A special blog by BSWN Senior Policy Officer, Angelique Retief
Stephen Lawrence was a Black British teenager who was stabbed to death by a gang of six white youths while waiting for a bus in Eltham on the evening of April 22nd, 1993. It was later determined that Lawrence was killed solely on account of his skin colour. The case gained special notoriety in the UK for its handling by the police. Five years later, a report submitted by Sir William Macpherson concluded that the police not only acted incompetently but that institutional racism was to blame for the failure to swiftly bring all the murderers to justice. Only two of the suspects were convicted, each receiving life sentences, while the remaining four assailants ultimately could not be brought to justice.
His murder exposed the deeply rooted institutional racism still alive in the policing and justice system today. And yet, despite all the data, nearly 30 years later the government have claimed that institutional racism does not exist despite the fact that Black and Minoritised people are for example, more likely to be on low income, more likely to be unemployed, more likely to be homeless, more likely to live in overcrowded accommodation, more likely to live in home with damp, condensation, disrepair or neglect, more likely to have poor health outcomes, more likely to have longer prison sentences, more likely to be stopped and searched, more likely to be excluded from school.
The EHRC have recently launched a new fund that will see up to £250,000 to help victims act against organisations which may have broken equality law. The fund will also support legal practitioners resolve complaints of race discrimination and help employers understand their responsibilities and what the consequences are for breach. As we noted in previous statement, an annual budget of £250,000 to help victims of organisations who have broken equality law is only scratching the surface of the issue. In the 12 months from April 2021 to March 2022 SARI had a total of 254 cases and 569 referrals of hate crime covering Bristol, BANES, NS and South Gloucestershire alone.
The government’s Race Report, Inclusive Britain, recommends bridging the divide between police and communities but what impact does strip searching a 15-year-old child have on this? A Freedom of Information request shows that in the past 5 years, 33% of the strip searches conducted by Met police alone were on Black people who make up just over 11% of the population of London. On average 5 children a day were subjected to a strip search, 35 of which happened to children under the age of 12. Bearing in mind that schools were locked down for some of that time. All data shows that strip searches are used against Black Children more than any other group which leads to the criminalisation of Black children. These issues of disproportionality are not confined to London or strip searches.
Nationally, the government’s race disparity data shows that Black people had the highest arrest rates per 1,000 people in every police force area where there was data. The biggest difference in the arrest rates between Black people and White people was in Dorset, where Black people were almost 14 times as likely to be arrested as White people. On average, white offenders are given shortest custodial sentences every year compared with all other ethnic groups with Asian and Black offenders receiving the longest sentences at 27 and 26 months respectively compared with 18 months for their white counterparts.
The events of 2020, such as the death of George Floyd in the US, the subsequent resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement, along with societal inequalities exposed and exacerbated by Covid, has made us reflect on how we engage with our communities. There are structural problems in terms of race and policing at every level of our criminal justice system – from who gets stopped and searched, to who gets arrested, charged, and convicted. These are all some of the factors which impact upon the relationship between communities and the police. Part of improving these relationships is to create permanent spaces for community engagement to allow for communities to engage with the police whilst also improving representation of Black and Minoritised individuals not only the police force but the criminal justice system more broadly.
In the context of all this, it is even more important to keep Steven Lawrence’s legacy in the national consciousness and to continue fighting against the institutional racism that the Macpherson report highlighted all those years ago. As we reflect on the what happened to Stephen Lawrence nearly 30 years ago, we must consider how far we have come and how much further we have still to go and acknowledge the role of every individual in driving real societal change and forging a space of inclusivity and equality.