The family of murdered black teenager Stephen Lawrence united today to mark the 30th anniversary of the teenager’s tragic death.
Stephen was murdered when he was just 18 in a racially motivated attack on April 22, 1993.
His death – and the failure of the Metropolitan Police to properly investigate it – touched off a wave of nationwide anger, anguish and grief.
Today, Stephen’s loved ones, Mayor of London Sadiq Khan and Labour leader Kir Starmer gathered for a memorial at St Martin-in-the-Fields church.
Starmer said a short speech and read a poem by Maya Angelou at the request of Stephen’s mother, Baroness Doreen Lawrence.
He told service-goers that ‘contrasted against the very worst side of Britain, Stephen represented the best’.
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Stephen, Starmer added, was ‘a life which shone with the light of potential’.
While Khan told the PA news agency: ‘It’s 30 years since Stephen Lawrence was brutally murdered, I remember it well as a south Londoner.
‘For those of us who are people of colour, it had a ripple effect on us, ripples of hate but also the appalling way that the family was let down by the Met Police Service, by the media and by some politicians.
‘Thirty years on, we’ve not made the progress we’d hope to have made.’
The way London’s police force handled Stephen’s death came to see the Met dubbed institutionally racist in the landmark 1999 Macpherson Report.
After decades of promises to reform, Met commissioner Mark Rowley admitted yesterday the force ‘did not dig deep enough’ to weed out racism.
The Met has never confronted the ‘cultural and systematic’ failings, he said, echoing a government report published in March that, once again, said the Met was institutionally racist as well as misogynist and homophobic.
The report, compiled by Louise Casey, a member of the House of Lords, was among the strongest condemnations yet of the Met ordered following the murder of Sarah Everard in 2021 by police officer Wayne Couzens.
Rowley said black people still feel ‘over-policed and under-protected’ in the capital, with ‘disproportionalities and systemic biases’ still in policing.
Stephen was stabbed to death in an unprovoked attack by a gang of white youths outside a bus stop in Eltham, southeast London.
Only a day after the boy’s death, a letter with the names of the suspects was left in a telephone box – it would take weeks for the suspects to be arrested and two charged.
But in July of that year, the charges were dropped, the inquest haltered and eventually, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) refused to prosecute them.
It would take years of campaigning by the Lawrence family to reignite the investigation, with a 1997 inquest concluding he was killed in a ‘completely unprovoked racist attack by five white youths’.
And when a wave of anti-racist protests swept through the UK, a government-commissioned inquiry blamed the bungled police investigation on the ‘professional incompetence, institutional racism and failure of leadership by senior officers’.
There was some deja-vu then when Baroness Casey found the Met has, in the face of scandal’s exposing its policing, responded by ‘playing them down, denial, obfuscation and digging in to defend officers without seeming to understand their wider significance’.
‘Thirty years on from Stephen’s murder, we offer our sympathies to the Lawrence family on their unimaginable loss,’ Rowley said in a statement today.
‘He was a dearly loved son and brother who was taken from them far too soon and in such senseless circumstances.
He added: ‘On behalf of the Metropolitan Police, I apologise again for our past failings which will have made the grief of losing a loved one all the more difficult to endure.’
But Stephen’s father, Neville, told Sky News that today marks ’30 years of pain and suffering for me and my family’.
‘Remember this is my first child. The memories I have of Stephen will never go away. I will never forget them, never,’ he said.
Gary Dobson and David Norris were finally convicted of Stephen’s murder in 2012. Nevill says he will push for Dobson, 47, and Norris, 46, to be thrown behind bars if they refuse to admit to murdering his son.
For Nevill, Baroness Casey’s report was unsurprising. ‘I am so disappointed. We are still facing the same kind of attitudes,’ he said.
‘Twenty years later for somebody else to come along and say the same thing. That shows you they have no intention of changing their behaviour.’
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