Do the right thing: the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry Report 10 years on

The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry Report was published in 1999. This article reviews the impact of the Report on agency responses to racially motivated crime and hate crime over the last ten years. While there have been improvements arising from implementation of the Report's recommendations, there have equally been unintended outcomes, including: compliance with the Report as a superficial measure of performance; media ridicule of its underlying principles; and unanticipated inversions of the common pattern of white perpetrators and black and minority ethnic (BME) victims. In order to do justice to the tenets of the Report, agencies need to fully understand its intent and locate the tackling of racially motivated crime and hate crime within a broader social justice agenda.