Policing and the Legacy of Lawrence

Nathan Hall, John Grieve, Stephen Savage

• Publisher: Willan
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134019748
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

February 2009 marked the 10th Anniversary of the publication of the Inquiry into the events surrounding the investigation of the murder of Stephen Lawrence. This book marks this anniversary and examines various dimensions of the impact of Lawrence on policing policy and practice.

It identifies a series of dimensions and processes associated with British policing in terms of the role that the Lawrence agenda has had on forming and/or shaping policy and practice in that particular area, and in doing so assesses the extent to which the original recommendations and issues raised within the Lawrence Inquiry have been reflected in policy, practice and, importantly policing outcomes in service delivery.

The book integrates practitioner and academic reflection on the impact of Lawrence and includes contributions from some of the key policing figures who were involved in post-Lawrence implementation and development programmes. As such the book will be of interest to both an academic police studies/criminology audience and police-practitioner audiences.

Part One:
Lawrence in Context

Chapter 1

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Stephen Lawrence as a miscarriage of justice

Stephen P. Savage, John Grieve and Sam Poyser

In this chapter we will attempt to place the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry (SLI) into a broader context, in two closely related ways. Firstly, we shall consider the Lawrence case as a particular form of miscarriage of justice to enable us to understand how the case sits in the lexicon of British miscarriages of justice and how it exists as an example of system failure. Secondly, and one reason why we consider Lawrence as a miscarriage of justice, we shall build on existing work about the role of miscarriages of justice and more generally system failure in driving change and reform in policing (Punch 2003; Savage 2007: 11–45) and where Lawrence sits in that respect. In that regard, rather than examine how Lawrence has had an impact on policing, or in what ways Lawrence has left a legacy — these are the primary concerns of other parts of this book — we shall in this chapter attempt to explain why: why Lawrence was to become so powerful an influence on policing. If, as this collection of essays as a whole indicates, the Lawrence agenda has constituted a watershed in British policing, we need to ask what it was about the Lawrence case which made it so. The chapter will proceed firstly by reflecting on definitions of ‘miscarriage of justice’; secondly by examining the relationship between system failures and police reform; thirdly by outlining how the Lawrence case constitutes a miscarriage of justice; before finally asking the question, ‘Why Lawrence?’

Defining and categorising ‘miscarriages of justice’

In a sense, one of the ‘legacies of Lawrence’ has been the role of the Lawrence case in stretching and deepening academic thinking on the nature of ‘miscarriages of justice’. Traditionally, the term has been used to refer to wrongful convictions and catalogues of the causes célèbres of miscarriages of justice would tend to consist of notorious cases where wrongful convictions have come to light, such as the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six cases (Rozenberg 1994). However, increasingly, commentators and researchers in the field of miscarriages of justice have adopted more nuanced conceptions of what constitutes a ‘miscarriage of justice’. Walker in particular has argued for a more inclusive and broader classificatory framework:

A miscarriage occurs whenever suspects or defendants or convicts are treated by the State in breach of their rights, whether because of, first, deficient processes or, secondly, the laws which are applied to them or, thirdly, because there is no factual justification for the applied treatment or punishment, or fourthly, whenever suspects or defendants or convicts are treated adversely by the State to a disproportionate extent in comparison with the need to protect the rights of others, or, fifthly, whenever the rights of others are not effectively or proportionately protected or vindicated by state action against wrongdoers or, sixthly, by the state law itself (Walker 2002: 506 — emphasis added).

It is the fifth category in Walker's framework (in emphasis) which is of most significance in this context. It incorporates, amongst other things, what we have elsewhere referred to as miscarriages of justice based on failures to act (Savage, Poyser and Grieve 2007). Rather than wrongful conviction, such miscarriages of justice may involve the failure to convict, or to act in appropriate ways to make conviction possible. ‘Miscarriages of justice’ can also apply when there is no action, inaction or questionable actions in the sense that an act has taken place (an offence against a victim) but no action or insufficient action or intervention has followed. Indeed, each time a wrongful conviction is exposed, another ‘miscarriage of justice’ is exposed at one and the same time, in the sense that the revelation of a wrongful conviction leaves an offence for which no one stands convicted. Whilst much of the research on miscarriages of justice — and indeed most of the media attention — has focused on ‘wrongful convictions’, miscarriages based on what we have called failures to act also warrant attention.

