Thank you, Helen, for being a calm voice of reason. You make some very good points here, and I particularly applaud your defense of the Sikhs in general. They too often get lumped in with a broader, more problematic group.
It seems that he had remained alive and conscious for about an hour after the stabbing, but then lost consciousness and died about 3 mins after the police arrived. It could well be that the police actions, roughly pulling his arms behind his back and literally dragging him around to do this, greatly exacerbated the bleeding into the lung (which then killed him). There was no reason to handcuff him (he was not posing a threat), and without that rough handling the medics might have saved him.
I agree with every argument in this article, save one. You seem to have stated as fact that regardless of the actions of police, Henry's life would have ended that evening. You cannot know that. I realize that he became unresponsive just a few minutes after their arrival, but we do not know whether or not he could have been revived or prevented from entering that state if rushed to the nearest emergency room rather than being jostled, mocked, and handcuffed.
Stab wound with a knife but no obvious bleeding? That sounds very strange. Maybe if it was an ice pick (small wound channel). I would think the front of his shirt would be covered with blood. It does sound like the police could have handled it a lot better. Anyway - your government will get it sorted out.
Good article, good arguments. Were there any witnesses to this crime. Any reports on what started the conflict?
I strongly agree with your view against religious exemptions for carrying knives.
As for the anti-bias training of police, there may be something there. I think it is best to keep it simple - just tell the police "Don't be a bigot and try to de-escalate where possible". We need culturally neutral policies. Equal protection under the law.
The police receive BIAS training, not anti bias. The entire point is that the training ORDERS the police to be racist against whites in order to acheive equal outcomes for white and black. If people are not racist against whites then whites get better outcomes, so we have to be racist to drag whites down and get the communist evil that is equity.
It is absolutely depressing beyond belief that we have someone who should be in the vanguard (her history suggests she "gets it") does not recognise what I thought she opposes even when it is right in front of her in black and white)
It sounds as though, because you know me to have opposed anti-racist unconscious bias training (including advising people in the emergency services as I discuss in my last book), you expect me to assert it to be the causal factor of police not believing Henry to have been stabbed, even though there is, as yet, insufficient evidence to conclude this. I think it’s important to keep a distinction between “This is a problem that exists” and “Every bad thing that happens must be caused by this problem.” That’s the difference between addressing social problems as they are & reading everything through a political narrative. This piece is about the importance of not doing that.
Also, to be clear... the truth is that I believe that you understand the problems of woke and DEI and the need to destroy them.
As such I would expect you to be somewhat unconcerned with the precise details of exactly what caused this particular death, and incredibly concerned with how to use the death to push your own objectively correct and morally superior narrative... because whether or not the police caused his death to any extent at all we know for a cold hard fact that police policies could have lead to his death, and if they carry on indefinitely will cause future deaths.
No-one is saying that every white death with police involvement is caused by police officers being racist against whites because they are told to be racist. Plenty of people are rightfully saying "the policy is racist and will kill, and it looks a lot like it might have killed in this case... but even if it didn;t it could have been the cause which is why opposing racism is the key thing here."
I think that the key thing is destroying every last bit of DEI / equity / woke, and if the facts of the murder suggest a narrative that can be used to push back against bad policies and help bring about better policies then that narrative should be pushed, whether that narrative is true in this case or not. Not least because it is almost certainly impossible to ever know for sure the extent to which racist police policies caused or contributed to his death.
I have no idea whether he could have been saved had the vile murderer called for an ambulance immediately, or if the police had believed him when he said he had been stabbed. All I know is that the police are taught to be racist towards white people, and that in this case they failed to make the correct decisions in a way that suggests that they may have listened to the training that taught them to be racist.
Bad policies exist. They could be predicted to cause a death like this. A death like this happened.
I am 100% comfortable with using the death to create a political narrative which can be used to destroy something that does or will cause similar deaths even if on this occasion the poor victim might have died anyway. Even if the narrative on this occasion would be determined to be false if an all-powerful deity were to give the definitive answer into exactly who / what contributed to the death.
The priority is to end bad policy, not not try to get an impossibly hard to get definitive answer as to the extent to which the bad policy killed on this occasion.
Thanks, Helen, for a calm and dispassionate look at this tragic case. I think there’s more that deserves to be said about the entire “knife crime” issue, but that’s not the central topic here.
I didn't know what really happened until I read the entirety of your article. At first, I thought you were being overly academic. Thanks to the headlines and outrage I thought the cops responded to a fight between two individuals and handcuffed the one obviously stabbed and lying on the ground when the other claimed racism. I had that in my head the entire time reading your article. A summary at the top would have been useful! Thank you for clearing up the narrative.
