TheKeyAuthor's Blog - Posts Tagged "smear"

Twenty years later, the truth is coming out about the Stephen Lawrence murder investigation: undercover officer Peter Francis says he was instructed in 1993 to find information that could discredit the family and anti-racism campaigners.
The police were heavily criticized over the investigation, so their response was classic: they tried to protect their image and defuse widespread public tension by smearing both the victim's family, and anyone promoting related issues that reflected badly on the Establishment and had the potential to further inflame a united public.

Extracts from the article:

Francis ... had posed as an anti-racism campaigner in a hunt for "disinformation" to use against those criticising the police.
He said the Metropolitan Police were concerned the reaction to the Lawrence murder might result in rioting similar to that following the beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles.
he came under pressure to find "any intelligence that could have smeared the campaign"
the aim of his operation was to ensure that the public "did not have as much sympathy for the Stephen Lawrence campaign" and to persuade "the media to start maybe tarring the campaign".
Doreen Lawrence [mother, campaigner and writer] said... "It just makes me really, really angry that all of this has been going on and all the time trying to undermine us as a family."

If you have a quick look at the Fact Sheet, you can see that the authorities basically did something similar to the McCanns & myself. If the public had found out about my case at that time, there may well have been a public reaction. I wasn't smeared because nobody knew anything about my case, so they covered it up instead. And in my book I wrote: "Although the McCanns couldn't answer back, a number of damaging leaks from the police investigation did end up in the Press that smeared them."

The truth is, the authorities pursue self-interests in direct violation of their duty to the public even if it hinders justice or causes immense damage to the victims of serious crime.