The Case of Stephen Lawrence

4

The police summoned a press conference the day after Lawrence died. His father appeared and said: ‘I would bring back hanging for something like this.’ His mother was under sedation. The headmaster of Lawrence’s school said he was a very popular pupil and ‘not the sort to get himself into trouble’. Duwayne Brooks, meanwhile, had spent much of the night and the following morning giving a long statement to the police. It included the words he’d heard near the roundabout–‘What, what, nigger?’–and on this basis the police acknowledged that Lawrence had probably been killed because he was black, that it was a murder motivated purely by race. Chief Superintendent John Philpott spoke of fears of a backlash among the black community. ‘We would ask young people to be sensible,’ he said. Extra police were drafted in, not to investigate the murder, but to keep the peace.

Many blacks and Asians in Eltham were angry, and directed their anger towards the police. Lawrence’s killing was the third (by some counts the fourth) racial murder in the borough of Greenwich over the previous two years, and the second to have occurred on Well Hall Road. A phrase appeared in some newspaper reports–‘the racist murder capital of Britain’–though the story at this stage was not front-page news in the press, nor was it reported on national television news bulletins. The Metropolitan Police, which has very few non-white recruits, was accused of failing to protect the minority community. A particular focus of anger was the headquarters of the anti-black, anti-immigrant British National Party on Welling Road, just three or four miles from Eltham. A BNP spokesman denied any link to the killing, but anti-racist activists announced their plans for demonstrations outside the party’s office.

Over the next few weeks there were several such demonstrations. One of them ended in violence between demonstrators and the police.

The relationship between the police and the Lawrence family began to break down. The Lawrences had lived in the middle of racial harassment for many years without being politicized by it. They had never personally experienced abuse or violence, had no idea why so many black people were critical of the police, and disapproved of anti-police views. Neville Lawrence told a reporter at this time: ‘We’d hear about these racial things happening, but we’d think it would never happen to us. We tried to bring up our kids in the right way, to obey the law.’ It was in that spirit that he agreed to appear at the police press conference, where he made his remark about hanging.

Nevertheless, the police began to blame the influence of ‘outsiders’. Two weeks after Stephen’s death the Daily Mail published a piece about the case under the headline: HOW RACE MILITANTS HIJACKED A TRAGEDY. It said that radical anti-racist organizations were exploiting the killing for their own political ends and damaging the trust between the Lawrences and the police that was vital if the killers were to be identified and arrested. An anonymous police officer was quoted: 'At the beginning we were very close to the family and had a good rapport. But later we had to go through several representatives before we could speak to them . . . We believe that the family are being used as pawns in a far wider game. Our inquiries are, in fact, being hampered by these people.’

The police were to make this claim many times. How true was it? Undeniably, many non-whites in Greenwich felt antagonism towards the police and there were vociferous radical groups articulating those feelings. Some of them made approaches to the Lawrence family and for a time one group did work closely with them: the Anti-Racist Alliance (ARA), led by a television journalist, Marc Wadsworth. But the ARA could hardly be painted as extremist. Several Labour Members of Parliament supported it and its members included a range of people to whom the word ‘liberal’ might apply. ARA members began work at the Lawrence house in Plumstead on the morning after Stephen’s murder, answering calls, taking the other two children to school, helping to deal with the press and the police.

Three days after the murder the Lawrences also hired a solicitor to represent them, Imran Khan, who could certainly be described as radical (in the 1997 general election he stood as a candidate for Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party). But he was also well known to be good at handling racial cases. From the day he was hired he was almost always present when the Lawrences met police officers. The police didn’t like it. Few of them had encountered a victim’s family which turned up with a lawyer, except in cases where the family was suspected of involvement.

Were the Lawrences used as pawns by Khan or Wadsworth? Naturally, both men have denied it; Wadsworth said frankly that the Lawrences wouldn’t give him the control he wanted, preferring to trust their own judgements or the advice of relatives. Ros Howells, a social worker and a friend of Doreen’s who attended many meetings between the Lawrences and the police, confirmed this: 'When you know Doreen Lawrence, you know that she is not led by anyone.’ In other words, the Lawrences make unlikely pawns; and even if they had been pawns, it is hard to see how Khan or Wadsworth could have interfered with any halfway competent murder investigation. Unless, of course, the family were suspects.