Thanks for your very reasonable essay. A minor quibble: I'm not sure you know that the victim couldn't be saved. I haven't seen any medical reports, but penetrating chest wounds often compromise lung function, and if that was the cause of death (as suggested by Nowak's words), simple first-aid measures might possibly have saved him.
I certainly don't know. If (for example) his aorta or pulmonary artery was severed, very unlikely. But I doubt he'd remain conscious long enough to speak to police in that case. If the cause of death was loss of lung function secondary to an open chest cavity, probably yes. Stab wounds are dirty, and it probably would require an expert opinion after autopsy to determine.
I'm making a big assumption here, but if his injury had been assessed sooner, inserting a chest tube for drainage might have saved him. Or perhaps a chest seal dressing. Medical examiners will find out.
The ruling from the court stated that he could not be saved, although I understand this is something that is being disputed by some people who have vested interests and didn't examine the body first-hand.
Sure, but now we're in conspiracy territory where a cover-up that includes the pathologist and Coroner is involved. We can always claim that such a thing has happened and that authorities are lying to us but without evidence to suggest so, this is an unfalsifiable claim. Anti-racist activists could claim that Nowak had racially attacked Digwa and the courts were covering that up. We have to assess things based on the evidence we have, not what could be true if there is an ideologically-motivated conspiracy.
I would agree if this was a typical inquiry, but this is a case where the police, who work with the medical examiner and who work with prosecutors and judges, are involved in a potential scandal that has serious political implications. The idea that in cases like this, the public should ignore those obvious conflicts of interest and any talk of public servants being potentially compromised should be brushed aside as conspiracy theory seems a tad myopic.
No evidence of conspiracy. Vested interests maybe - lots of money involved. I'm sure the police will be sued. I agree with you. People should not jump to conclusions with no evidence. We see that way too often. US mainstream media gets that wrong quite often. Not sure about the UK.
Of course judges aren’t perfect and have institutional biases but what would be the issue in this case when the ruling was based on testimony of the medical examiner? You can read the ruling online.
I don't know of course but I read that it took him an hour to die? If that's correct I'd guess it could have been possible to save him. It's hard for me to know where to find accurate information about an incident with this much political salience
Yes I have seen a report from a Polish medic who asserted that if an ambulance had been called and he had got to the hospital which was literally close by he could actually have been saved.
I appreciate your analysis. However, the key issue - to me, at least - is the difference in the societal and political responses to what happened here and what happened in 2020.
One case warranted protests and murals; one did not. Resolving that fact is our greatest challenge.
Comparisons to George Floyd are spurious. These are both terrible cases, but the murder of a suspect in a minor crime by a police officer in a country with a long history of racial prejudice is simply very different from the murder of one civilian by another followed a mistake made by police in the heat of the moment.
It's great to see a post that attempts to lay out the facts, although the "anti-woke" are increasingly becoming unhinged if not positively cheering for racial civil war to break out.
Both countries have long histories of racial prejudice. Both cases involve the police screwing up. In the Floyd case, the carotid restraint was not necessary and likely led to his death per the medical examiner’s report. Floyd did have many serious co-morbidities.
The police get a call about a racially motivated attack. They arrive and see a "minority" family yelling about how an 18 year old white boy lying in a crumbled heap on the ground was being racist towards them. The 18 year old white boy says, in a tone that is barely audible, that he has been stabbed and can't breathe. The police don't take him seriously, and spend the next minutes documenting all the lies told by the Sikh about how racist this white boy is. The police are certain that the white boy is a racist - they have zero doubts about the Sikh's story and believe the white boy to be lying about being stabbed, without inspecting his body.
But because we can't read the minds of the police officers, we should assume that their actions were not motivated by racism? The investigation will never reveal the true ideological lens of the police officers. They can always lie and hide their racism, and the ones investigating them are racist too anyway.
It's time to acknowledge that we no longer live in a liberal society. The factions who have power and influence in the UK and US reject liberalism, and our political institutions, such as the police departments, are no longer guided by liberal values.
Without evidence of racism, yes, we should not conclude that the police are motivated by racism.
Maybe the reason police stop and search black people so much more than white people is because they are racist against black people, but, maybe in a specific given case, their experience tells them that this particular black guy has the air of youths they have arrested in that area many times for carrying knives or drugs.
Maybe the reason the police did not believe Henry Nowak that he’d been stabbed but had instead committed a racist attack was because they are racist against white people but maybe it was because what they’d been called to was a report of a racist attack and their experience does not include families of Sikhs concealing knife crime, he was bleeding internally and they assumed he was drunk.
Is it such a radical suggestion to think we should probably not assume everything is explained by racism unless there is evidence that it is? When did racial identity politics become the lens through which we should automatically read everything? Why is it that everybody who does this recognises what a flawed epistemology it is when used by people in the interests of a group that is not their own?
