There are few more mundane tasks than waiting for a bus. It's dull, necessary but ought to be safe.

So what kind of a society is it in which a black man is knifed to death at a bus stop, simply because he is black, and in which the police fail to find the killers, mainly because the victim is black?

When I asked a cross-section of people in Eltham who killed Stephen Lawrence, it seemed the only ones there who have been unable to say, are the police.

Poster appealing for witnesses

Why the court case failed

There were witnesses, and local people left lists of names in prominent places; a page from a note-book tucked under a car windscreen-wiper; an entry in a pupil's diary at a local secondary school, 'a black boy was killed near us last night and these are the people who did it ...

Of course the police have to prove who commits crimes and the case did go to court but failed.

With the Macpherson report the reason why it failed, we now know, is largely because the Eltham police essentially did not want to solve the murder, so they ignored evidence and witnesses, and didn't bother with other basic procedures.

Duwayne Brooks - witness to Stephen's murder

Stephen Lawrence's best friend, Duwayne Brooks, who was with him on that fateful night, classically in the wrong place at the wrong time, still blames himself for deciding they return from Stephen's uncle's house, not in Eltham, to their home district, again not in Eltham, via that bus stop.

Duwayne Brooks, who is black, pleaded with the police when they arrived to get emergency help for Stephen as he bled to death, and ended up pleading with the police to stop implying that he had killed Stephen.

Mr Brooks says they assumed because he is black, that he could well have been the killer.

Suburban deprivation

Eltham is a typical London suburb, its near total lack of aesthetic appeal was not helped by the re-arrangement of much of this part of the city by the German air force in the second world war.

There is one place of historical beauty there, Henry the Eighth's Eltham Palace, but it is -- to quote Shakespeare - a jewel in a toad's head -- and it doesn't distract many of the people from, what seems to be, their main activity: shopping in the high street; an ugly road defaced in the nineteen fifties and sixties by the appallingly bad taste of architects and urban planners.

Eltham is part of a band of suburbs which rings London, it's a struggle, whichever means of transport you take, to reach the cultural heart of the capital, and an equal struggle out, to what passes for countryside in this overcrowded bottom right-hand corner of Britain. I should know: I live nearby.

At the time of the murder the Lawrence Five were living in housing estates close to the bus stop. Grey places, but not blighted: Eltham is not inner city. And it has far fewer black residents than surrounding areas.

These are close-knit communities, family ties are tight, relatives are often neighbours; people are conservative. Work, often in short supply, is usually provided by the better-to-do professionals nearer central London who need builders and other tradesmen.

Is everyone racist?

The Macpherson Report begs the bigger questions; what produces a racist killer, and, the other side of the coin - how far does a society create a police force in its own image.

Metropolitan police under scrutiny

These are big questions: are we all capable of being racist killers or racist policemen? I can understand the frustrations of growing up in a place like Eltham, but how does that lead to the cold-blooded killing of a passer-by?

What I can't begin to understand is how any policeman, in London or elsewhere, can decide to allow a man to die without justice rather than stand up for the innocent against evil.