`The collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture or ethnic origin." These are the words used by Sir William Macpherson to describe "pernicious and institutionalised racism" in the London Metropolitan Police.
Sir William's report on the murder of Stephen Lawrence, the black teenager who was stabbed to death by a gang of white youths in south London six years ago, was published yesterday. His inquiry - and the impressive dignity of the Lawrence family - have provoked an anguished debate in Britain which seems certain to spread far beyond the metropolitan police.
The report will be read with particular interest by Sir Ronald Flanagan. He will recognise many of the criticisms levelled against Sir Paul Condon, the commissioner of the metropolitan police, who has been forced to accept the charge that, despite his best efforts to eradicate it, his force is riven with racism and prejudice.
Sir William Macpherson of Cluny, who chaired the Lawrence inquiry, is no bleeding-heart liberal. When he retired in l996 a fellow judge described him as being "not famous for his lenient sentences". At one stage the tribunal was adjourned when the Lawrence family expressed concern at newspaper reports that he had been racially insensitive on the bench. They were reassured when Jack Straw, the Home Secretary, told them he had every confidence in a judge who had a reputation for being tough but fair.
This assessment has been vindicated. The 75-year-old Scottish judge conducted his inquiry with impeccable fairness and sympathy. He has also produced a report which has forced very many people to reassess the widespread nature of racism in British society, not just in the police force, but in the legal system, education, the armed forces and the media. Even the BBC, which has traditionally prided itself on being a beacon of liberal values, is not exempt from the charge that it has failed to reflect the changing nature of a multi-ethnic society in its programmes and recruitment practices.
The stark facts of the Lawrence case are worth repeating. In April l993, 16-year-old Stephen Lawrence and his friend Duwayne Brooks were standing at a bus-stop in south London when they were set upon by a gang of white youths. Stephen was stabbed. His friend's attempts to attract help for him were unsuccessful. Even when the police arrived, no attempt was made to attend to the fatally injured youth.
It may seem a terrible thing to say, but it could have been even worse. One cannot but wonder what Sir William would have had to say if his inquiry had been told that a number of armed policemen who were sitting in a Land-Rover near the scene of the attack, able to see everything that was going on, made no attempt to protect the victims.
That is the main thrust of the evidence which has been heard in a Belfast court this week where a 21-year-old man is on trial for the murder of Robert Hamill in Portadown in April l997. The 26-year-old Catholic was walking home from a dance with a small group of friends when he was attacked and kicked to the ground by a loyalist gang. Later he was taken to the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast, where he died in May 1997.
There have been claims that the police tried to intervene, but these have been denied by eyewitnesses to the crime . On Monday, Siobhan Girvin, Robert Hamill's cousin, told Lord Justice McCollum that she had run over to the police Land-Rover while Robert was being kicked and beaten and begged those inside "to get out and help us". She received no reply. There was no attempt to stop the attack by, for example, firing in the air, a tactic which the RUC has used effectively in the past when dealing with riots.
There are other disturbing similarities between what happened to Stephen Lawrence on the streets of south London in April 1993 and the murder of Robert Hamill in Portadown four years later. In both cases a number of youths have been charged with murder, but have been acquitted on the grounds of insufficient evidence, a lack which the families of the victims attribute to the police. In the Lawrence case an internal inquiry exonerated the metropolitan police from any fault in its conduct of the investigation into his murder, but this finding has not been endorsed by subsequent events.
In the Hamill case a report has been sent to the Director of Public Prosecutions relating to allegations that the police failed to intervene while Mr Hamill was being attacked. Apparently the RUC line on this, privately at least, is that the odds against them were too high. There were four policemen in the Land-Rover while a group of 30 loyalists were shouting "Die, you Fenian scum" outside.
Some readers may protest that the political contexts in which the Lawrence and Hamill cases were so tragically played out are too different for comparisons to be relevant. But the findings of the Macpherson report contain lessons which will be taken seriously by anyone who understands the urgent challenge which the reform of policing represents in Northern Ireland. Some of the difficulties which face both the metropolitan police and the RUC are strikingly similar. There is the under-representation of recruits drawn from minority or ethnic communities, the "canteen culture" manifest in racist/sectarian comments etc., the instinctive tendency to suspect members of the minority community as criminal or subversive.
The report on the Lawrence case concedes that such attitudes may often be the result of "unwitting prejudice or thoughtlessness". The same can probably be said of most institutions in most states, including our own.
Sir William Macpherson emphasises that in order to eradicate racism (or sectarianism) there must first be an unequivocal acceptance that the problem exists. It is not enough to talk about a few bad apples, as has happened so often in the past. The report continues: "Any police officer who feels unable so to respond will find it extremely difficult to work in harmony and co-operate with the community in the way that policing by consensus demands."
It is for these reasons that the report on the murder of Stephen Lawrence and the failures of the metropolitan police in dealing with the case will be compulsory reading for, among others, Mo Mowlam, Chris Patten and the Chief Constable of the RUC. There are lessons for all of us here. We have no cause to be complacent about racism in our own society, but we must leave that subject for another day.