I'm going to ignore the issues with this analogy you've made because you probably could have picked a better analogy.
If this event occurred in a vacuum then I would agree with you that we shouldn't assume it was motivated by racism. But here are some facts:
- Police are taught that part of their jobs is fighting racism (meaning the racism of whites against brown people)
- There is a political narrative that dominates political institutions which frames white people as racist, evil colonizers, and brown people as victims.
- There was no evidence that Henry Nowak was racist, or had done anything racist, except for Dogwa's unsubstantiated claims.
So why did the police immediately believe Dogwa with complete confidence? They had no real evidence, but it fit their ideological priors. Those priors are that white people are racist and evil. And those priors are themselves racist - they are not based in any kind of rational analysis.
I more or less agree with you, Helen, in fact I made the same point on social media the day before your post, but racism does seem to me the most likely explanation, because the alternative - that the police are simply so incompetent that a man saying he'd been stabbed was not something they felt they needed to take seriously - seems implausible. "It was dark", "they thought he was drunk" - don't give me that. Police routinely attend incidents in the dark, and involving people who are drunk or on drugs, and it is their job to ascertain what has happened even in circumstances as impossible as nighttime.
Well, they didn't take it seriously. It can't be that they thought it was credible but didn't care because he was white. The seriousness would reveal itself.
Well, it could, I suppose and that’s what the woke argue when it is the other way round. That police automatically believe white people and not black people. We can’t know if they’d have found it more credible if a black or brown person was saying he’d been stabbed and a white family was saying he’d attacked one of them and that wasn’t true.
The detail about Digwa having already been barred from his own temple for aggressive behaviour is doing a lot of unreported work here. The Sikh community hadn't missed who he was — they'd already identified and distanced themselves from him. That matters both for the per capita argument and for the broader narrative, because it collapses the idea that this crime reflects something about a community rather than something about an individual with a documented history of violence.
The Hanlon's Razor section is doing the most important work in the piece, and I'd push it one step further. Even if we accept stupidity over malice as the explanation — and I think that's probably right — stupidity doesn't emerge from nowhere. If training creates reflexive credulity around racism claims, and that credulity shaped how those officers processed the scene, then the training is still the proximate cause even without a single officer consciously thinking 'white kid, ethnic family, therefore the white kid is the aggressor.' Structural effects don't require conscious intent. That's actually what makes them structural.
The hardest part of your piece — and you're right to hold the line here — is insisting that the ideological explanation for the police failure remains unestablished rather than confirmed. It's plausible enough to investigate seriously, which the IOPC is now doing. But 'plausible' and 'proven' are different things, and the speed with which the political class on both sides moved from one to the other tells you more about the culture war dynamics than about what actually happened on that street in Southampton.
"Do not attribute things to malicious policies that we know exist because we have all clearly seen and read them, when it is much more likely that the DEI appointed police are stupid. It is clearly entirely unreasonable to assume stupid police officers appointed on a tick box equity driven agenda do what they do because they are following the rules in place to force them to behave in a racist anti-white manner - much more likely that it is all down to their stupidity"
As ever Helen, this is a good argument. You are inclined to give the police the benefit of the doubt, due to Hanlon’s Razor. I understand that, but I won't do that because I think it is implausible that all 4 police officers who initially attended the incident made the same catastrophic accidental error by chance. When 4 police officers by chance make the same error it strikes me as more likely that a systemic problem is at work - and indeed that was an argument at the George Floyd killing (none of the other police officers intervened to prevent Chauvin killing him).
Finally, it's worth noting that heart-stab victims have a 90% survival rate if they reach hospital. Clearly, that figure is affected by survivor bias, but it shows that Henry's death, while always likely, *cannot* be assumed inevitable. Indeed, he had already survived for a surprisingly long time when the police arrived.
I don’t think there being four of them makes it more probable the cause was racism. I think it’s more unlikely that all four of them would have held the same uncommon ideological bias than that they’d all assume the initial report to be true. “Drunk” is almost certainly a much more common reason they come across someone lying slumped and confused than “stabbed and bleeding internally.”
Did you not see the video? They handcuffed him for fear he could become violent but laid him on his side in the recovery position with one officer sitting by his head watching his face and saying “I think he’s going to vomit” and being ready to help him if he did.
It was absurd for the police to believe that someone who literally hadn't moved since they arrived was about to become violent, and I have no doubt the police investigation will be very clear (and very critical) on this. It's a bit more believable that he might have been an escape risk, if he was executing a brilliant "fool then and then run" plan, but that wouldn't explain why he hadn't run *before* the police arrived because the family wasn't restraining him when the police arrived. The police appear to have given no serious thought to exactly how and why this allegedly violent attacker had remained unrestrained on site waiting 15min-ish for them.
