Steven Lawrence was murdered
because he was Black.
Few crimes in recent times have had
such a profound or long lasting impact.
Injustice, watershed, landmark
are all used to describe the Lawrence Case.
The thing that makes Lawrence particularly important
and why I think the Stephen Lawrence case is the case
that is apparently changed the nation is because
it hinges on something else.
So the murder itself was just jaw dropping
and nobody could grasp that.
But what followed was just beyond anybody's imagination.
I remember the Stephen Lawrence case very well.
It was the day before my daughter's birthday.
So it was the 22nd of April, 1993,
and I remember it extremely well.
It's hard to describe it in any other way
as just almost sport.
I suspect, for an American audience,
you would be able to really relate to this,
and perhaps this is why it was so shocking
because although it wasn't, in any sense, a kind of,
you know, down south Mississippi lynching,
it wasn't far off.
This is the bus stop where Stephen Lawrence
was brutally stabbed to death in a savage racial attack.
Today, the bus stops being changed,
there are even new benches,
but it does nothing to diminish the fact
that this point represents the very worst
in British race relations.
You had two boys, Stephen and his friend,
who were at a bus stop in Southeast London one evening.
And they were part of a absolutely unprovoked attack
where one of the boys managed to escape.
Stephen, sadly, didn't.
And five young white men murdered him.
And as we discovered as the story unfolds
and the press and the media are able to get behind the story
of Stephen's murderers,
these people had practiced these kinds of assaults
and killings in their bedrooms.
And also, it was just the most extraordinary thing.
And it was the premeditated nature of it
that I think people found so very, very difficult.
In the days following Stephen's murder,
the police received several tip-offs
and all sources pointed to the same five suspects,
brothers, Neil and Jamie Acourt, Gary Dobson,
Luke Knight, and David Norris.
Their gang were named 26 times
as Stephen Lawrence's killers
in the hours following his murder.
Lawrence handed in her own list of suspects
only to see the officer first fold it up
and then strew it into a ball in front of her.
The Met's failure to respond
to initial reports would prove to be the first
in a string of injustices against the Lawrence family
that spanned more than two decades.
Couple of weeks later, and still no arrests.
The Lawrence family had a press conference
airing their frustration that not enough was being done
to catch the killers.
Two days later, they met with Nelson Mandela.
Nelson Mandela paused on a visit to Britain
to publicly shake the Lawrence's hands.
In private, they talked, he listened
when no one in authority would.
We are very used to this type of thing
where life is regarded as cheap in South Africa.
And but, nevertheless, it's a sense of disconcert
that it should happen in a country like Britain.
So we had these two huge problems.
We had this issue of a young man in a London street
who could be murdered,
but in addition to the murder,
we were confronted with this extraordinary notion
of the ineptitude of the police inquiry
that was motivated by race.
It's a racist society that it doesn't matter,
as for a Black person, that is,
it doesn't matter what standard of life
you try to achieve for yourself,
it makes no difference in cases like this.
You are treated as if you're a criminal
right from the start.
In 1994, a year after the murder,
covert video filmed by the police over several days
in one of the suspects apartments
showed the gang using knives
and making violent racist remarks.
With the investigation going nowhere,
and a growing sense that the system had failed them,
Stephen's parents took matters into their own hands.
In 1996, Doreen and Neville Lawrence took out
a private prosecution against three suspects.
This was the first private prosecution
for murder in the UK for more than a century.
But the Lawrence's would once again leave without justice.
The judge directed the jury
to return not guilty verdicts.
Identification evidence was ruled inadmissible,
and there was not enough other evidence
to justify the prosecution.
The three suspects were acquitted
and the entering of not guilty verdicts meant
they could not be tried again.
I think one of the things that makes the racism arguments
such an interesting one is that there is the difference,
I think, between individual racism and institutional racism.
So, and I think that most people would be askance
at the idea of being accused of being racist,
but because we live so comfortably in a racist system,
it's difficult to reconcile those two points
because self-evidently the system is racist.
In 1997, the Lawrence family registered
a formal complaint with the Police Complaints Authority
about the Met's handling of the investigation.
Soon after, "The Daily Mail", a national newspaper,
ran a front page accusing the men of killing Lawrence
and challenging them to sue for libel.
I think "The Daily Mail's" involvement
was really very surprising.
If you think about "The Daily Mail",
"The Daily Mail's" sort of Fox News
of the UK broadcasting environment,
and this was very much a CNN story,
if I can put it that way for you.
And the fact that it was actually Fox News,
in the form of "The Daily Mail" that went to bat on this,
and actually published the extraordinary headline "Murders,"
with a picture of these young men was a massive stunt.
With growing interest around the case,
from both the media and the public,
pressure was on the newly elected Labor administration
to take action.
By the summer of 1997, the new Home Secretary Jack Straw
met with the Lawrences.
And soon after the Home Office announced a judicial inquiry
into the police's handling of the case.
This inquiry will have full powers
to compel the attendance of witnesses,
to give evidence under oath,
and if they fail to do so,
to punish them as if it were a contempt of court.
