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- guardian.co.uk, Sunday 10 August 2003 00.57 BST
That trust has been reciprocated. The police have protected her and her mother from reprisals by moving them 39 times. Whatever other criticisms can be made of detectives and the Crown Prosecution Service, you can't accuse officers of failing to stand by Bromley. They have looked after her as best they can and are now campaigning to change the law to protect future Bromleys.
Ten-years ago, in the immediate aftermath of the spectacularly incompetent investigation into the murder of Stephen Lawrence, his mother Doreen summed up black attitudes to the police. 'If it was the other way around and a white boy had been killed by a gang of black men, they would have arrested half the black community in the area. But nothing has been done, there have been no arrests and the police won't tell us what is happening.' In other words, the police banged up blacks for crimes they didn't commit while failing to deliver justice when they were the victims of crime. The Lawrence case, added Nelson Mandela during a visit to London, reminded him of apartheid South Africa where 'black lives were cheap'.
Not anymore. The Metropolitan Police has increased the value of a black life exponentially by the rather simple tactic of trying to get law-abiding blacks on its side. Assistant Commissioner Tarique Ghaffur takes a meticulous pride in enumerating the successes of Operation Trident, the initiative to tackle black-on-black crime in London. Between January and July 2001, his officers investigated 21 black-on-black murders; in the same period in 2002 there were 24; in the same period in 2003 there were 11. Black-on-black attempted murders went from 94 in the first seven months of 2001 to 70 in 2002 to 26 this year. Shootings which weren't serious enough to be classified as attempted murder followed a slightly different pattern: 82 in 2001; 118 in 2002; and 71 in 2003. The proportion of cases which ended with a suspect being brought to trial, has leapt from 20 to 70 per cent. 'We are using community outrage against the criminals,' he says. Operation Trident is just one operation among many, and London is just one city among many, but by any measure Trident's officers have scored a significant success. It would be applauded if the police's successes didn't upset the conventional wisdoms of Left and Right.
Conservatives present Britain as a country at the mercy of criminals. The police can do nothing when the villains are black because officers have been shackled by the findings of the Macpherson inquiry into the Lawrence murder. Macpherson imposed a politically-correct straitjacket on the police by branding them 'institutionally racist'. Cowardly chief officers stabbed the rank-and-file in the back by going along with his liberal gibberish. Now, in the words of the Sunday Express in April: 'Police officers are so terrified of being labelled racist, they deliberately avoid questioning black suspects during routine patrols.'
We'll leave aside the fact that Sir William Macpherson of Cluny (twenty-seventh chief of the clan Macpherson, a former SAS member and a keen golfer) is an unlikely Islington bleeding heart, and note instead that for many on the Left the police are indeed racist. The black riots of the 1980s were classified as 'uprisings' or 'rebellions', even though the rebels wrecked their own neighbourhoods and on occasion killed their neighbours. When the riots subsided, left-wing attention concentrated on black deaths in police custody and the fitting-up of black suspects.
Lee Jasper, Ken Livingstone's adviser on policing, could write a book on police racism, but is now as interested in how the police can protect blacks from murderers as how blacks can be protected from the police. He says that mutual suspicion had meant that by the mid-1990s the police were in the absurd position of relying on black criminals to maintain law and order. Because the law-abiding treated them with suspicion, detectives talked to informers, and in return for information offered them protection. The most disgusting transaction was between the Met and Delroy Denton, a Jamaican hoodlum who boasted of having killed seven women and was described by those who knew him as a 'sex-fuelled psychopath'. He avoided deportation by cutting a deal with the cops. He was allowed to roam black London because he promised to give Scotland Yard information on Yardie cocaine rackets. His benefit of clergy expired only when he was convicted of the rape and murder of Monica Lawes in Brixton in 1995.
Compare Denton with a heroic black woman now known as 'Sophie Lewis'. She was the girlfriend of a Yardie gangster, Ricky Sweeney. Life with him became ever more frightening. He boasted of murdering a rival and was always on the look out for assassins wishing to return the compliment. When Sweeney was arrested for burglary, she took her chance to break free. Operation Trident detectives approached her and, on the prompting of her father, she agreed to talk. Sweeney ordered her execution. She was shot four times in the head but survived. The attempted murder made her determined to give evidence against the hitmen as well as Sweeney. When she went to Jamaica for her grandfather's funeral, there was a second attempt to kill her. She didn't shut up but helped send Sweeney and his accomplices down last year.
Sophie Lewis's courage was exceptional but not unique. Trident officers managed to persuade six users of a crack house in north London to play the unlikely role of witnesses for the Crown and help convict two gunmen who shot dead a local drug dealer in June 2002.
In December last year a prominent Tottenham gangster, Adrian Crawford, was assassinated by Daniel Cummings, leader of the rival Hackney Boys. Cummings assumed that 'his reputation for violence would shield him from prosecution', the police said. So confident was he that he pulled up alongside Crawford's car, got out with his friends and shot Crawford dead in the street.
The police worked with Crawford's family who appealed for witnesses to come forward. They were reassured by Trident officers that they would be protected. On Wednesday, Cummings was convicted of murder, even though the court was besieged by 60 of his supporters who did everything they could to intimidate witnesses and jurors. Detective Chief Inspector Julian Headon, who led the Crawford investigation, said Trident was achieving 'remarkable results'. Even four years ago such trust between the police and the family of a murdered gang leader would have been completely 'unheard of'.
The Met and its black critics agree that the difference between then and now is the Macpherson Report. 'No Macpherson: no Trident,' said Jasper. 'No Macpherson: no co-operation.' Because the police accepted that they could be in the wrong, people who lived in fear are coming forward. Jasper isn't a bug-eyed optimist. The disproportionate stopping and searching of young black men continues to alienate tens of thousands. Nevertheless he cheerfully quotes Martin Luther King: 'We're not where we want to be, but thank God we're not where we used to be.'
Ghaffur says that as a result of Macpherson the Met now has officers who liaise with the families of victims, independent panels of 'critical friends' and joint appeals from the police and black community for witnesses to come forward. Conservatives can describe these wet tactics as 'political correctness gone mad'. But, as so often, the problem with conservatives is that they are not conservative enough. What the Met is trying to do is what the British police at its best has always tried to do: police with consent.
In the years since the Macpherson Report was published, Sir William, that great exemplar of insane political correctness, has sat in his fifteenth-century castle in Perthshire and endured hate mail and regular press assaults on his reputation. The only one that got to him was a claim in the Telegraph that he had 'blood on his hands' because he had stopped officers catching black criminals by insisting the police took racism seriously. The truth is the precise opposite. He'd have had blood on his hands if he'd stayed silent.
