abbott & lawrence
Stephen Lawrence was an 18 year old black man who was murdered by 5 white racist thugs in 1993.
He was waiting for a bus home with a friend when the group spotted them, ran over shouting “what what, n****r” and stabbed Stephen. He died in the street a while later, but not before the police arrived, failed to perform any kind of first aid, and spent the minutes he lay bleeding to death interrogating Stephen’s friend Duwayne, accusing him of the attack and suggesting it was gang related (no prizes for guessing Duwayne’s skin colour). By the time the police called an ambulance Stephen was dead.
Within 24 hours the police had received numerous tip-offs naming all 5 of the killers responsible, although no arrests were made for more than 2 weeks. The police then failed to investigate at almost every possible opportunity. In the days following the murder the police watched one of the chief suspects get into a car with a binbag full of clothes and drive off to dispose of them. The officer leading the investigation (a veteran as you’d expect with a murder case) later told a public inquiry he ‘did not know’ the police could arrest suspects based on reasonable suspicion. The investigation was obstructed and poorly carried out at every instance. An officer who turned whistle-blower some years later told the BBC that a senior detective was taking bribes from the father of one of the suspects (the father being a major drug smuggler) to protect them.
The killers were not convicted or even tried by the state, the Lawrence family had to bring a private prosecution. This failed thanks to the police incompetence and racism, and the judge’s dismissal of Duwayne’s identification evidence. In 1999 a public inquiry was held to look into the murder and the police investigation. (nb: public inquiries like this cannot find people guilty of crimes in the UK). The result of the inquiry was the Macpherson Report, which found the met police to be “institutionally racist”. One thing it highlighted was that black people were 4 to 5 times more likely than whites to be stopped and searched by the police. Today, that ratio is 8 to 10 times.
After some improvements in DNA techniques leading to a new trial, two of the five killers were convicted this year. Of course, the British press called this ‘justice’. Perhaps the families of Sean Rigg, Smiley Culture, Mark Duggan etc can expect this sort of ‘justice’ in 19 years time, but I doubt it, because they were all murdered by the police themselves.
So this is it. This is the context in which the British media and political elite slam a black woman for being racist. Because although a black man was viciously stabbed to death and his murder ignored by a racist police, a black woman said some mean words on the internet. It’s all even, you see.