You might believe that you would instantly recognise that a slumped slurring figure was stabbed rather than drunk and so unlikely to lash out immediately but I’m not. I still cross the road. It’s probably policy to handcuff people who have been reported for a violent assault. I don’t know if that’s a good precaution or not. I’m just sceptical of people confidently asserting that the reason for it is racism and that they’d not have done that if the guy accused of assault and appearing drunk had been black or brown. I’m consistently skeptical of this, btw. Activists also like to claim that police handcuffing black men are doing so because of racism and that this is the reason they get stopped and searched so much more. There was also the undercover panorama documentary which infiltrated the police and filmed a lot of negative racist assumptions about black and brown people.
I think there is a rather complicated mix of racial bias in the police force and that anti-black and brown bias still exists and is clumsily overcompensated for with policies and training that make police neurotic about accusations of racism. Consequently, there is evidence to support accusations of racist bias against minorities and majorities. I think the people who claim that any mistreatment or misjudgment of an individual is explained by racism when it’s the kind they’re concerned about but not when it’s the other kind are not helping. We need to look at cases individually.
The speech policing by police is also not cut and dried in one ideological direction. We had a pro-Palestine protestor prosecuted for carrying a sign calling Sunak a “coconut” and a female footballer for saying police were stupid because they are white. It’s a mess and ideological commitments are certainly part of it and a part that must be addressed. I’ve been doing this for a decade. Race-based grievance narratives don’t help.
This new BBC report is also worth a read - the BBC have obtained film the police had refused to release:
Watch Henry Nowak's killer repeatedly lie to police
It also backs an assertion by the Nowak family that Digwa was "never handcuffed", as Henry was while he lay dying. The contrast in the men's treatment by Hampshire police was described as "unbearable" by the family.
The video ends before Digwa is put in a police van, but Hampshire police confirmed to the BBC that he was "never handcuffed", just as the Nowak family first disclosed after his sentencing. In a statement, Mark Nowak said: "He was never handcuffed at all and as Vickrum Digwa himself told the court, whilst under arrest for Henry's murder, police even took him to the kitchen so he could choose his food."
Hampshire police has also confirmed to BBC South that Digwa was "never handcuffed" during his four days in custody prior to being charged.
The public expect an explanation for why the police treated the two so very differently even after Digwa was arrested for murder. I expect the internal inquiry into this incident to be brutal.
"The Sunday Times can also reveal that the force wanted to portray Nowak as the aggressor in an official statement three days after his death, but changed their wording after outrage from his grieving family.
...
It was only after Nowak lost consciousness that police realised he was gravely injured, gave him first aid and finally arrested Digwa. They did not handcuff him.
...
Vickrum Digwa himself told the court, while under arrest for Henry’s murder, police even took him to the kitchen so he could choose his food.".
For the record, I don't think it was "racism" that influenced the police officers. For all 4 officers, something overrode their standard police first aid training - that they should immediately apply the DR ABC technique to any suspect or victim who says they can't breathe or have been injured.
I think it was their training that they should take "hate" crimes (i.e. typically offensive speech) more seriously and their training that they should try harder to believe ethnic minorities. This can also explain why - contrary to police policy - they handcuffed someone who was immobilised on the ground and very obviously not a threat of either violence or escaping.
You have more confidence in the effectiveness of anti-racist unconscious bias training than me and also more than the evidence warrants. My last book has a chapter covering research into the effects of this. It consistently shows that it makes no difference at all or makes people more racist.
What do you think it is that has turned the police into the most fervent enforcers of Social Justice ideology standards on speech and "power structures" in disputes if it is not their training? Do you think tens of thousands of officers in a notoriously conservative establishment organically and suddenly became hard-left advocates in the last decade? That's just not plausible. Even if the police had spent the last decade only recruiting humanities graduates (the ones chanting "defund the police", lol) it would not have changed the behaviour of historic staff this much.
Thank you, Helen, for being a calm voice of reason. You make some very good points here, and I particularly applaud your defense of the Sikhs in general. They too often get lumped in with a broader, more problematic group.
It seems that he had remained alive and conscious for about an hour after the stabbing, but then lost consciousness and died about 3 mins after the police arrived. It could well be that the police actions, roughly pulling his arms behind his back and literally dragging him around to do this, greatly exacerbated the bleeding into the lung (which then killed him). There was no reason to handcuff him (he was not posing a threat), and without that rough handling the medics might have saved him.
