There had been no rape, there were no drugs and Stephen and Duwayne were not in any gang. Two independent witnesses saw everything they did in that part of Eltham that night, and they provoked no one.More than that, the circumstances of the murder, as they became clear, lent power- ful support to the race motive. It was a stranger attack, completely unprovoked, in an area known for hostility to black people; all the attackers were white and of the five young people at the bus stop, only the two black ones were attacked. Add the use of the word “nigger”, and by any sensible estimation what you have is a race crime.One of the most depressing spectacles of the public inquiry, however, was the procession of detectives who still argued that the murder was just a piece of thuggery, that the killers would have done the same to a white boy, that you couldn’t tell exactly what was in their heads when they attacked. Tom Cook, a former deputy chief constable on the inquiry panel, was driven to exasperation.

If a man goes into a post office with a gun and demands money, he said, you don’t need to see inside his head to know his motive is robbery.Another way in which the mindset showed itself was in the response that accepted that the murder was a tragedy, but insisted it should not be politicised. Anti-racism groups and local politicians were wrong, it was said in the press and elsewhere, to use the case in arguments about policing and race relations; they had their own agenda, which was scarcely compatible with the needs of a grieving family. When an anti-BNP march near Eltham ended in violence between mainly black protesters and police, “race activists” and “black radicals” were accused of “hijacking” the tragedy of Stephen Lawrence’s murder and even of hindering the investigation.This notion of political manipulation stuck to the case for years, and yet it is as wrong-headed as it is insulting to the Lawrences (who have minds of their own, thank you) The murder was a political event. How could it not be? If you were black in south-east London, the killing made you afraid. Stephen was stabbed, after all, because of the colour of his skin, and by local estimation he was not the first.

Your children’s skin was the same colour; they might not be safe. You might not be safe; as the posters would later say: “You could be next.” This is precisely the sort of thing for which we need politics.You can argue that one of the factors that let the police down was their failure to recognise the political status of the crime. They struggled to take the politics out of it, urging black people to be calm and briefing newspapers about the activities of radicals, and they insisted that the case be treated like any other murder Yet it wasn’t like any other murder. It may not quite have been an assassination, but it was certainly an assault on a whole community, and for that reason it deserved a higher priority, more resources and more thought than other murders. It didn’t get them.These two things – the denial of the motive and the refusal to accept that what happened was more than a random street event that could be dealt with by normal procedures – had practical consequences.