Such ‘failures to act’ embrace as broad a range of system failures as wrongful convictions (on the latter see Walker 1999: 52–55). They include police poor practice, malpractice and incompetence (failure to identify an event as a potential crime; failure to identify an event as a certain type of crime; failure to investigate effectively; poor treatment of victims and their families), inadequate prosecution processes (poor communication with the police; ‘risk avoidance’) and problematic trial practices (hostile cross-examination of witnesses; weak presentation of the prosecution case). More specifically, failures to act embrace the failure of the police to identify suspects, the failure of the police to press charges, the failure of the prosecution to mount a case, the collapse of the prosecution case during the trial and, throughout all of these, the failure of the agencies involved to inform or support victims and their families. One can add to this category those miscarriages of justice which relate to the failure of the authorities to protect citizens from known danger. Examples of this would be the Mubarek case, where a young Asian offender in custody was murdered in a prison cell having been placed with another offender known by the prison authorities to be both racist and violent (Kennedy 2005), or the Zito case, where a man was killed on an Underground train platform by a man known by the police and health agencies to be mentally disordered and dangerous but who, for a variety of reasons, was not made safe by being kept in secure accommodation (Jones and Mason 2002). Later in this chapter we shall attempt to locate the Lawrence case within this lexicon of system failures as ‘failures to act’, but it is evident at this point that most at issue in this case were police failures at early and critical stages of the investigative process. Before elaborating on that, we can reflect on the role of system failures, including the range of types of miscarriages of justice, in stimulating or furthering change and reform in policing, and how in turn they can be identified with periodic watersheds in the development of policing.

System failure as a driver of change in policing: watersheds in police reform

In the public policy literature a distinct sphere of study relates to the relationship between what Dunleavy (1995) calls ‘policy disasters’, or what Boin and t'Hart (2000) refer to as ‘crises and fiascos’. The case for focusing on this issue for public policy analysis is that ‘policy disasters’ can be an important stimulus for change and reform, or ‘institutional renewal’, in public sector institutions. In that sense system failures can offer what has been called ‘windows of opportunity’ for reform (Keeler 1993), creating conditions where change and reform become more possible and more likely than would otherwise have been the case. System failures and the crises they engender provide opportunities for policy-makers and those close to influencing policy to think the previously ‘unthinkable’ and enable change agendas to enter the scene. This capacity was expressed famously many years ago by Sherman (1978), in his case concerned with system failure in terms of ‘scandals’ and what they can lead to:

Scandal is a mighty weapon. It can topple governments and destroy careers. It can tarnish the reputation of an entire profession. It can cause misery and suffering among the families of its subjects … But it can also be an agent of change. (Sherman 1978: xv — emphasis added)

Boin and 't Hart (2000) suggest a staged process by which crises within the public sector can lead to ‘institutional renewal’. Firstly, a stable and established policy sector is faced with problems, generated externally or internally, which seriously undermine the status quo in that sector. This is often a scenario of ‘things going wrong’. Secondly, and as a result, the existing or traditional routines and procedures within that sector come under increasing scrutiny and criticism. Thirdly, the authority and legitimacy of policy-makers within the sector are subsequently challenged and an institutional crisis ensues. In turn, this provides a ‘window of reform’ where institutional change becomes possible, although not certain. If change is to take place then the response to that opportunity might be incremental change (‘adaptation’ to the problem or ‘restoration’) or more fundamental reform (‘reconstruction’). This framework can be applied across the public sector. For example, tragic events such as the fire at King's Cross Underground station in 1987 (Fennell 1988) and the Paddington rail crash in 1999 (Crompton and Jupe 2002) both played a key part in driving fundamental reforms of the British public transport sector. In these cases ‘system failure’ was indeed a driver for fundamental change, or a midwife of reform. Exactly the same, perhaps even more so, can be said about the role of system failure in driving police reform.

