Henry Nowak: we must demand accountability
The terrible bodycam footage of the Southampton student's final moments brings home the shocking consequences of the ideology of bastardised 'anti-racism'.
‘We’ve just been attacked racially by some white person.’ Vickrum Digwa’s brother instinctively knew which buttons to press to mobilise the British state. The ideology behind the treatment of Henry Nowak, and sadly now a growing list of state failure in the name of anti-racism, is – of course - a political one.
It is now widely accepted that police and local authorities failed to pursue the participants in grooming gangs in part because of fears over community tensions and accusations of racism. Yet the comparison with Nowak’s case becomes clearest when viewed through individual examples. A father arrested twice for trying to rescue his 14-year-old daughter from a gang of Asian men. A Labour councillor dismissing victims as ‘poor white trash’. Girls, plied with alcohol and drugs by their abusers, routinely picked up for drunken and disorderly behaviour. Time and again, the machinery of the state seemed more willing to suspect the victims than their assailants.
The most uncomfortable thing about the police footage of Henry Nowak’s arrest is the apparent disregard for his life. ‘I don’t think you have, mate’, an officer replies after Henry tells him he has been stabbed. It reflects the immediate profiling of a likely drunk, white racist who, in the eyes of the police, had abused a respectable Sikh family and therefore was not worth listening to. You can see the prejudice of the police operating in real time.
Of course, the officers in question have not yet been dismissed, pending an investigation. The Independent Office of Police Conduct says they are currently being treated solely as witnesses. In recent years, it seems that the most egregious crime an officer can commit is not the facilitation of the death of an 18-year-old university student, but making racist remarks. For example, who could forget the BBC’s brave, courageous and desperately needed Panorama film in which an officer was plied with nine pints of Guinness before making off-colour remarks about Arabs and Algerians being the ‘worst’ criminals to deal with?
The ideas of ‘unconscious bias’, ‘white privilege’ and ‘systemic racism’ have been drilled into a generation of workers thanks to the EDI-ification of society. After the Manchester Arena bombing, in which 22 people were murdered, security personnel admitted they had not approached the suspicious perpetrator because ‘I was scared of being wrong and being branded a racist if I got it wrong and would have got into trouble’. Risks identified by teachers regarding Axel Rudakubana, who later murdered three young girls in Southport, reportedly went unreported because of concerns about stereotyping a ‘black boy with a knife’. Valdo Calocane, who killed three people in Nottingham, was discharged from care amid concerns about the over-representation of young black men in detention.
Of course, pleas to ‘not politicise’ these tragedies – driven by an ideology that nobody voted for – are selectively applied dependent on the victim. The murder of George Floyd, thousands of miles away, prompted calls for political reform here in the UK. The House of Commons and the House of Lords held a minute’s silence for Floyd – but that seems unlikely for Nowak. The police shooting of career criminal Chris Kaba sparked calls for justice, institutional reform and the vilification of firearms officers by Sadiq Khan, Diane Abbott and Jeremy Corbyn. Yet when the full facts were laid out at trial, the officer in question was acquitted by a jury in just three hours.
Going by the testimony heard at the Nottingham Inquiry – where bereaved families said institutions closed ‘ranks to try to keep us quiet’ – there is a fair chance that Henry Nowak’s parents could face similar pressures as they seek answers about their son’s death. How Henry’s parents grieve, and what they choose to do, is entirely up to them. Yet the Nottingham Inquiry, and the determination of the victims’ families, has demonstrated the importance of persistently challenging rotting public bodies and demanding transparency. As Emma Webber – mother of one of Calocane’s victims, Barnaby Webber – told the hearing: ‘We have faced evasion, self-protection, avoidance and downright lies so many times.’ That observation could apply to every tragedy mentioned above. Depoliticising these events only serves the government and the institutions that fail us.
Why was Henry Nowak’s killer not arrested at the time? Why did officers search Henry’s phone for evidence of racist abuse? While Digwa’s father and brother have been charged with weapons offences, why have they not been charged as accessories after the fact? (His mother awaits sentencing after being convicted of hiding the murder weapon.) As Dr Sanjoy Kumar told the Nottingham Inquiry, ‘there wasn’t a single institution involved in our case that didn’t fail’.
Until those questions – and others – are answered, we must not ‘move on’. Accountability is not hatred. Perhaps Farage is correct and on this – ‘we should be angry’. Because if a young man’s death, a catalogue of institutional failures, and a political ideology that repeatedly seems to blind public bodies to reality, cannot justify our anger, then what can?
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