Henry Nowak's Murder and the Politics of Narrative

What happens when facts become secondary to political narratives

Photo by Max Harlynking on Unsplash

(Audio version here)

On Monday, 23-year-old Vikrum Digwa was given a life sentence with a minimum of 21 years for the murder of 18-year-old Henry Nowak. Since then, there have been many, many think pieces on the broader significance of this horrible crime.

It is unsurprising that the brutal and senseless murder of such a young man would arouse so much anger and disgust. It was also bound to be read through the lens of the culture wars. Henry’s killer was the son of migrants from India and a member of a minority religion. He had made false claims of racism against his victim and the police, accepting that Henry was the aggressor and not believing he had been stabbed, pinned down and handcuffed a dying youth. This is a toxic mix of characteristics bound to incite existing anger about immigration, violent crime, “woke” concepts of racism which hold that only white people can be guilty of it and potential police bias.

Some arguments along these lines have been serious, thoughtful and reasonable and addressed issues of cultural clashes, knife crime and the hampering of the police by racially relative guidelines. Others, however, have sought to read this incident through the lens of pre-existing cultural narratives in ways that simply do not work. The serious issues surrounding this case will be better addressed if people refrain from doing this.

Three primary bad arguments stand out to me on perusing online debate. They hold that this murder occurred because of immigration policies that allowed Indian Sikhs into the country, that allowing Sikh ceremonial daggers to be carried encourages such crimes from this particular group, or that Henry was failed by police having been ideologically trained to believe the white youth must be the perpetrator. Let’s look at those:

1) “If we had not let Sikhs into the country in the first place, this crime would not have happened.”

This claim is literally true in this particular case. Vikrum Digwa’s parents were migrants from India and the family is Sikh. However, the significance of this is generally expanded to a claim that the murder occurred because Digwa was a Sikh and that immigration policies that allowed Sikhs in are to blame for increased violent crime. This relies on a fundamental misunderstanding of crime per capita.

Confusion over the concept of per capita is common and it seems to be counterintuitive to people to think this way. While religion is not recorded in crime records, it is in prison populations which represent the most serious crimes. Sikhs are underrepresented in serious crime. If British Sikhs made up the entire population, serious crime would be about 20% lower than it is now. This may even be too low an estimate of the gap. Because the Sikh population is younger than the general population which increases prevalence of crime and because they are more likely to be city-dwellers which also has this effect, we would expect this to elevate serious crime rates among the group. This is not the case.

Sikhs are not a problem population for UK law and order, statistically speaking. Sikh communities generally show high levels of educational attainment, employment, politeness and law-abiding behaviour. Sikh women have criticised an honour culture which exists within some Sikh communities and denies them the choice and freedom of men. This is something that can and should be criticised but is a different issue to that of violent crime impacting broader society and culture. Sikhs are particularly likely to object to aggression and violence on religious grounds regarding this as Krodh - anger, rage - and Digwa had, in fact, been barred from his temple for aggressive behaviour. Sikh leaders condemned his violence.

2) Kirpans are the problem! Why are Sikhs permitted to carry knives when nobody else is?

This is a somewhat better question. It can be persuasively argued that there should be no religious exemption for carrying knives. I would support this argument and consistently object to religious deeply held beliefs being granted a privileged status over non-religious deeply held beliefs. If we support knife bans, we should do consistently.

Fortunately, the kirpan is a ceremonial object and not generally used for cutting anything. It is worn as a reminder against the five enemies of Sikhism including Krodh and using it as an offensive weapon is strictly taboo and prevents it from being a kirpan. Therefore, it does not need to be sharp. For this reason, some countries, communities and individuals already wear a blunt kirpan or one that is welded into its sheath for reasons of personal safety and compliance with laws. This is surely a satisfactory solution to balance religion freedom with universally applicable knife laws.

Sikhs have argued since the trial that the blade used by Digwa was not a traditional kirpan even though he claimed that it was. The association of the ceremonial object with knife crime is simply not supported by evidence and most of the rhetoric around it appears to be an attempt to paint Sikhs as inherently prone to engaging in violence because this item is part of their religious practice. Statistics do not support this.

3) Henry was failed because police were ideologically motivated or trained to believe claims of racism and see the white youth as aggressor.

This is not entirely lacking in plausibility. We know that police failed to act to protect white (and Sikh) girls against sexual predators in Rotherham because the perpetrators were Muslim and they were afraid of being suspected of racism or ‘Islamophobia.’ Good arguments can and should be made against ideological “anti-racist” policies and training or policies which seem to sanction culturally or ethnically relative policing. These are already under review following the murder of Henry Nowak.

It can also be convincingly argued that Vikrum Digwa and possibly his family attempted to use the cultural power of claiming racism to deflect from his violence because the police are trained to be particularly receptive to this and to intimidate them out of challenging it. To this extent, the cultural prominence and prestige of Critical Social Justice ‘anti-racist’ theories could potentially be used to hinder the investigation and give more credence to the account of the individual of racial minority.

However, it is not clear that this is what happened. The ideological explanation is plausible enough to investigate but not established by the evidence currently available. The police made a terrible misjudgement in not checking Henry’s chest after he said he had been stabbed and could not breathe. But the extent to which this was a result of a bias towards uncritically accepting claims of racism leading to automatically blaming the white youth or simple confirmation bias due to responding to a particular crime report has yet to be discovered. The police responded to a call about a racially motivated attack and found a family from a community underrepresented in violent crime confirming this report and holding upright a young man whose bleeding was internal and whose semi-comatose state was not immediately distinguishable from being drunk.

We cannot know that the police would have acted differently if the races of the individuals had been reversed or if the false accusation of an attack had not been claimed to have been motivated by racism. Dismissing Henry’s claim of having been stabbed with “I don’t think you have, mate” even while telling the murderer’s family that they had to take this seriously was stupid. Nevertheless, Hanlon’s Razor - Do not attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity - can be argued to apply here.

It is yet to be determined if the police’s terrible misjudgement was influenced by ideologically biased training around race or religion or whether it was purely error based on uncritically assuming the truth of the initial report and being met by a respectable-looking family. Either way, investigations need to be done to prevent such a thing from happening again. It would not have saved poor Henry if the police had believed him immediately but it would have prevented him from spending his last conscious moments in handcuffs.

In our deeply polarised times, there is a temptation after a horrific crime or tragic death for people to read it as confirmation of whatever social or political theory they already hold. The result is often that the facts of the case become secondary to the narrative people are committed to. We saw this very clearly with many adherents to the Black Lives Matter movement.when individual incidents were frequently treated as proof of sweeping theories about race and policing. We would do better not to emulate this.

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