I agree with every argument in this article, save one. You seem to have stated as fact that regardless of the actions of police, Henry's life would have ended that evening. You cannot know that. I realize that he became unresponsive just a few minutes after their arrival, but we do not know whether or not he could have been revived or prevented from entering that state if rushed to the nearest emergency room rather than being jostled, mocked, and handcuffed.
Stab wound with a knife but no obvious bleeding? That sounds very strange. Maybe if it was an ice pick (small wound channel). I would think the front of his shirt would be covered with blood. It does sound like the police could have handled it a lot better. Anyway - your government will get it sorted out.
Good article, good arguments. Were there any witnesses to this crime. Any reports on what started the conflict?
I strongly agree with your view against religious exemptions for carrying knives.
As for the anti-bias training of police, there may be something there. I think it is best to keep it simple - just tell the police "Don't be a bigot and try to de-escalate where possible". We need culturally neutral policies. Equal protection under the law.
The police receive BIAS training, not anti bias. The entire point is that the training ORDERS the police to be racist against whites in order to acheive equal outcomes for white and black. If people are not racist against whites then whites get better outcomes, so we have to be racist to drag whites down and get the communist evil that is equity.
It is absolutely depressing beyond belief that we have someone who should be in the vanguard (her history suggests she "gets it") does not recognise what I thought she opposes even when it is right in front of her in black and white)
It sounds as though, because you know me to have opposed anti-racist unconscious bias training (including advising people in the emergency services as I discuss in my last book), you expect me to assert it to be the causal factor of police not believing Henry to have been stabbed, even though there is, as yet, insufficient evidence to conclude this. I think it’s important to keep a distinction between “This is a problem that exists” and “Every bad thing that happens must be caused by this problem.” That’s the difference between addressing social problems as they are & reading everything through a political narrative. This piece is about the importance of not doing that.
Also, to be clear... the truth is that I believe that you understand the problems of woke and DEI and the need to destroy them.
As such I would expect you to be somewhat unconcerned with the precise details of exactly what caused this particular death, and incredibly concerned with how to use the death to push your own objectively correct and morally superior narrative... because whether or not the police caused his death to any extent at all we know for a cold hard fact that police policies could have lead to his death, and if they carry on indefinitely will cause future deaths.
No-one is saying that every white death with police involvement is caused by police officers being racist against whites because they are told to be racist. Plenty of people are rightfully saying "the policy is racist and will kill, and it looks a lot like it might have killed in this case... but even if it didn;t it could have been the cause which is why opposing racism is the key thing here."
I think that the key thing is destroying every last bit of DEI / equity / woke, and if the facts of the murder suggest a narrative that can be used to push back against bad policies and help bring about better policies then that narrative should be pushed, whether that narrative is true in this case or not. Not least because it is almost certainly impossible to ever know for sure the extent to which racist police policies caused or contributed to his death.
I have no idea whether he could have been saved had the vile murderer called for an ambulance immediately, or if the police had believed him when he said he had been stabbed. All I know is that the police are taught to be racist towards white people, and that in this case they failed to make the correct decisions in a way that suggests that they may have listened to the training that taught them to be racist.
Bad policies exist. They could be predicted to cause a death like this. A death like this happened.
I am 100% comfortable with using the death to create a political narrative which can be used to destroy something that does or will cause similar deaths even if on this occasion the poor victim might have died anyway. Even if the narrative on this occasion would be determined to be false if an all-powerful deity were to give the definitive answer into exactly who / what contributed to the death.
The priority is to end bad policy, not not try to get an impossibly hard to get definitive answer as to the extent to which the bad policy killed on this occasion.
I appreciated hearing your reasonable perspective on this event, Helen.
Lovely piece!
Thanks, Helen, for a calm and dispassionate look at this tragic case. I think there’s more that deserves to be said about the entire “knife crime” issue, but that’s not the central topic here.
I didn't know what really happened until I read the entirety of your article. At first, I thought you were being overly academic. Thanks to the headlines and outrage I thought the cops responded to a fight between two individuals and handcuffed the one obviously stabbed and lying on the ground when the other claimed racism. I had that in my head the entire time reading your article. A summary at the top would have been useful! Thank you for clearing up the narrative.
This was really good. Thank you.
Thanks for your very reasonable essay. A minor quibble: I'm not sure you know that the victim couldn't be saved. I haven't seen any medical reports, but penetrating chest wounds often compromise lung function, and if that was the cause of death (as suggested by Nowak's words), simple first-aid measures might possibly have saved him.
Is this the case? Everything I have seen said that he could not have been saved.
I certainly don't know. If (for example) his aorta or pulmonary artery was severed, very unlikely. But I doubt he'd remain conscious long enough to speak to police in that case. If the cause of death was loss of lung function secondary to an open chest cavity, probably yes. Stab wounds are dirty, and it probably would require an expert opinion after autopsy to determine.
