In early 2003, in my then home of South London, an incoming council leadership set up an independent panel to investigate events that had happened around five years earlier at a council unit catering for vulnerable mostly elderly people. In existence only from 1997 to 2001, this was an emergency response service that clients could call 24/7 via a pendant if they got into trouble at home.
I was interested at the time, perversely you might think, in institutional failure, having regularly passed but never attended the inquiry into teenager Stephen Lawrence’s racist murder of 1993, which held its public hearings at Hannibal House in candy-pink Elephant & Castle in 1998. That inquiry found that Scotland Yard was ‘institutionally racist’, “namely that police prejudice against black people was so ingrained that it contributed to allowing racist murderers to get away with their crime.” (Vikram Dodd, The Guardian, February 18, 2000).
Now, at least in South London everybody knew that about the police at the time, but wouldn’t necessarily believe that similar was true about one of the more progressive councils in London and especially not within a unit whose laudable purpose was to provide a safety net for elderly people with onsetting difficulties but still living their life alone in their respective homes. What could possibly go wrong?
