Certainly your best argument isn’t that I put three letters in an order you didn’t like!
The history of a flawed idea doesn’t stop it’s being flawed. The aim of policing is to prevent crime; to pursue and bring to justice those who break the law; to keep the peace; and to protect, help and reassure the community. For that, the employment of individuals needs to be on the basis of merit and not ethnicity.
I’m curious as to where the policy you linked to says anything different.
If that was the point you took from that then you probably should read it again.
I generally avoid joining in on the gossip and speculation on these types of cases as it’s mostly based on half truths, speculation and our personal biases. My view being that I wasn’t there, nor was I in the court when the case was heard.
However, I’m going to share an article from the FT which actually refers a lot to the judge’s comments and gives the lie to a lot of the 2 tier policing comments, though it does raise some other serious points about how the police treat suspects in general. Though the latter point is nothing new to anyone who’s ever had dealings with the police.
What Henry Nowak’s murder does — and does not — tell us about policing - https://giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/actions/redeem/fea5724b-9b56-4516-84f0-484062cdcdfc via @FT
I am by no means an admirer of the police. But, and a big but here in their defence: their working life is dealing with shit of the worst kind - dealing with people normal folk regard as scum, seeing things day in and day out that most find disgusting and to cap it all, they have to fight the mamby pamby society we create to get anything done. Compared to most, they go home after a days work sick and fed up and understandably suspicious of everything.
Is it any wonder that sometimes they get it wrong? And when they do get it wrong, they are hung out to dry..
I think Stephen Bush is clearly misrepresenting what the police saw when he says “If the police are called to the scene because a neighbour hears a disturbance, and there are three people present, and two of them present a plausible but untrue account of what has occurred, of course the police are going to believe them.”
“If the police are called to the scene because a neighbour hears a disturbance, and there are three people present, and two of them present an untrue account of a racially-aggravated offence, of course the police are going to believe them.” See below.
The lies were not plausible, given Nowak’s condition (the BWV shows someone who couldn’t even sit up, and who wouldn’t have smelled strongly of drink, given a blood alcohol level of 60mg/100ml, less than the drink-drive level).
At the beginning, police did nothing to ascertain why Novak was so incapacitated.
Much of the effort, police and liberal press alike (check Stephen Bush’s career 
), is at the moment being directed at damping down what they see as dangerous far-right agitators making use of the situation. That is probably a good thing, because of the way situations escalate, but don’t go away with the idea that there isn’t a problem with current DEI (spell it how you like!) ideology.
And we’re still left with a situation where several police officers attended an incident and were so fixated on dealing with a fictional racially-aggravated offence that they failed to behave as any properly-trained police officer would do and investigate a plainly incapacitated suspect.
It may be lazy policing. But, given the policy I referred to and the way it is set out, it is more plausible that what the police had in the forefront of their minds was that priority needed to be given to allegations of racially-aggravated offences, and that their actions - should anything go wrong - would be scrutinised through that lens.
I don’t like the phrase “two-tier policing”. But it is clear that police are being encouraged down a divisive path by their leaders. When even ‘the policing minister, Sarah Jones … [is] saying that anti-discrimination guidance to police that black and white suspects should be treated differently “gives the wrong impression”’, it’s plain that something needs to change.
You mean like when Bush writes this?
On the night of the attack, Digwa’s brother made a 999 call — on which Digwa can be heard — claiming Digwa had been the victim of a racially motivated assault.
When Hampshire police arrived on the scene, Vikrum Digwa, with the corroboration of his brother, continued to provide a false account of events that explained Nowak’s visible injuries and cast himself as the victim, rather than the assailant
And this?
On the night of the attack, Digwa’s brother made a 999 call — on which Digwa can be heard — claiming Digwa had been the victim of a racially motivated assault.
And the judge said this:
Another consequence of those lies is that the attending police officers honestly believed that there were reasonable grounds for suspecting Henry had committed an offence and arrested him with the consequence he was handcuffed for about a minute before his condition further deteriorated and the arresting officer began CPR.
The police were given a convincing but wholly false narrative of the incident. It was dark and Henry was wearing a dark top. The entry damage caused by the knife through it, would not have been obvious. Whilst there was visible blood on Henry, it would not have clearly been seen coming from that wound and the clearly visible facial wound was not lifethreatening. Henry was complaining that he had been stabbed and was struggling to breathe but that would not have necessarily told the officers how serious the situation had become.
It is the experience of the criminal courts that sometimes, someone arrested and handcuffed will feign injury in the hope they may be released. These police officers were faced with having to make quick decisions in pressurised circumstances about the best way to act. The genuine shock to the particular police officer, when he realised that he had been giving CPR to Henry when he had a serious chest wound tends to show that he was doing his best in a very difficult situation.
Personally, I think Bush is really quite balanced in his writing but I can see why you might disagree.
P.S. I’m not playing the ad hominem game.
But, to get back to the previous point? Where did the policy say anything different?
The section headed “Our commitments”.
Meanwhile, here’s a summary of what i said earlier, from the I paper.
Officers dealing with the knife attack on the 18-year-old student should have revised their approach and fully searched him for injuries from the moment he told them “I’ve been stabbed”, they said.
Two former Scotland Yard personnel, including an instructor in dealing with crime scenes, said bodycam footage showed the four Hampshire Police officers who arrived at the aftermath of the assault had failed in their “duty of care and investigation” by not thoroughly examining Mr Nowak and immediately treating the incident as a potential life-threatening crime.
