Racist Murder and Pressure Group Politics Dedicated to those founts of pride and joy Robert and Sarah Hodkinson of Holyport and Max Dennis of Pensacola Racist Murder and Pressure Group Politics Norman Dennis George Erdos Ahmed Al-Shahi Institute for the Study of Civil Society London First published September 2000 © The Institute for the Study of Civil Society 2000 email: [email protected] All rights reserved ISBN 1-903 386-05 5 Typeset by the Institute for the Study of Civil Society in New Century Schoolbook Printed in Great Britain by The Cromwell Press Trowbridge, Wiltshire Contents Page The Authors viii Foreword David G. Green x Authors’ Note x Preface Norman Dennis xi Summary xix Introduction 1 Mrs Lawrence’s experience of racism The Macpherson report’s evidence and findings 1 The Main Issues 4 Stephen Lawrence’s death The murderers Racist criminality Police racism Remedies Passion and proportion 2 The Methods of Inquiry used by Macpherson 11 The Macpherson ‘court’ The abstraction of abject apologies The Taaffes Trial by pressure group 3 The Crowd in Hannibal House 20 The crowd and Mrs Lawrence The crowd and Inspector Groves The crowd and Detective Sergeant Bevan The crowd and Sir Paul Condon The gullible scepticism of special interest groups and those they succeed in influencing 4 Mr and Mrs Lawrence’s Treatment at the Hospital as Evidence of Police Racism 33 Acting Inspector Little’s alleged racism The Night Services Manager’s evidence 5 The Initial Treatment of Duwayne Brooks as Evidence of Police Racism 42 How he was treated by the police at the scene of the murder How he was treated by the police at the hospital How he was treated at Plumstead police station How he was treated by the police in connection with the Welling riot vi RACIST MURDER AND PRESSURE GROUP POLITICS 6 The treatment of Mr and Mrs Lawrence in Family Liaison as Evidence of Police Racism 53 The behaviour of officers concerned with family liaison The situation within which the family liaison had to be conducted The Lawrences’s reaction to people other than the police Racism Handling bereavement 7 The Failure of Many Officers to Recognise Stephen Lawrence’s Murder as a Purely Racially Motivated Crime as Evidence of Police Racism 73 Free-floating aggression Macpherson’s initial approach: the murder was not ‘purely’ racist The switch to ‘pure’ racism Evidence Versus Public Opinion 8 The Lack of Police Urgency and Poor Police Motivation in some Areas of the Investigation as Evidence of Police Racism 85 Macpherson’s own incompetence in connection with the Stephen Lawrence investigation What the Lawrences alleged against the police The ‘evidence’ of Professor Holdaway Macpherson 9 The Everyday and the Sociological Use of the Word ‘Institutional’ 93 The Commission for Racial Equality Stokely Carmichael Lord Scarman 10 ‘Institutional’ as Institutional Failure 99 Dr Benjamin Bowling The 1990 Trust 11 ‘Institutional’ as Counter-Institutional Subculture 103 The Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) Black Police Association The Metropolitan Police Service Commissioner 12 ‘Institutional’ as that which is Unidentifiable from Any Evidence 106 Lord Scarman The President of the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) Dr Robin Oakley Macpherson 13 Macpherson’s Anthropology 118 Our anthropological comments Colour-consciousness Macpherson’s implied anthropology The obscurities of the Macpherson doctrine that the police must not be colour-blind CONTENTS vii 14 The Political Uses of Disruptive and Separatist Anti-Racism 128 Traditional Marxism The ‘Marxism’ of the Frankfurt School and the student politics of the ‘Sixty-Eighters’ Trotskyism The wide spectrum of anti-racist views 15 Stereotypes and Prejudice 135 The observer-created stereotype The stereotyping invited by the carrier of the stereotype The indispensability of responding to the signals of self-chosen stereotypes Erroneous stereotypes Making demands that cannot possibly be met 16 Conclusion 142 The welcome for Macpherson The fanatical mind-set The betrayal by the intellectuals The spectrum of anti-racism Notes 149 Index 177 The Authors Norman Dennis was born in 1929 in Sunderland, one of the four sons of a tram-car driver. He was educated at Green Terrace Elementary School and the Bede Collegiate Boys’ School. He won a place at Corpus Christi, Oxford, but chose to go to the London School of Economics, where he was awarded a First Class Honours in Economics. He was Reader in Social Studies at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, where George Erdos and Ahmed Al-Shahi were his long-time col- leagues and friends. He has been a Rockefeller Fellow, Ford Fellow, Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Palo Alto, Leverhulme Fellow, and Visiting Fellow at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. He is currently Director of Community Studies at the Institute for the Study of Civil Society. With Professor A.H. Halsey he is author of English Ethical Social- ism, Clarendon Press, 1988. The Institute