What then are the system failures most frequently associated with policing, failures which are, in turn, most frequently associated with drivers for police reform? Each policy sector has its own particular configurations of ‘stress points’ which, for that sector, provide most opportunities and vulnerabilities for ‘things going wrong’. For the health sector, that might include outbreaks of infection in hospitals (Martin and Evans 1984); for the education sector it might include breaches of security for children in the classroom, such as those identified in the Dunblane shootings (Cullen 1996). In terms of policy sectors closer to the police sector, it is evident that the prison sector, for example, is particularly vulnerable to failures surrounding prison disturbances or ‘prison riots’ (Carrabine 2005), escapes from prison (Barker 1998) and deaths in custody, such as the killing of Zahid Mubarek (Zahid Mubarek Inquiry 2005). In all of these cases, system failures are prone to the process of the delegitimation of the status quo, periods of review and criticism, followed by designs for institutional renewal as outlined earlier — and possibly actual reform itself. What, then, are the ‘stress points’ as far as the police sector is concerned?

There is a case for viewing the police sector as particularly prone to system failure. To begin with, police work can position the police in highly sensitive and potentially volatile situations where, either as a result of their own activities and behaviours, or as a result of wider social problems and divisions, police interventions may provoke or at least be the catalyst for outbreaks of social disorder — a relatively frequent form of system failure in the policing context. The potential for public order problems is never that far from certain types of police work (Baker 2002); when social disorder occurs the police may be blamed, rightly or wrongly, for some or all of the problems which become evident. In addition to this level of vulnerability, some police decisions, such as the use of firearms or the hot pursuit of vehicles, have to be taken at very short notice with little opportunity for detailed consideration, and yet they may result in death or serious injury to others or the officers themselves. In turn such decisions may become the focus of intense scrutiny, with the potential for exposing a range of system failures in such areas as police training, the supervision and management of officers, police communications, and so on. The involvement of the police in such critical incidents, a consequence of the police role, creates a unique propensity for the police sector to be vulnerable to ‘things going wrong’, or system failure. Furthermore, policing is often undertaken in situations where public safety is at issue, and when public safety is compromised police actions and decisions may be identified as causal factors. Perhaps the most notable example of this was the Hillsborough disaster in 1989, when 96 football fans were killed as a result of injuries sustained during crushing on the terraces, and after which the police were to take much of the blame for the ways in which crowd control was handled (Taylor 1989).

However, to return to the theme raised earlier, major system failures may be and have been critical drivers of reform and positive change in policing, in Britain and elsewhere. In his comparative study of police deviance Punch (2000) has developed the convincing thesis that whereas in some countries police corruption tends to be the main form of policing ‘scandal’, in the European/British context ‘scandal’ tends to be around other sorts of system failures:

… in Europe the concerns about corruption and deviance revolve around two matters. First, ‘noble cause’ or ‘process’ corruption, particularly in specialised units, which is oriented to achieving results. And — at the other end of the scale — non-performance, incompetence and failing to perform adequately. (Punch 2000: 308–9)

This captures conveniently the core areas of system failure which, it could be argued, have been driving forces for police reform in the British context. ‘Noble cause’ corruption is a label which has been given to the police role in miscarriages of justice based on wrongful conviction; performance-related ‘scandals’ concern the ‘other’ type of miscarriages of justice referred to earlier: failures to act. ‘Performance’-related scandals could also embrace another key source of system failure in the British context — police failures concerning police-community relations and policing styles, as evidenced in the Scarman Inquiry into the Brixton disorders (Scarman 1981). If we take these together it is possible to draw up a threefold sequence of the role of system failures, through official inquiries (public or otherwise), in creating the conditions for ‘paradigm shifts’ or ‘third-order’ changes in policing in postwar Britain, watersheds or ‘mind-set changes’ in the history of police reform, including Lawrence. This framework summarises a wider study (Savage 2007) of the role of system failure in British police reform.

Watershed 1: Confait — Fisher Inquiry — Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984

The Confait case involved the wrongful convictions in 1972 of two boys, Colin Lattimore and Ronald Leighton, both of whom suffered learning difficulties, for the murder of Maxwell Confait. They were convicted on the basis of confession evidence, subsequently denied, which was eventually shown at the Court of Appeal to have been seriously fallible, leading to the quashing of their convictions in 1973. Part of the fallout of this particular case of miscarriage of justice was the ordering of an ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of abbreviations
• Figures and tables
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction: the legacies of Lawrence
• Part One: Lawrence in Context
• Part Two: Lawrence and Operational Policing
• Part Three: Lawrence — Widening the Agenda
• References
• Appendix 1: The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry — A Selective Chronology and Context 1974–2008
• Appendix 2: Recommendations of the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry
• Index