A senior police officer who has been criticised for an "inappropriate" meeting he held with a undercover "spy" attached to the family of murdered Stephen Lawrence was Harrow's former borough commander, the Observer can reveal.
Commander Richard Walton, who served as the borough's top cop from April 2007 to July 2009 and is now head of Counter Terrorism Command, was criticised in the findings of The Stephen Lawrence Independent Review into allegations of corruption in the original police investigation of the murder of Stephen Lawrence and the role of undercover policing in the case.
Black teenager Stephen, 18, was stabbed to death in Eltham, south-east London, in 1993 and two white men - Gary Dobson and David Norris - were sentenced to life imprisonment in 2012 for the racially-motivated fatal attack.
The report of the review, led by specialist fraud and crime barrister Mark Ellison QC, confirms that in mid-August 1998 ex-Special Branch officer Mr Walton, who was then an Acting Detective Inspector, had been seconded to the Metropolitan Police's Lawrence Review Team busy drafting the force's repsonse to The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry, the public inquiry led by Sir William Macpherson into the matters arising from the killing.
The findings criticise as "wrong-headed and inappropriate" a meeting between Mr Walton and an undercover police officer, known only as N81, who had been deployed to infiltrate one of the groups seeking to influence Stephen's family.
"We have found Mr Walton’s position around this meeting less than straightforward to establish and somewhat troubling," it said.
"It is difficult for us to discern precisely what N81 conveyed to DI Walton as regards N81’s proximity to the Lawrence family camp and the influence that N81’s group had achieved upon it.
"It seems to us that in arranging this meeting, the SDS (Special Demonstration Squad) side, who knew most of the detail about what N81 had reported back, were certainly not doing so on the basis that there were any boundaries as to what N81 could and could not discuss with DI Walton."
Mr Walton told the inquiry that, contrary to what he had first agreed, he was not working on the force's submission to The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry but in fact had been assessing the impact of the Inquiry on community relations as part of his new role in the Racial and Violent Crime Task Force.
The Ellison Review report says: "Mr Walton has maintained throughout, however, and we accept, that the meeting was not his idea, but a request from a more senior officer in the SDS.
"We also accept that he agreed to the meeting without any detailed knowledge of the actual role and intelligence gathered by the undercover officer.
"It follows that we accept that Mr Walton may well have simply taken up the invitation without realising that he was going to meet an undercover officer who was positioned close to the Lawrence family campaign."
Home secretary Teresa May will now consider her response to the findings.
In a statement, the Metropolitan Police said: "As we have only just received a copy of his report, it would be highly inappropriate to comment upon it until we have taken the time to fully read, understand and assess its content.
"His report considers some very serious issues that whilst in the main are historical, could have a negative impact on confidence in modern day policing."
