Judge in the Stephen Lawrence inquiry moved from scepticism to concern, to shock and incredulity
Tributes paid as Sir William Macpherson dies aged 94
You had to be there. You had to know what life was like before the Macpherson inquiry into the death of Stephen Lawrence, and then after.
Before Macpherson, the issue for campaigners, for distraught families and for journalists seeking to do their jobs by throwing light on police misbehaviour towards people of colour, was to prove not just that it was happening but that it was possible. Whenever a voice was raised, it was silenced, by the police and by the media. Victims and their families were rubbished; those campaigners who sought to help them were portrayed to middle England as opportunists and extremists.
It took an official inquiry to break through that wall of wilful obfuscation. It took a very conservative judge like Sir William Macpherson of Cluny to make that happen.
After the inquiry, the issue facing modern Britain became a different one. We moved from “Does racism exist?” to “How much racism is there?” We moved from “Do the police provide an inferior service to Black Britain?” to “How much worse is it – and why?”
He was not a popular choice. He came to the task with a record of past judgments that led some activists to reject him as too conservative, perhaps illiberal. But as the weeks of his inquiry passed, as the Lawrence’s continued their historic campaign, as details emerged of how a grieving family and Duwayne Brooks, a traumatised teenager who saw his friend knifed to death, were treated, as the shoddiness and the apparent indifference was exposed, those of us who sat through the inquiry saw Macpherson move from scepticism to concern, to shock and incredulity. He was always composed, but often his bemusement was clear.
