THE police officer involved in an alleged plot to spy on the parents of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence should have faced disciplinary charges rather than be allowed to retire, his parents said.
The Met Police allowed the former Met Police commander Richard Walton to retire from his post as the head of its counter-terrorism command. Walton quit in January, six days after a watchdog sent the Met the findings of its investigation into the police spying on the Lawrence family.
Speaking from his home in Jamaica, Neville Lawrence said: ‘I have long felt that allowing officers to retire to avoid disciplinary action totally undermines public confidence in the police.’
He said that the IPCC investigation had made it clear that the police had wrongly spied on his family, adding that he wanted to know ‘at what level of seniority within the Metropolitan Police this spying was sanctioned’.
Doreen Lawrence said: ‘My family and the public at large have been denied the opportunity of seeing justice done yet again in this case.’
The IPCC investigation was launched in 2014 after a Home Office-commissioned inquiry reported that police had been involved in a plot to collect ‘fascinating and valuable’ intelligence from an undercover officer.
According to the investigation by Mark Ellison QC, the Met Police had planted the undercover officer in the ‘Lawrence family camp’ and was gathering information about the bereaved family and their supporters.
He said it could have appeared that the Met was trying to use the intelligence to gain a ‘secret advantage’ over the family at a judge-led public inquiry into alleged wrongdoing by the police.
At the time, former high court judge William Macpherson was heading the public inquiry scrutinising the Met’s botched investigation into Stephen’s murder by a racist gang in 1993. The investigation concluded that the police were ‘institutionally racist’.
