To determine the proper response to the murder of Henry Nowak we must first dismiss those courses of action that would be in error. The establishment line, the one voiced by the government, the media and the political left, is that Nowak’s death is about knife crime. New policies or fresh legislation are required as well as interventions to divert young men from ‘toxic masculinity’. This we will call the Adolescence strategy, for like the Netflix-series-cum-moral-panic this perspective can confront a social controversy only by denuding it of those elements that make it controversial, in this case by forgoing discussion of the role of anti-racist policing in the decision of responding officers to handcuff a dying teenager on the strength of a false accusation of racism.
To the anti-racist, the potential for a crime to stir up ill-feeling towards a minority demographic is a more immediate concern than establishing the truth
Progressives deem any reference to race a shameful exploitation of a tragedy by far-right ideologues bent on sowing division. That these same people behaved differently over the murder of George Floyd and the lawful killing of Chris Kaba does not make them hypocrites. Progressives sincerely believe that whites cannot be victims of racism and so in framing incidents of cross-racial or inter-ethnic violence, public officials and journalists tend to racialise events where whites are villains and de-racialise those where they are victims. Their more intemperate critics regard this double standard as proof that progressives are consciously malign but progressives believe they are being actively anti-racist, a stance they associate with virtue and good conscience.
To the anti-racist, the potential for a crime to stir up ill-feeling towards a minority demographic is a more immediate concern than establishing the truth about an incident or preventing a reoccurrence. It’s a logic Norm Macdonald fans will recognise.
The counter-establishment position, espoused mainly by nationalists, is that Nowak’s death must mark the end of favoured treatment for minorities, such as the legal exemption which allows Sikhs to carry a kirpan, or ritual knife, on their person even as other Englishmen risk arrest and prosecution if found in possession of a blade. Nowak’s killer did not use a kirpan to deal the fatal blows but, so the thinking goes, the accommodation of ‘alien’ religious practices emboldened him to carry other weapons and discouraged the authorities from challenging him on this. Like progressives, these nationalists are focussed on the knife, which they imbue with ominous significance, a symbol of the two-tier Britain they so resent.
We should reject the first interpretation because it requires us to edit out substantiated facts, such as the killer’s deployment of (invented) racial victimhood, in drawing conclusions from the incident. We should reject the second interpretation also because it proceeds from the assumption that Sikh religious practices are the root cause of Nowak’s death, something which is plainly untrue. There is a third interpretation, one which allows us to be candid about the circumstances of the murder without having to pretend that restricting religious liberty for Sikhs would serve either justice or public safety. This interpretation begins and ends with the actions of the police officers who responded to the incident and posits ideological, cultural and institutional explanations for their conduct.
My contention is this: that the invocation of the R word (racism) was enough to override in these officers the instincts and practices which have traditionally been inculcated via police training and policy. That a culture of performative anti-racism in British policing has created perverse incentives and disincentives which make frontline officers second-guess their gut impulses. That absent this culture the responding officers here would not have handcuffed Henry Nowak but attempted to de-escalate the situation and that the conversations this would have necessitated between the respective parties would have more quickly established that Nowak was gravely injured.
A dying teenager should not be lying on the ground in handcuffs because of a false accusation of racism, or a true accusation for that matter
That this culture, and the broader embrace of anti-racist ideology by constabularies, is sufficiently well-known that aggressors from a racial or ethnic minority believe that appealing to this ideology will get a police officer on their ‘side’. That the above, whether it can be substantiated or whether is a matter of perception, is inimical to policing by consent, social cohesion, and the very legitimacy of the justice system.
In order to establish where the truth lies and what actions should be taken next, there should be a review of the circumstances surrounding Nowak’s death and the police response. That review should be conducted by someone well-versed in these debates and prepared to ask awkward questions and propose radical remedies. If such a review were to conclude that the ideology of anti-racism and its embedding in institutions like the police were at fault, those remedies should involve a comprehensive rooting out of this ideology and its expressions in policy, priorities and practices.
It might include a recommendation of a statutory obligation of racial or ethnic neutrality, a prohibition of divisive victimhood and group-identity narratives, and the dismantling of sectional associations within the police which allow officers to organise and lobby senior management along identity-based lines. Beyond policing itself, it might prompt a reassessment of laws on racial incitement or consideration of the charitable status or access to public funds of universities and other organisations which promote anti-racist ideology.
Paramount in any such review should be clarifying, in language the general public can understand, the difference between anti-racism, a divisive ideology incompatible with institutional neutrality, and non-racism, which is not only a necessity for equality before the law in a multiracial nation but a moral imperative in any society that recognises the equal dignity of the individual without regard to race or heritage. There will be circumstances where public policy or practice must be sensitive to race or ethnicity – the higher rates of stillbirth and infant mortality among black Britons, for example – but where it is not a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim, the state and anything the state funds should be race-neutral. If I were Kemi Badenoch, I would be proposing such a review and I would be tapping Sir Trevor Phillips to chair it.
Henry Nowak’s murder is an outrage but our response should not be driven by blind anger or inchoate resentment. Gather evidence, review policy and practice, and where necessary make changes. A dying teenager should not be lying on the ground in handcuffs because of a false accusation of racism, or a true accusation for that matter. When they respond to an ongoing incident, there are sundry urgent considerations competing for the attention of a police officer, but chief amongst them should be the preservation of human life. The claim levelled against Henry Nowak did not require him to be handcuffed at that moment. Allegations of offensive, insulting or abusive words or actions should not take priority over matters of life and death.
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