I'm making a big assumption here, but if his injury had been assessed sooner, inserting a chest tube for drainage might have saved him. Or perhaps a chest seal dressing. Medical examiners will find out.
It is the pathologists report which says not.
I see - well that covers that. Any report on cause of conflict?
The ruling from the court stated that he could not be saved, although I understand this is something that is being disputed by some people who have vested interests and didn't examine the body first-hand.
Your response seems to imply that the court doesn't have vested interests. They most certainly do.
Sure, but now we're in conspiracy territory where a cover-up that includes the pathologist and Coroner is involved. We can always claim that such a thing has happened and that authorities are lying to us but without evidence to suggest so, this is an unfalsifiable claim. Anti-racist activists could claim that Nowak had racially attacked Digwa and the courts were covering that up. We have to assess things based on the evidence we have, not what could be true if there is an ideologically-motivated conspiracy.
I would agree if this was a typical inquiry, but this is a case where the police, who work with the medical examiner and who work with prosecutors and judges, are involved in a potential scandal that has serious political implications. The idea that in cases like this, the public should ignore those obvious conflicts of interest and any talk of public servants being potentially compromised should be brushed aside as conspiracy theory seems a tad myopic.
No evidence of conspiracy. Vested interests maybe - lots of money involved. I'm sure the police will be sued. I agree with you. People should not jump to conclusions with no evidence. We see that way too often. US mainstream media gets that wrong quite often. Not sure about the UK.
Of course judges aren’t perfect and have institutional biases but what would be the issue in this case when the ruling was based on testimony of the medical examiner? You can read the ruling online.
I don't know of course but I read that it took him an hour to die? If that's correct I'd guess it could have been possible to save him. It's hard for me to know where to find accurate information about an incident with this much political salience
The pathologists' report said that the severed vein could not have been accessed and repaird.
That sounds reasonably definitive. Sorry to raise what appears to be an incorrect point, based on insufficient information.
Is the pathologist report public?
Yes I have seen a report from a Polish medic who asserted that if an ambulance had been called and he had got to the hospital which was literally close by he could actually have been saved.
I appreciate your analysis. However, the key issue - to me, at least - is the difference in the societal and political responses to what happened here and what happened in 2020.
One case warranted protests and murals; one did not. Resolving that fact is our greatest challenge.
Comparisons to George Floyd are spurious. These are both terrible cases, but the murder of a suspect in a minor crime by a police officer in a country with a long history of racial prejudice is simply very different from the murder of one civilian by another followed a mistake made by police in the heat of the moment.
It's great to see a post that attempts to lay out the facts, although the "anti-woke" are increasingly becoming unhinged if not positively cheering for racial civil war to break out.
Both countries have long histories of racial prejudice. Both cases involve the police screwing up. In the Floyd case, the carotid restraint was not necessary and likely led to his death per the medical examiner’s report. Floyd did have many serious co-morbidities.
I think the point is both cases were immediately jumped on by narrative seekers.
The police get a call about a racially motivated attack. They arrive and see a "minority" family yelling about how an 18 year old white boy lying in a crumbled heap on the ground was being racist towards them. The 18 year old white boy says, in a tone that is barely audible, that he has been stabbed and can't breathe. The police don't take him seriously, and spend the next minutes documenting all the lies told by the Sikh about how racist this white boy is. The police are certain that the white boy is a racist - they have zero doubts about the Sikh's story and believe the white boy to be lying about being stabbed, without inspecting his body.
But because we can't read the minds of the police officers, we should assume that their actions were not motivated by racism? The investigation will never reveal the true ideological lens of the police officers. They can always lie and hide their racism, and the ones investigating them are racist too anyway.
It's time to acknowledge that we no longer live in a liberal society. The factions who have power and influence in the UK and US reject liberalism, and our political institutions, such as the police departments, are no longer guided by liberal values.
Without evidence of racism, yes, we should not conclude that the police are motivated by racism.
Maybe the reason police stop and search black people so much more than white people is because they are racist against black people, but, maybe in a specific given case, their experience tells them that this particular black guy has the air of youths they have arrested in that area many times for carrying knives or drugs.
Maybe the reason the police did not believe Henry Nowak that he’d been stabbed but had instead committed a racist attack was because they are racist against white people but maybe it was because what they’d been called to was a report of a racist attack and their experience does not include families of Sikhs concealing knife crime, he was bleeding internally and they assumed he was drunk.
Is it such a radical suggestion to think we should probably not assume everything is explained by racism unless there is evidence that it is? When did racial identity politics become the lens through which we should automatically read everything? Why is it that everybody who does this recognises what a flawed epistemology it is when used by people in the interests of a group that is not their own?