for the Study of Civil Society (ISCS) is the current publisher of his Families Without Fatherhood (with George Erdos), Third Edition, ISCS, 2000; Rising Crime and the Dismembered Family, ISCS, 1993 and The Invention of Permanent Poverty, ISCS, 1997. He edited and with Detective Superintendent Ray Mallon contributed two chapters to Zero Tolerance: Policing a Free Society, ISCS, 1997, and contributed ‘Beautiful Theories, Brutal Facts: the welfare state and sexual liberation’ to Welfare, Work and Poverty (edited by David Smith), ISCS, 2000. He is also well known for his study of a Yorkshire coal-mining town, Coal Is Our Life (with Cliff Slaughter and Fernando Henriques), Eyre and Spottiswood, 1956, and two participant-observation studies of bureaucracy and politics as they affected the working-class district of his birth, Millfield, Sunderland, People and Planning, Faber and Faber, 1970, and Public Participation and Planners’ Blight, 1972. He has been a Sunderland city councillor and is active in his ward Labour party. He is currently studying the question of what consti- tutes effective and appropriate policing in a free society when it experiences a rapid rise in the frequency of crime and sub-criminal disorder. He is also studying the struggle between the bureaucratic, political, academic and media advocates of drug, educational and family permissiveness in Zürich and one of their most important opponents, a Zürich citizen’s organisation called the VPM. George Erdos was born in 1946 in Hungary, and spent his formative years there. He left in 1964. He finished his secondary education in Germany. He then studied psychology at the universities of Frankfurt, viii AUTHORS ix New Hampshire, Bar-Ilan, Mainz and Cambridge. He settled in England and took British citizenship. He is currently lecturer in psychology at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. In the 1980s he worked on the Educational Opportunities programme of the state of New Jersey. Its basis was that, in the course of studying for and by obtaining a university degree, the African-American male would assimilate his conduct to that of the American white middle-class male and be enabled to enjoy success in American terms. Although the programme was targeted at African-American men, it was actually utilised with enthusiasm by African-American women. Changes rapidly taking place at that time in the culture and conduct of white middle-class men stimulated Dr Erdos’s interest in the role of the colour, class and culture (including the weakening of all cultures towards a state of what Emile Durkheim called anomie, the absence of cultural controls) in English and American society. He is an adherent of ethical socialism, in the sense given the term in English Ethical Socialism. He experienced communism directly, and through his German relatives he experienced fascism indirectly. He saw that in times of disorder people can be brought to abandon their civil liberties for the sake of security. Ahmed Al-Shahi is a British citizen of Kurdish origin. He received his university education in Baghdad. He came to England in 1959, where he completed his postgraduate training in social anthropology, first at the University of London, and then at Oxford University. He taught social anthropology at the University of Khartoum and at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. In the course of his research in northern Sudan, particularly among the Shaygiyya tribe, he exper- ienced at first hand a society of rich ethnic, cultural and religious diversity. Among his publications are Wisdom from the Nile (with F.C.T. Moore), Oxford, 1978; Islam in the Modern World (co-editor with Denis MacEoin), Croom Helm, 1983; Themes from Northern Sudan, Ithaca, 1986 and The Diversity of the Muslim Community (editor), Ithaca, 1987. He is currently attached to the Middle East Centre at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, where he teaches the anthropology of the Middle East. He continues his research and writing on the role of knowledge, tolerance, and institutional structures in striking the right balance between integration, the maintenance of cultural identity, and mutual accommodation in the special circumstances of each society. Foreword Racist Murder and Pressure Group Politics dissects the Macpherson report and questions its approach. Race has become an issue sur- rounded by raw sensitivities and the authors, Ahmed Al-Shahi, Norman Dennis and George Erdos, have shown great courage in tackling it without fear or favour—in the best tradition of university scholarship. This book is published as a companion volume to Institutional Racism and the Police: Fact or Fiction, which contains a range of views as an aid to public debate. In that book, John Grieve of the Metropoli- tan Police and Mike O’Brien, a Home Office Minister, describe their reactions to the Macpherson report, while Lord Skidelsky and Michael Ignatieff challenge Macpherson’s claim that the Metropolitan Police were guilty of ‘institutional racism’.