The inquiry, led by retired High Court Judge
Sir William MacPherson,
sat for 59 days to hear evidence from 88 witnesses
and produced more than 100,000 pages of documents.
At the heart of this inquiry is the allegation
from the Lawrence's and their lawyers
that racism permeated the police investigation
into Stephen's death and permeates the society
in which happened.
So it's become a touchstone for the Black community,
and the outcome could point to the direction
to the future of race relations in Britain.
The gang came to give evidence
at the public hearing,
having been told they will face prosecution otherwise.
A huge crowd gathered outside the hearing,
hoping to get a chance to see them take the stands.
What do we want?
Justice!
Who for?
Stephen Lawrence.
At the inquest,
the five suspects refused to answer questions.
The inquest jury ruled Stephen had been unlawfully killed
in a completely unprovoked racist attack.
Tensions between the police, the public,
and the suspects reached boiling point outside the court.
The inquiry was adjourned for three hours
after police fired CS gas on protesters.
The men spat and hit out at the crowd
while police escorted them back to their vehicles.
In 1999, two years after the inquiry began,
MacPherson made 70 recommendations
and delivered a damning final verdict.
He conclude it in his really landmark report
that the Metropolitan Police Service
was indeed institutionally racist.
There 70 kind of overarching recommendations were presented
to the Metropolitan Police Force,
and the Metropolitan Police Force, to be honest,
has been having a very,
a very complicated time engaging with it.
The chairman of the inquiry,
Sir William MacPherson repeatedly challenged Sir Paul
about widespread instinctive racism within the force,
but Sir Paul continually rebutted that suggestion.
I find it difficult after five years
for the commissioner to still be saying
that he felt that there was no racism
or corruption involved in Stephen's case.
So if that wasn't racism and it wasn't corruption,
I still haven't been given the answer
as to why Stephen's killers are still walking free.
The inquiry prompted some serious changes
within the police force
and led to the Race Relations Amendment Act in 2000
that strive to eliminate discrimination
and promote racial equality.
But the problem of racism is
it's so deeply woven into the fabric of our society
that it is by no means a simple thing to resolve.
The inquiry may have shone light
on institutional racism, but it didn't bring the result
the Lawrence family so desperately wanted,
the conviction of their son's murderers.
In the 11 years since,
there have been three murder investigations,
two police reviews, and a public inquiry,
yet his killers still remain free.
Now the Crown Prosecution Service says
it's unlikely the case will ever be solved.
But then in 2005, double jeopardy,
the rule preventing suspects being tried twice
for the same crime, was scrapped.
Something MacPherson had recommended
in his report six years earlier.
But with no new evidence,
this offered the Lawrence family little hope.
At every turn, the Lawrence Case makes history.
They literally challenged every step of the way
and whatever obstacle was in the place,
statute, law and so and so, they just overturned it.
A tiny spot of blood found on the collar
of Dobson's jacket has a one in a billion chance
of not belonging to Stephen.
Other fibers from the dead teenagers clothing were
allegedly found on a multicolored cardigan.
Using the latest forensic technology,
new evidence was found during a cold case review
of Lawrence's murder that tied
two the previously acquitted suspects to the case.
In 2011, the trial of Gary Dobson and David Norris
for Lawrence's murder begins in light of the new evidence.
It took a long time for justice to ride out
in the Lawrence Case.
Doreen watched the many suspects in her son's murder
walk free from courts and inquiries.
19 years later, only two of them have been convicted,
a failure, she says, of politicians, as well as the police.
It's 19 years later, 19 years, let me say that again,
before Dobson and Norris were imprisoned.
So there are two things about that that are extraordinary.
One is it took 19 years for them
to be brought to court again and charged and found guilty.
Ans two is that 19 years later,
Baroness Lawrence was still as resilient
and as committed to it as she was 19 years previously.
We pay tribute to Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence's
courage and dignity.
They have contributed to major changes within policing,
the law, and indeed within society as a whole.
Doreen Lawrence continued to campaign
for justice for her son,
as well as for other victims of racist crime.
In 2013, Doreen was awarded the title of Baroness
for her relentless work within the community.
She has been, you know, really, really, really embedded
in the psyche of this nation because of the work
that she's done and the sacrifice she's paid.
It's hard to explain it in terms of what it looks like,
but it was, it was...
Yeah, in a way it was our probably the most important
criminal justice struggle,
in terms of the Black story in this country
in the last, however many years.
Black Lives Matter!
Policing has long been a focal point
for concerns of racial injustice in the UK.
And despite changes sparked by the Lawrence case
and the landmark MacPherson inquiry,
Black people and ethnic minorities in Britain
are still disproportionately represented
when it comes to police checks, imprisonment,
and deaths in custody.
We need to remember that the UK is not innocent.
We are a physical representation
of our support for George Floyd.
We are a physical representation
of our support for Steven Lawrence.
I think there is a very challenging conversation
to be had about race
and a challenging conversation to have about racism.
I think there is enough evidence to suggest
that racism is in the DNA of this nation.