Were they suspects? Surely not; the police had the evidence of Duwayne Brooks and Joe Shepherd, the boy waiting at the bus stop, which pointed them clearly towards a white gang. The Lawrences, however, felt like suspects. They may have felt like this whatever their race. In about eighty per cent of British murder cases, the murderer is close to the victim in some way–husband, wife, uncle, cousin, friend–and the methods of police investigation reflect this statistic. Like many other relatives of murder victims, the Lawrences felt that they were being treated with too little sympathy and being given too little information.

They were angered in particular by the persistent scrutiny of their own lives. To the Lawrences the cause of the murder was simple; why could the police not concentrate on finding the boys who did it? Instead–or so it seemed to the Lawrences–the police went on questioning them, the family who had suffered. Three days after his son’s death, Neville Lawrence was upset to find the police pressing him to explain why Stephen had been wearing a brightly coloured baseball cap. Was it a piece of gang insignia?

The Lawrences began to feel that the reason for this persistence was their race. As Doreen Lawrence said later: ‘They’d never come across a black boy who didn't have a criminal record. They couldn’t believe it. And when they finally did, they decided he must have been part of a gang and his death must have been connected to a fight between rival gangs. For two weeks they concentrated their investigation on us and what we’d done wrong.’

The Lawrences also felt that the murder of their son had not received the media attention that many people, including the then Conservative MP for Eltham, Peter Bottomley, felt that it deserved. An appalling murder, which is what it was, had been muted by the victim’s colour, so that it became a racial ‘incident’. The police effort to find the killers seemed to lack energy. So far as the Lawrences could tell, the police had not carried out systematic house-to-house inquiries in the Progress Estate or Dickson Road on the night of the killing. No one had been taken in for questioning, even though, over the following days, callers at the Lawrence home supplied a number of names of people thought to have been involved. The effect, say the family, was that any opportunity of capturing the killers in the process of disposing of clothing or weapons was lost. Instead, the extra police who arrived at the scene on the night, and who might have carried out some of this work, were sent away again. Fourteen days passed before the first arrests, by which time the forensic trail had gone cold. To the Lawrences, it seemed that the best chance of convicting their son’s killers was thrown away before he had been dead a week.

On 4 May, the Lawrences gave a press conference to vent their anger. ‘Nothing has been done,' Doreen Lawrence said. 'There have been no arrests and the police won't tell us what’s happening. The black community and I cannot stand for this any longer. The killers are out there and other black kids can’t feel safe on the streets.’ Her husband added: ‘The police are not really concerned about arresting anyone. They are just going through the motions.’ (Much later, Doreen Lawrence would describe an incident at this time which particularly shocked her. She took to the police station a list of the names of her son’s alleged killers provided by friends and sympathizers. 'I presented it to one of the officers and while we were talking I watched. He folded the paper and rolled it into a ball in his hand. I asked “Are you going to throw it in the bin?” He said “No, no.”’ In fact, two of the six names on the list figured in later legal proceedings.)

Two days later the police met the Lawrences to try to clear the air. They insisted that they were pursuing the case vigorously, with twenty-five officers working full-time from the incident room at Plumstead police station, and they invited the Lawrences to visit the station to see the work in progress. (The invitation was refused.) The police also said that they were properly investigating the many tip-offs they had received. The officers left the meeting believing that a ‘fragile peace’ had been established.

They were wrong. The next day the Lawrences staged a remarkable publicity coup. Nelson Mandela, on only his second visit to Britain since his release from jail, agreed to meet them. The Lawrences emerged from Mandela’s hotel in central London to face a crowd of reporters and camera crews. They complained about the ‘cavalier’ attitude of the police and the police’s failure to act on the information they had been given. Their complaints were widely reported. Two weeks after the murder, the Lawrence case had at last become news.