In Britain, New Inquiry Is Ordered in Bias Killing
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Version 0 of 1. LONDON — Prime Minister David Cameron on Monday ordered a government investigation into a former undercover police officer’s allegations that in the 1990s he was ordered to look for “dirt” on a black youth’s family members who campaigned for justice after the youth died in one of Britain’s most notorious racially motivated murders. “To hear that, potentially, the police that were meant to be helping them were actually undermining them — that’s horrific,” Mr. Cameron told reporters. The former officer’s account, published Monday in The Guardian and on the paper’s Web site, was the latest chapter in a case that has generated a succession of scandals, most involving Scotland Yard officers assigned to investigate the case. The youth, Stephen Lawrence, 18, was fatally stabbed in London by a gang of white youths while he and a friend waited for a bus on their way home from evening classes in April 1993. The Guardian reported that the former officer, Peter Francis, said commanders had ordered him to find information that could be used against members of the Lawrence family, including determining whether any in the family were already political activists, had been involved in public demonstrations or were engaged in drug dealing. Mr. Francis said that in his undercover role, from 1993 to 1997, he and three other officers in the Special Demonstration Squad had infiltrated Youth Against Racism in Europe, a group that held protests in support of the campaign for justice led by Stephen Lawrence’s parents, Doreen and Neville Lawrence. Mr. Francis said senior officers at Scotland Yard, formally the Metropolitan Police Service, had wanted to discredit the Lawrences’ campaign because they believed that the wave of public protests could set off rioting like the unrest in Los Angeles in 1992 after officers were acquitted in the beating of Rodney King. The allegations lent new momentum to a case that has entangled successive British governments and has come to epitomize a wider pattern of disarray, malfeasance and corruption that has dogged Scotland Yard for years. Mr. Cameron promised that government investigators would “get rapidly to the bottom of what’s happened” and would “get the full truth out.” Theresa May, who as the home secretary oversees policing throughout Britain, said two existing inquiries into police wrongdoing, one of them looking into the handling of the Lawrence case and the other investigating a succession of scandals in undercover policing, would examine Mr. Francis’s account. After years of official inquiries into police mishandling of the case, including a finding in 1999 by a high court judge that insensitivity and lack of investigative rigor betrayed a culture of “institutional racism” among Scotland Yard’s 30,000 officers, two white men were convicted of Mr. Lawrence’s murder last year, 19 years after the killing. But three other men identified by the police as having been part of the gang that killed Mr. Lawrence remain free, with prosecutors saying insufficient evidence made conviction at trial unlikely. Past Scotland Yard commissioners who spoke about Mr. Francis’s account, while saying they had no knowledge of any attempt to discredit the Lawrences, offered no rebuttal to the claims. “If these allegations are true, it’s a disgrace, and the Metropolitan Police Service will apologize,” the current commissioner, Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, said in a statement. He added, “Smearing the family of a murder victim will never be acceptable to me or my officers.” Mr. Lawrence’s parents expressed shock and anger over the allegations. “Out of all the things I’ve found out over the years, this certainly has topped it,” Mrs. Lawrence told reporters here. Neville Lawrence, speaking from Jamaica, where he now lives and where his son is buried, added his voice to those of prominent opposition politicians and rights campaigners in demanding that the government establish a new judicial inquiry. “I have no confidence that the measures announced today will get to the bottom of this matter,” he said. |