Abstract
As the UK celebrates the conviction of two men for the racist murder nineteen years ago of Stephen Lawrence, the author draws on research into racial violence being carried out by the Institute of Race Relations to show that violence is still at very high levels and is becoming dispersed to new areas. The Macpherson Report may have brought in changes to police practices, but violent, popular racism, encouraged by wider government policies, such as the war on terror, is still a national scandal.
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References
1.Benjamin Bowling and Coretta Phillips, Racism, crime and justice (London, Longman, 2002), pp. 15–16 .
2.Cressida Dick, ‘Stephen Lawrence murder: nothing in the Met’s history had a greater impact’, Guardian (3 January 2012), available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2012/jan/03/cressida-dick-stephen-lawrence-verdicts. Incidentally, Cressida Dick was the officer who, in 2005, was in charge of the operation that led to the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes, an entirely innocent Brazilian man, wrongly suspected of involvement in terrorist activities, shot eight times by police officers on the London underground. Cressida Dick has since been promoted .
3.Donna Bowater, ‘David Cameron: Britain “still has a problem with racism”’, Daily Telegraph (9 January 2012), available at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/9002758/David-Cameron-Britain-still-has-a-problem-with-racism.html .
4.Institute of Race Relations, ‘96 murders since Stephen Lawrence’s’ (5 January 2012), available at: http://www.irr.org.uk/2012/january/ha000002.html. All of the murders cited in this article are detailed further in: Institute of Race Relations, ‘Deaths with a (known or suspected) racial element 1991–1999’, IRR Factfile (22 April 2010), available at: http://www.irr.org.uk/2002/november/ak000002.html; and Institute of Race Relations, ‘Deaths with a (known or suspected) racial element 2000 onwards’, IRR Factfile (5 January 2012), available at: http://www.irr.org.uk/2002/november/ak000008.html .
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6.For information on racial violence in both of these cities, see Jon Burnett, The New Geographies of Racism: Plymouth (London, Institute of Race Relations, 2011); and Jon Burnett, The New Geographies of Racism: Stoke-on-Trent (London, Institute of Race Relations, 2011) .
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