Former Met police chief admits surveillance of Stephen Lawrence’s family was institutionally racist | Undercover police and policing

At the spy inquiry, a former Metropolitan police commissioner admitted the surveillance of Stephen Lawrence’s family by undercover police officers was institutionally racist.

When Paul Condon was commander of the Metropolitan police in the 1990s, a controversial undercover unit spied on the family as they tried to persuade Scotland Yard to properly investigate Lawrence’s racist murder.

Officers reported information about the divorce of Lawrence’s parents, Doreen and Neville, to their superiors.

Condon, who testified Tuesday, said the secret surveillance of the Lawrence family and their campaigns “very well fits the parameters of institutional racism.”

The failure to investigate the 1993 murder meticulously was one of the biggest and most controversial issues it had to deal with, and caused great damage to the reputation of the UK’s largest police force.

Speaking more broadly about the undercover unit, Condon also said the Metropolitan police had failed to control the special demonstration squad (SDS), which had committed “appalling” abuses for decades.

He said he was appalled by the mistakes made by the unit, which spied on tens of thousands of political activists for 40 years. He told the inquiry there were “rogue officers who did some bad things” but that the bigger fault lay in the Met’s systematic failure to strictly police the unit.

He said undercover officers were told every day to “lie, cheat and deceive as a way of life” but added that the Met needed to recognize that undercover work “could be corrupting” if strong rules were not in place.

Condon, who became a member of the House of Lords after his police career, became the highest-ranking police officer to testify at the long-running public inquiry chaired by retired judge Sir John Mitting.

The investigation was launched after the Guardian revealed how SDS spied on the Lawrence family and their supporters in the 1990s.

Mitting is investigating wide-ranging abuses by undercover officers. These include how they stalk bereaved parents as they seek justice for relatives or campaign to expose police misconduct, deceive women into long-term relationships and even having children, steal the identities of dead children and lie in court.

SDS undercover operatives adopted false identities to infiltrate mostly left-wing groups in missions that usually lasted four years between 1968 and 2008.

Condon said at the beginning of his statement that he wanted to “personally apologize to every single person who was harmed by the actions of the officers on the task force over the decades, and I was appalled by much of what I learned throughout this investigation, and he wanted to sincerely apologize to every single person who was harmed in the process.”

He said there were “terrible things going wrong” at SDS and “terrible behavior by individual officers”. He added: “Equally, I think the biggest mistake over the decades has been with the Metropolitan police, where these officers have been told on a daily basis that it is their job to lie, cheat and deceive as a way of life, and what they have been asked to do.”

“The metropolitan police had to realize that without boundaries, without ethical guidance, under these conditions this work could be corrupting, and even someone with a strong moral compass would give in to base instincts.”

But Condon said he knew nothing about the abuses while he was in charge of the Met between 1993 and 2000. He said it was “unrealistic” to suggest that he, as head of the Met, could be aware of the day-to-day workings of a small, secretive unit.

Condon said he “never commissioned, encouraged, authorized, agreed to, or was aware of” the surveillance conducted on the Lawrence family and their supporters.

Asked by the investigation’s lead attorney, David Barr, whether he would agree that the surveillance was “an expression” of institutional racism, Condon said, “Yes.”

An inquest into the murder by Sir William Macpherson in 1999 stated that institutional racism at the Met was one of the reasons that allowed Lawrence’s killers to escape justice. Police leaders accepted the findings and later claimed they had reformed the service to such an extent that it could no longer be implemented.