Stephen Lawrence’s family have been failed for 30 years. Why does it fall on the BBC to do the Met’s job?

Metropolitan Police officers have spent three decades bungling, botching and burying evidence that should have brought all of Stephen Lawrence’s killers to justice. After a BBC investigation did their job for them, writes former chief prosecutor Nazir Afzal, the fury only grows

Doreen Lawrence will never get justice for her son. It is shameful that it has taken the BBC to investigate simply because the Met has failed again and again (PA Media)

At the time of the conviction of Gary Dobson and David Norris for the murder of Stephen Lawrence, I was one of the country’s chief prosecutors

So I remember every detail clear as a bell.

Everyone thinks they know who attacked Stephen. Luke Knight and brothers Neil and Jamie Acourt have been suspects for 30 years. All three have denied being involved. Neil Acourt and Knight were acquitted of murder in 1996.

It was only years later – in 2012 – that two of the five public suspects, Norris and Dobson, were given life sentences for the murder.

But Duwayne Brooks, who was with Lawrence on the night of 22 April 1993, said there were six attackers. He told police the one who started the attack was the “fair-haired one”.

None of the boys the police pursued was fair-haired. But Matthew White was.

White has only been named as a major suspect for the first time today because BBC investigative reporter Daniel De Simone traced witnesses, saw police documents, and uncovered new evidence that shows how officers mishandled investigations relating to White.

It is shameful that it has taken the BBC to investigate this simply because the Metropolitan Police has failed again and again. Six years after his murder, the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry found not only institutional racism in the Met but also institutional corruption and incompetence.

Let us not forget that in the devastating Baroness Casey Review following the murder of Sarah Everard, the force was described as institutionally racist, sexist and homophobic — clearly little had changed.

The Met closed the case into Lawrence’s killers in 2020 after years of failure. And now its incompetence has been exposed again, not at the behest of any internal interest in getting better, but because it has been forced to take the almost unprecedented step of naming White as a suspect thanks to the work of the BBC.

With any homicide inquiry, you have a golden period for getting evidence. It can be days, weeks or months. In this case, because of everything that went wrong right at the beginning, because officers didn’t see Lawrence as a victim, because they thought he might have been involved in something, that opportunity to really get into the suspects was missed. White was treated as a witness.

There were more than enough clues that would have made them reconsider their views. They seem to have accepted his original alibi and treated him with kid gloves. And all of that led to the initial failings to identify or charge anybody. Because the police did not seize all the forensic evidence, the only forensic evidence that allowed us to convict Dobson and Norris was a jacket. We didn’t have anything from White. That’s why, at the prosecution back in 2014, when it was asked if White could be charged, they were told there wasn’t a chance of putting a case together. They’d had very little evidence.

What’s more, there were clearly officers closely aligned with the suspects on the fringes of this investigation who may well have impeded it in some way.

It needs to be said that Detective Chief Inspector Clive Driscoll, who took over the murder investigation in 2006 and helped secure the convictions of Dobson and Norris in 2012, was a phenomenal officer. I’ve worked with him. He was a person who really had the bit between his teeth. Yet he says he was told by the then commissioner Cressida Dick in the immediate aftermath of the convictions to “just leave it now”. Shortly afterwards, he was encouraged to retire. When someone has the appetite and can deliver and yet can be taken off the investigation, what does that say?

And that’s what ultimately led to White escaping justice. That, and more rank incompetence. One of the witnesses was White’s stepfather who had told police his stepson may not have told detectives all he knew. But when police returned to investigate, they interviewed the wrong stepfather – Matthew White’s mother had remarried twice. I was struck that in the BBC’s investigation, they tracked down another black man who was assaulted by White. White threatened him, saying, “Remember you’re in Eltham, remember where you are, remember what happened to Stephen Lawrence. I can call my boys, they can come down and they can deal with you.”

The victim says White mentioned Stephen Lawrence “in almost in every threat” – at least eight or nine times – and referenced that it happened at the nearby bus stop.

White said the victim would be “Stephen Lawrenced” and then attacked him.

It is one travesty after another. I feel for Doreen and Neville, Lawrence’s parents, who have had to experience this over and over again for the last three decades. And of course, they will not get justice because White will not face trial, having passed away. It is shameful.

It’s devastating, not just to the Lawrences but to the wider community because we all felt that people of colour, and indeed women, have not received the same service they’re entitled to down the years because of the institutional racism, institutional misogyny and the institutional incompetence of the Met.

That incompetence continues into the 21st century. It was a disgrace then and it is a disgrace now and it is high time justice was served.

Nazir Afzal is a solicitor and former prosecutor within the Crown Prosecution Service