Paul Condon, who led London's Metropolitan Police from 1993 to 2000, has told a public inquiry that the covert surveillance of Stephen Lawrence's family by undercover officers constituted institutional racism. The spycops inquiry (a long-running public examination of decades of misconduct by undercover police units) heard that officers from the Special Demonstration Squad monitored Lawrence's parents, Doreen and Neville, as they campaigned for a proper investigation into the 1993 racist murder of their son, even reporting on the couple's marital separation to superiors. Condon, now a member of the House of Lords, also apologised for wider abuses by the unit, which spent 40 years infiltrating political groups and committed what he called "horrendous" wrongdoing, placing primary blame on the Metropolitan Police's systemic failure to supervise the squad rather than on individual officers alone.