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5 February 1999

Police prefer to shoot the messenger

The Met's officers are trying to discredit the Lawrence inquiry, reports Brian Cathcart

By Brian Cathcart

As publication of the Lawrence inquiry report draws near, attempts are being made to discredit it. The public hearings on which Sir William Macpherson will base his findings, we are told, bore a closer resemblance to Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist inquisitions than to the due process of English justice. Witnesses were subjected to draconian and theatrical interrogations, and whenever they tried to justify themselves they were howled down by a frenzied public gallery. Salem has been mentioned.

These arguments stem from the Police Federation and the Police Superintendents’ Association, which represent officers likely to be criticised by Sir William. In a wider sense, too, their members will bear the consequences of his findings. They are getting their retaliation in first, and finding an audience in the conservative press.

The impression their comments create is, if not completely false, extremely misleading. Worse than that, and more worryingly, these comments suggest that, after all that has passed since Stephen Lawrence was murdered, police officers are still not ready to learn the lessons. Sir Paul Condon and his colleagues at the top of the Met may speak of regret, change and reform, but those lower down the ranks, whose actions should in future be guided by those reforms, would rather shoot the messenger.

Let us look at what really happened at the inquiry. It sat for more than 50 days and heard about 100 witnesses, the majority of them police officers. For those police witnesses it was undoubtedly a bruising and sometimes a harrowing experience.

Michael Mansfield QC and his junior, Stephen Kamlish, representing the Lawrence family, were not inclined to take prisoners. Their cross-examinations were sarcastic and at times ferocious; they were never inclined to take the word of police officers at face value.

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In the early stages of the inquiry this onslaught caught the police by surprise. Their barristers complained to the chairman that the Mansfield team had given no notice of many of the allegations they were making, and that this was contrary to the rules of public inquiries. Sir William agreed, and ordered Mansfield to give due notice in future.

After a couple of weeks of hearings, then, the police were doubly on notice. They knew that the Lawrence camp could be counted on to give them a hard time and they knew, once they received their letters of warning, roughly what the complaints would be. Yes, these letters sometimes arrived very late, but after the first few they can rarely have contained many surprises.

Who was facing these questions? In the early days it was sometimes young constables, but before long we passed to experienced detectives, inspectors and superintendents. These people – many of them murder specialists – should be used to giving evidence in court; they should know how to conduct themselves under hostile questioning from a defence barrister.

Further up the ranks, the inquiry came to people such as chief superintendents, commanders and deputy assistant commissioners. These are senior public servants; they should know how to account for themselves in front of an audience, however sceptical. As for Sir Paul Condon, another witness given a hard time, his presentational skills were part of the reason he got his job. If these people found themselves tripped up by lawyers, we can hardly be asked to feel sorry for them.

And what about the public gallery, caricatured as baying for police blood and drowning out the case for the defence? With a few exceptions – very few – it was just not like that. For the first couple of months of the inquiry (it ran from March to September, with a summer break) the public seats were rarely more than one-third full and audience participation was restricted to muttering and laughter. These responses, it has been pointed out by inquiry officials, were prompted, not by anything that Mansfield or the chairman said, but by the evidence of the witnesses.

In later months the gallery was often fairly full and the audience undoubtedly became more vocal and more hostile to police witnesses, who were visibly discomfited. Some of the lawyers exploited this. When it became oppressive the chairman or Bishop John Sentamu, one of the advisers on the panel, would appeal for calm, not always with complete success.

There were two moments when things got out of hand. One was when, notoriously, members of the Nation of Islam burst in and brought the proceedings to a halt. Another came when Doreen Lawrence, Stephen’s mother, while being examined by counsel for the Met, asked, “Am I on trial here?” The uproar from the public gallery effectively prevented further questioning.

These events were exceptional, and for the most part the inquiry progressed quietly and with due dignity. It is a travesty to suggest, as one columnist did in the Daily Telegraph, that policemen were “heckled as they came to testify by everyone from the Nation of Islam to the Winston Silcott campaign”. (For the record, the Nation of Islam incident occurred during the evidence of one of the five murder suspects, not of a police officer.)

This inquiry was necessary because of grave public doubts about the handling of the Lawrence case. Answering those doubts was never going to be easy and would inevitably require tough questions and bitter answers. We know now – the Met has acknowledged it – that serious mistakes were made; police officers and their representatives should be ready to face the consequences rather than complaining about the manner in which those mistakes were exposed.

Brian Cathcart’s book, “The Case of Stephen Lawrence”, will be published by Viking in May

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