I'm going to ignore the issues with this analogy you've made because you probably could have picked a better analogy.
If this event occurred in a vacuum then I would agree with you that we shouldn't assume it was motivated by racism. But here are some facts:
- Police are taught that part of their jobs is fighting racism (meaning the racism of whites against brown people)
- There is a political narrative that dominates political institutions which frames white people as racist, evil colonizers, and brown people as victims.
- There was no evidence that Henry Nowak was racist, or had done anything racist, except for Dogwa's unsubstantiated claims.
So why did the police immediately believe Dogwa with complete confidence? They had no real evidence, but it fit their ideological priors. Those priors are that white people are racist and evil. And those priors are themselves racist - they are not based in any kind of rational analysis.
I more or less agree with you, Helen, in fact I made the same point on social media the day before your post, but racism does seem to me the most likely explanation, because the alternative - that the police are simply so incompetent that a man saying he'd been stabbed was not something they felt they needed to take seriously - seems implausible. "It was dark", "they thought he was drunk" - don't give me that. Police routinely attend incidents in the dark, and involving people who are drunk or on drugs, and it is their job to ascertain what has happened even in circumstances as impossible as nighttime.
Well, they didn't take it seriously. It can't be that they thought it was credible but didn't care because he was white. The seriousness would reveal itself.
No, but it can be that they automatically disbelieved him, and believed Digwa, because of race.
Well, it could, I suppose and that’s what the woke argue when it is the other way round. That police automatically believe white people and not black people. We can’t know if they’d have found it more credible if a black or brown person was saying he’d been stabbed and a white family was saying he’d attacked one of them and that wasn’t true.
The detail about Digwa having already been barred from his own temple for aggressive behaviour is doing a lot of unreported work here. The Sikh community hadn't missed who he was — they'd already identified and distanced themselves from him. That matters both for the per capita argument and for the broader narrative, because it collapses the idea that this crime reflects something about a community rather than something about an individual with a documented history of violence.
The Hanlon's Razor section is doing the most important work in the piece, and I'd push it one step further. Even if we accept stupidity over malice as the explanation — and I think that's probably right — stupidity doesn't emerge from nowhere. If training creates reflexive credulity around racism claims, and that credulity shaped how those officers processed the scene, then the training is still the proximate cause even without a single officer consciously thinking 'white kid, ethnic family, therefore the white kid is the aggressor.' Structural effects don't require conscious intent. That's actually what makes them structural.
The hardest part of your piece — and you're right to hold the line here — is insisting that the ideological explanation for the police failure remains unestablished rather than confirmed. It's plausible enough to investigate seriously, which the IOPC is now doing. But 'plausible' and 'proven' are different things, and the speed with which the political class on both sides moved from one to the other tells you more about the culture war dynamics than about what actually happened on that street in Southampton.
"...the facts of the case become secondary to the narrative....." Over and over and over again.
@Helen Pluckrose
" Nevertheless, Hanlon’s Razor - Do not attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity - can be argued to apply here."
I assume that malice, malevolence, and mendacity apply to corporate and government entities regardless of competency or stupidity by actors.
"Do not attribute things to malicious policies that we know exist because we have all clearly seen and read them, when it is much more likely that the DEI appointed police are stupid. It is clearly entirely unreasonable to assume stupid police officers appointed on a tick box equity driven agenda do what they do because they are following the rules in place to force them to behave in a racist anti-white manner - much more likely that it is all down to their stupidity"
As ever Helen, this is a good argument. You are inclined to give the police the benefit of the doubt, due to Hanlon’s Razor. I understand that, but I won't do that because I think it is implausible that all 4 police officers who initially attended the incident made the same catastrophic accidental error by chance. When 4 police officers by chance make the same error it strikes me as more likely that a systemic problem is at work - and indeed that was an argument at the George Floyd killing (none of the other police officers intervened to prevent Chauvin killing him).
Finally, it's worth noting that heart-stab victims have a 90% survival rate if they reach hospital. Clearly, that figure is affected by survivor bias, but it shows that Henry's death, while always likely, *cannot* be assumed inevitable. Indeed, he had already survived for a surprisingly long time when the police arrived.
I don’t think there being four of them makes it more probable the cause was racism. I think it’s more unlikely that all four of them would have held the same uncommon ideological bias than that they’d all assume the initial report to be true. “Drunk” is almost certainly a much more common reason they come across someone lying slumped and confused than “stabbed and bleeding internally.”
PS If the police thought Nowak was very drunk then cuffing him was even worse, as they would know he was then at risk of choking on his own vomit.
