seven - The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry: a case study in policing and complexity

Summary

Policing is really quite simple. (Chief Constable X to the author, 2004)

The National Crime Agency will deal with serious, organised and/or complex cases. (Press release and draft legislation for National Crime Agency, 2013)

Any fool can complicate the issues, John. (Mary Midgely, philosopher, to the author, circa 1980)

Introduction

This chapter explores two questions ‘Is policing a simple or complex task?’ and ‘Can complexity theory help us answer that first question?’ It will use the Stephen Lawrence Public Inquiry (SLI), its transcripts, findings, conclusions, recommendations and practical policing and other outcomes (if any), as a case study. It is essentially a positivist (things can get better) but realist account, with some analytic philosophy elements (recent explorations of the word ‘adaptation’). It concludes that the complexity thinking about learning and adaptation of policies and practices could have improved the progress made in the 15 years since the SLI and, in particular, the finding of institutional racism (IR). The chapter is concerned not with challenging that finding or with reexamining the evidence that the SLI considered, nor with the ongoing investigation, but with the learning and adaptation or otherwise that followed the SLI's findings and recommendations. Other findings and related recommendations, besides IR, are examined in respect of leadership, critical incidents, family liaison, stop and search, independent advice, and hate crime investigation, which support the conclusion of the value of complexity thinking. Finally, the chapter suggests that for policing, there are other ways of looking at the fear of change and return to equilibrium besides the dominant narrative of police failure.

Following the findings of the SLI (see later) 15 years ago, the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) used critical incidents training and management to take an approach based on a psychological theory of cognitive dissonance, which was both reductionist and, to some extent, linear, that is, it essentially sought to break down the component parts of the incident to understand what happened (this was perhaps counter-intuitive because as detectives, we had pieced together the various bits of evidence) (see Hall et al, 2009), an approach that was possibly self-defeating in the long term.