Racist Murder Haunts London

The prime suspects in this 1993 murder may not have dragged their victim behind a truck. But he was beaten and stabbed to death on a suburban London street, reports CBS News Correspondent Mark Phillips.

The killing of black teenager Stephen Lawrence has had a shock value here too and not just for its brutality. It's because the killers have never been brought to justice.

The blame for that has been placed on London's much romanticized police force, whose reputation for politeness has disguised what an official inquiry here has called a pervasive, institutional racism.

Declaring that Lawrence's murder shamed the nation, the government Wednesday ordered a major overhaul of race laws after the official report on the case said London's police force is riddled with racial prejudice.

The police were aware that a group of known white racists was seen near Lawrence the night he was killed. But despite video evidence showing they had practiced knife attacks, a credible case against them was never made.

In fact, the murdered boy's father says the police looked only for a black suspect. "There were six people there and straightaway they thought that the one black person, the friend of my son, was the one that was responsible," said Neville Lawrence. "Why didn't they listen to him telling them that the people who attacked my son and had run down the road were white?"

Inherent racism in London's largely white police force was supposed to have been fixed after it was blamed for riots in the early 1980s. But the inquiry into Lawrence's killing proved to many that police attitudes had not changed.

Paul Wilson of the Black Police Association, says "For the first time I believe middle class people in this country have some handle on what racism is all about, the subtleties, the ignorance the apathy towards race issues within the police service."

It's a long way from southeast London to southeast Texas. But in terms of race relations, it turns out it's not very far at all. Here, too, a black man was killed by white racists. Here, too, a country is asking itself serious and disturbing questions about how far it's really come.

And if more unsettling evidence of the problem was needed, Stephen Lawrence's memorial was defaced this week, even as the report detailing the racist nature of his murder was being made public.