Did you not see the video? They handcuffed him for fear he could become violent but laid him on his side in the recovery position with one officer sitting by his head watching his face and saying “I think he’s going to vomit” and being ready to help him if he did.
It was absurd for the police to believe that someone who literally hadn't moved since they arrived was about to become violent, and I have no doubt the police investigation will be very clear (and very critical) on this. It's a bit more believable that he might have been an escape risk, if he was executing a brilliant "fool then and then run" plan, but that wouldn't explain why he hadn't run *before* the police arrived because the family wasn't restraining him when the police arrived. The police appear to have given no serious thought to exactly how and why this allegedly violent attacker had remained unrestrained on site waiting 15min-ish for them.
You might believe that you would instantly recognise that a slumped slurring figure was stabbed rather than drunk and so unlikely to lash out immediately but I’m not. I still cross the road. It’s probably policy to handcuff people who have been reported for a violent assault. I don’t know if that’s a good precaution or not. I’m just sceptical of people confidently asserting that the reason for it is racism and that they’d not have done that if the guy accused of assault and appearing drunk had been black or brown. I’m consistently skeptical of this, btw. Activists also like to claim that police handcuffing black men are doing so because of racism and that this is the reason they get stopped and searched so much more. There was also the undercover panorama documentary which infiltrated the police and filmed a lot of negative racist assumptions about black and brown people.
I think there is a rather complicated mix of racial bias in the police force and that anti-black and brown bias still exists and is clumsily overcompensated for with policies and training that make police neurotic about accusations of racism. Consequently, there is evidence to support accusations of racist bias against minorities and majorities. I think the people who claim that any mistreatment or misjudgment of an individual is explained by racism when it’s the kind they’re concerned about but not when it’s the other kind are not helping. We need to look at cases individually.
The speech policing by police is also not cut and dried in one ideological direction. We had a pro-Palestine protestor prosecuted for carrying a sign calling Sunak a “coconut” and a female footballer for saying police were stupid because they are white. It’s a mess and ideological commitments are certainly part of it and a part that must be addressed. I’ve been doing this for a decade. Race-based grievance narratives don’t help.
This new BBC report is also worth a read - the BBC have obtained film the police had refused to release:
Watch Henry Nowak's killer repeatedly lie to police
It also backs an assertion by the Nowak family that Digwa was "never handcuffed", as Henry was while he lay dying. The contrast in the men's treatment by Hampshire police was described as "unbearable" by the family.
The video ends before Digwa is put in a police van, but Hampshire police confirmed to the BBC that he was "never handcuffed", just as the Nowak family first disclosed after his sentencing. In a statement, Mark Nowak said: "He was never handcuffed at all and as Vickrum Digwa himself told the court, whilst under arrest for Henry's murder, police even took him to the kitchen so he could choose his food."
Hampshire police has also confirmed to BBC South that Digwa was "never handcuffed" during his four days in custody prior to being charged.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5yzl5xl3gjo
The public expect an explanation for why the police treated the two so very differently even after Digwa was arrested for murder. I expect the internal inquiry into this incident to be brutal.
Re handcuffing, this is worth a read:
"The Sunday Times can also reveal that the force wanted to portray Nowak as the aggressor in an official statement three days after his death, but changed their wording after outrage from his grieving family.
...
It was only after Nowak lost consciousness that police realised he was gravely injured, gave him first aid and finally arrested Digwa. They did not handcuff him.
...
Vickrum Digwa himself told the court, while under arrest for Henry’s murder, police even took him to the kitchen so he could choose his food.".
https://archive.is/20260607115940/https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/henry-nowak-murder-trial-police-l8x990pkb
For the record, I don't think it was "racism" that influenced the police officers. For all 4 officers, something overrode their standard police first aid training - that they should immediately apply the DR ABC technique to any suspect or victim who says they can't breathe or have been injured.
I think it was their training that they should take "hate" crimes (i.e. typically offensive speech) more seriously and their training that they should try harder to believe ethnic minorities. This can also explain why - contrary to police policy - they handcuffed someone who was immobilised on the ground and very obviously not a threat of either violence or escaping.
You have more confidence in the effectiveness of anti-racist unconscious bias training than me and also more than the evidence warrants. My last book has a chapter covering research into the effects of this. It consistently shows that it makes no difference at all or makes people more racist.
What do you think it is that has turned the police into the most fervent enforcers of Social Justice ideology standards on speech and "power structures" in disputes if it is not their training? Do you think tens of thousands of officers in a notoriously conservative establishment organically and suddenly became hard-left advocates in the last decade? That's just not plausible. Even if the police had spent the last decade only recruiting humanities graduates (the ones chanting "defund the police", lol) it would not have changed the behaviour of historic staff this much.
See my last public post.