By Mark daly

The first time I met Stephen Lawrence’s mother, Doreen, she said very little.

Accompanied by her friend and lawyer, Imran Khan, she had arrived at our editing suite to watch a BBC documentary that followed my time spent undercover as a police recruit.

This was 10 years after her son was murdered and four years after Sir William Macpherson blamed the Metropolitan Police’s failure to properly investigate his death on “institutional racism”.

Before starting my investigation at police college, I had been working hard to prepare my cover, nervous about making a mistake that might jeopardise months of preparation.

Perhaps that was why I was so shocked by the racism, unprepared for the explicit, brutal prejudice, I recorded, virtually from my first day. Worse, this awful racism came not from hardened officers who had patrolled the streets for years but from the newest recruits.

It seemed incredible to me that they thought they should be police officers. It seemed even more incredible that the police agreed.

There were more than 100 of us at the National Police Tra i n i n g Ce n t re at Bruche , Warrington, assembled from forces all over the north of England and Wales.

It was 15 weeks of residential basic training. We were living in each others’ pockets, and I was kitted out with secret cameras.

The death of Stephen Lawrence was central to race relations training given to the recruits. The police service did not want to repeat those mistakes although ome of my fellow recruits seemed less concerned.

Constable Robert Pulling, for example, told me: “He f****** deserved it and his mum and dad are a f****** pair of spongers, and have sponged everything they could get their hands on.

“The Macpherson Report…a kick in the b******* for any white man, that was.”

A week before The Secret Policeman was broadcast in 2003, we arranged to show it to Mrs Lawrence.

I was nervous, unsure of her reaction, knowing her only from a public image of a steely, frank woman, determined to see justice for her son and fully reveal the Met’s failures and the reasons for those failures.

She watched the programme quietly, saying little. When it was over, she said just five words: “It’s just like we thought.”

She did not seem shocked. She seemed the opposite of shocked and, over the years, Doreen Lawrence has found there is little left to shock her.

Sunday will mark the 25th anniversary of her son’s murder on 22 April 1993. He was stabbed to death in an unprovoked racist attack by a pack of white youths in London. It would be the most significant murder case in the Met’s history.

Put simply, race relations in the UK fall into two categories: before and after Lawrence. Despite knowing, within 24 hours, the names and addresses of the five men widely suspected of the murder, police failed to make arrests for two weeks, losing the opportunity to capture crucial forensic evidence.

The suspects arrogantly strutted their way through a failed prosecution and an inquest into Stephen’s death, laughing at justice, goading protesters, humiliating the police and piling agony on Stephen’s heartbroken parents, Doreen and Neville.

They would be called out, however, in an unforgettable front page in the Daily Mail simply headlined: “Murderers. The Mail accuses these men of killing. If we are wrong, let them sue us.”

A landmark public inquiry followed, led by Sir William Macpherson, who, in 1999, would conclude that the police failures were not just down to inadequacy.

Simply put, Stephen’s murder was not investigated properly because he was black. Almost overnight, the term “institutional racism” became a phrase synonymous with the Met.

The Macpherson Report would be the starting point for my first involvement in the Lawrence case in late 2001.

At that point I was a newspaper journalist in Scotland but had been invited to join the BBC’S investigations unit to join a secret project – going undercover in the police to expose racism.

The BBC had spent years preparing the groundwork for this deep-cover operation. I was terrified I would not be up to it. But I did my best to prepare. And Lawrence was as its core. The result was the Secret Policeman in 2003, a film that provoked

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Incredibly, they thought they were suitable. Incredibly, the police agreed