Baroness Lawrence said officers can be 'as brutal as they want' without being held to account.
By Reeta ChakrabartiThe Metropolitan Police has failed to change in the 30 years since the murder of her teenage son, Baroness Doreen Lawrence has told BBC News.
in an unprovoked racist attack by a gang at a bus stop in Eltham in south-east London. Two of his five suspected killers were jailed for murder nearly 20 years later.The 1999 Macpherson Report into the failed investigation into Stephen's death found there had been "institutional racism" in the Metropolitan Police. The watershed report made 70 recommendations, many aimed at improving police attitudes to racism.
I have covered the Lawrence story since the 1990s and have watched and interviewed Doreen many times as she campaigned for justice for her son. The private person we will never know, but her public persona has changed considerably. Back then, she treated her encounters with the media as a necessary evil, her only means of keeping her family's cruel denial of justice in the public eye.
Thirty years later, Baroness Lawrence of Clarendon has lost none of her steel. But she is a more relaxed person, more comfortable in her public role, and with an easy warmth. There is no rest for her though, and perhaps there never will be.Despite the 2012 convictions of David Norris and Gary Dobson, there are other suspects who are still free.
Sir Mark Rowley, the Commissioner of the Met, has admitted that there are severe shortcomings, but that the Met is not the same force that it was 20 or 25 years ago.She adds that she has heard "a lot of rhetoric" from the commissioner, "but unless we see the changes ourselves, we're never going to believe that".
Baroness Lawrence feels that for her to do so, they would first need to admit to their crime. "But they've never owned up, and in their eyes, they've done nothing wrong."before being considered for parole.
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