The former Met instructor suggested there were grounds for concern that inexperience may have been an issue and that efforts to tackle racial prejudice in policing had resulted in officers feeling “apprehension” when an allegation of racism is made at a crime scene.
“It is potentially going to change their judgement or actions.”
In here? You’ll need to help me as I see no commitment to recruiting based on ethnicity rather than merit.
Our commitments
- Zero tolerance of racism and ensuring Hampshire & Isle of Wight Constabulary (HIOWC) is anti-racist in all it does.
- Understanding and reducing our disproportionality using a reform or explain approach.
- Understanding the impact, trauma and history of policing ethnic minority communities.
- Improving outcomes and support for ethnic minority victims of crime.
- Increasing our contact with and involving ethnic minority communities in our policing and decisions that concern them.
- Recruiting, retaining and progressing a representative workforce.
- Mandating and developing a culture that supports and values all of its workforce.
I’m not sufficiently voyeuristic to watch the video but, on the face of it, there’s little to disagree with here.
I’ve highlighted the key words. If that statement were any more qualified, we’d need to call it Dr. Farage’s 2-tier policing schtick is just rabble rousing and, indeed, the rabble is well and truly roused.
The police response that I’ve heard - north to south - has been that there was minimal failure on the part of the officers involved.
That statement wasn’t “qualified”: it was a screaming “they messed up because of Hants’s race training”! It’s the way the police generally express themselves which isn’t always obvious.
But it’s up to you whether you accept what I say. The coming months will make things clearer.
Where’s the commitment not to hire on merit?
I see what you’re getting at: sorry to be slow!
I wouldn’t expect that to be in a document about how Hants police their force area.
Whether multiculturalism as a doctrine has failed, and whether it is helpful to make diversity of intake more important than quality, would be a different discussion.
I’m inclined to think proper training and employment based on merit alone is more important than having a staff which reflects the ethnic mixture of the community, though if both were possible, that would be the ideal.
I think that’s rather the point. In my experience the policy is about providing equality of opportunity rather than equality of outcomes, i.e. removing the barriers that might prevent underrepresented elements of the community from even applying, let alone thrive.
The police service has hardly been renowned as a bastion of woke, quite the reverse really, being widely thought of as institutionally racist and misogynistic. I’d say there’s quite a strong argument that, to be effective, the police needs to reflect the community they serve at least to some degree. Unless, of course, we subscribe to a view of policing by force rather than consent.
I have to disagree with that point.
It is, or certainly used to be, basic training that where an incident / accident has occured with various people having been injured, it is not the ones who are making a fuss who are seriously hurt. The people who are NOT making any noise are those that one should attend to first. People who are in danger of dying tend to do it quietly.
I ask you to consider the following;
The failure on the part of the officers involved was not minimal, it was a massive failure.
The primary duty of a police officer is the protection of life. Clearly they failed in that duty.
They failed to add together the obvious signs that were right in front of their eyes.
Nowak was dying in front of them and they failed to comprehend that fact.
To say that inexperience may have been an issue is a nice way of trying to explain what would otherwise be dereliction of duty.
I too!
I was saying that all of the senior officers I’d heard speaking about the incident seemed intent on exculpating the Hants officers from any responsibility for Nowak’s death, rather than dealing with the points you so cogently make.
I have also noticed that although the Chief Constable has issued an apology for what happened, that it seems to be 6 months after the incident.
The IOPC has been quite rightly tasked with investigating, but where is Hants Constabulary’s own Discipline and Complaints department in all this ?
The officers concerned who are still serving are no longer on front-line duties ---- but where ?
In my day if one made a cock-up of that sort of magnitude you heard all about it from the Chief Superintendent while standing to attention on the carpet in front of his desk at 10am the next morning – even if you were on the night shift. Said experience would also have ended with the officers being informed of to which far flung corners of the county they were being immediately transferred in the interest of the ‘efficiency of the force’.
Makes me wonder by whom, when, where, and how these officers were trained, and who it was that certified them as being adequately trained to be let out onto the streets unsupervised.
I suppose that no senior officer would wish to admit that the supervisory chain has failed.
Just to be clear. I’m not saying that the officers were responsible for Nowak’s death, but I am saying that they failed in their duty of care.
Where was the comforting and reassuring word, why was the hand not being gently held rather than handcuffed, where was the hand to gently support the dying man’s head, or to smooth his hair out of his eyes.
Where was the compassion ?
Clearly they forgot to take it out on patrol with them that night.
Yes, the normal religious knife is the same size as the smallest swiss army penknives that anybody can carry in public. This particular individual and his family belonged to a extreme sect where the bigger the knife you carry the more devoted you are. They were already breaking the law just carrying such a knife in public.
If you want evidence that Farage and his chums , including Musk want to create a divisive society, then look no further than some of the posts in this thread.
Come on, be respectful of the views of others and enjoy the dinner party debate.
It seems to me that whoever calls the police first gets the first go at explaining what has happened whether that’s the truth or not. Lazy policing.
That attacks on white people by anyone non- white leads to the kind of disturbance seen in Southampton is disturbing and is often fuelled by misinformation on social media. In Southampton the wrong officiers were named which has lead to their having to leave their homes, in Epsom a few months ago demonstations followed reports of a woman being raped by an asylum seeker. No such attack took place.
We are better than this aren’t we?
You mention Musk. I read on Bluesky that a third of Musk’s recent posts on X have been about the UK. He has no connection with it, has barely visited, so why? He seems to be very keen on fomenting civil war.