black family with a left-wing lawyer was telling them, clung to the report uncritically. It was, an officer said, their "comfort cushion", and they certainly rested on it.

As the public inquiry found, the common thread that tied this whole disastrous Lawrence bundle together was racism. If racism is by definition to cause people disadvantage because of their race, then it was difficult to conclude that the police service had not perpetrated an act of racism against the Lawrences. The report stressed that it did not suggest that every officer was a malicious racist; but the pattern of the police responses to black people that emerged in the case was crystal clear. It was one of denial, rejection, defensiveness, avoidance and the transfer of blame, and the consequence was a catastrophic and deserved loss of trust. People who are not malicious racists, people no different from you and me, can act in racist ways, or in ways that have racist effects. More than that, we can do damage by what we fail to do. We can do it singly or in groups, and in the latter case it can be called institutional.

So what of the present day? When a black man is attacked or killed these days because of his colour, is anything different?

Many things are. Thanks to the Macpherson report, the police are better trained, are obliged to take any suggestion of a racial motive more seriously, and have much closer relations with minority communities, while their procedures for monitoring investigations and liaising with stricken families have been transformed.

But have those visceral responses to black experiences been replaced in the police, or in wider society? Has the reflex that demands that the victim must be proven innocent disappeared, or do we still respond to these crimes with suspicion? Is the reflex thatdoubts the racist motive still there? Does public opinion still recoil from the notion that race crime is political and that people have a right, even a duty, to be angry about it? And does our political class hear and respond to the grievances of ethnic-minority people, even when what they find may be uncomfortable?

I wonder. Listen to that background hum of complaint about thought control, political correctness and excessive paperwork, and it's clear that there are some who are convinced that getting this right is not worth any effort. I am an optimist; I believe that 10 years on, things have improved and that, at the very least, the terms of the argument have changed. But I am not naïve: if you are black, the bar of justice is still set higher for you. That is not something for which we can simply blame police officers.

At least, though, there is the benchmark of the Lawrence case. Here a black family was let down, discriminated against, patronised, lied to, fobbed off and disbelieved, and yet in the end they managed to put the truth before the world and it vindicated them comprehensively.

Those events will never be replicated exactly, but nobody can ever say now that they didn't happen. It is something for us all to remember. And remember, too, that 10 years ago this month, a nice young man called Stephen Lawrence had to die before we could have that benchmark.

Brian Cathcart is the author of 'The Case of Stephen Lawrence' (Penguin, £8.99)