Driving while black in London

A Scotland Yard officer is to be disciplined for racially discriminating against Stephen Lawrence’s younger brother.

The police watchdog has ordered the Met to bring misconduct proceedings against the officer, who followed and stopped teacher Stuart Lawrence as he drove home in his car last November.

The Met’s professional standards unit had previously cleared the officer of any wrongdoing.

But after Mr Lawrence appealed, the Independent Police Complaints Commission has ruled that his allegation against the officer was ‘well founded’ and he should face a misconduct hearing.

More than 20 other, unrelated allegations of racial discrimination – made against the Met by Mr Lawrence - were rejected by the IPCC.

Last night Mr Lawrence urged Met chief Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe to take ‘robust and appropriate disciplinary action’ against the officer who is facing misconduct proceedings.

‘There is no place in the police service for officers who conduct themselves as he did,’ he told the Mail.

The decision to partially uphold Mr Lawrence’s appeal is seen as a major embarrassment for Yard chiefs.

The public inquiry into the 1993 murder of his brother Stephen, 18, accused Scotland Yard of being ‘institutionally racist’.

Father-of-one Lawrence, 36, lodged a formal complaint with the Met in January (2013), alleging he had been stopped or searched by officers on 25 occasions since the age of 17.

As revealed exclusively in the Mail, he claimed he had been targeted simply because of the colour of the skin.

His patience finally snapped after he was stopped near the home he shared with his fiancée and young son in Peckham, South-east London, on the afternoon of November 16 last year.

He was driving his three year old Volkswagen Scirocco when two officers pulled him over and checked his details.

Mr Lawrence says that when he asked why he had been stopped, one of the officers replied he had been ‘naturally suspicious’ of him.

After spending three months probing his various allegations, the Met’s Department of Professional Standards (DPS) concluded in April there was no evidence any of its officers acted inappropriately. But the IPCC has now upheld Mr Lawrence’s complaint about last November’s incident.

The officer who was driving the police vehicle which followed Mr Lawrence’s car told investigators that he (Mr Lawrence) had stared at him as he drove past. He said he noticed that the man at the wheel was Afro-Caribbean ‘but could not make out any more than that’.

In its report, a copy of which has been seen by the Mail, the IPCC said it did not find the ‘eye contact’ between Mr Lawrence and the police officer provided a ‘credible justification’ for the decision to follow him.

It added that it was more likely than not that Mr Lawrence did not speed up or fail to indicate, as was alleged by the officer and a police colleague who was with him at the time.

‘On the balance of probability we conclude that the conduct took place as Mr Lawrence has alleged,’ it added.

‘In the absence of credible reasons as to why Mr Lawrence was followed and questioned we consider that his complaint that this was on the grounds of ethnicity is well founded.’

According to the IPCC report, 74 per cent of the police driver’s stops between September 2012 and March 2013 were on Afro-Caribbean people.

It recommended he face a misconduct hearing for racial discrimination.

Because he had never previously been in trouble and didn’t use offensive language in the incident with Mr Lawrence, he is unlikely to lose his job.

His colleague who was also involved in the altercation with Mr Lawrence (last November) will not disciplined, the IPCC said.

This, it explained, is because there is no evidence he influenced the driver’s decision to follow and stop Mr Lawrence, and was not aware of his race until he got out of his car.

Mr Lawrence welcomed the IPCC’s decision to ‘partially’ uphold his appeal.

He said: "The IPCC now recognises, on the basis of the evidence that it has seen, that the only reason I was stopped by police on the 16th November 2012, was because of my ethnic origin. This is the conclusion that the original officer investigating my complaint should have reached.

The fact that he did not do so caused me hurt and distress because it suggested that I was not telling the truth about what happened to me. It also shows how ineffective the complaints procedure is when police investigate police.

‘There are bound to be many miscarriages of justice because of this biased procedure. Ultimately, it needs to be changed so that complaints are not investigated in a biased way and people in my position do not have to go through the stress and humiliation of not being believed when they make a complaint.’

Original report here

　

　

(And don't forget your ration of Wicked Thoughts for today. Now hosted on Wordpress. If you cannot access it, go to the MIRROR SITE, where posts appear as well as on the primary site. I have reposted the archives (past posts) for Wicked Thoughts HERE or HERE or here