Britain’s police are meant to police without fear or favor, but there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that they don’t – think of how they hold, or too often do not hold, the ring impartially between supporters of Israel and Palestine, Muslim and Christian preachers, supporters and opponents of trans rights, or whatever.
Does all this matter? The Nowak case, with an obvious victim, shows clearly that it does
There is a tendency for the great and the good to say this is no very big deal; the police are doing their best in difficult situations, complainants are normally tiresome culture warriors or enablers of hate speech. Events in Southampton Crown Court over the last two weeks show how wrong they are. Partial policing can potentially be deadly.
A Sikh man, Vickrum Digwa, is standing trial for the murder of a Polish student, Henry Nowak, who died from loss of blood after being allegedly stabbed by him in a run-down student quarter of Southampton. Of Digwa’s guilt or innocence we say nothing, since he denies the charge of murder and the trial continues. But whether or not he is guilty, the account in court of how Nowak died is enormously worrying.
It is admitted that Nowak, already weak from knife wounds, was trying to reach help when the police arrived. The evidence is that, having arrived, the police interviewed both parties; told that Nowak had started a drunken fight and racially abused Digwa, they immediately handcuffed him. Afterwards, they realized his condition. When he collapsed, they removed the cuffs and administered first aid. But it was too late. He died in their hands.
Even accepting that dealing with a street brawl at midnight is not easy when it is unclear who if anyone was in the right, this raises questions. If someone is weak and spurting blood, one might have thought that arresting them was fairly pointless. They are unlikely to go far, and the first priority should be to get them to a hospital. A general policy of arresting anyone who has been involved in a fight (no-one knows who to believe) is one thing. Not making an exception where one party is seriously injured and needs immediate help isn’t, shall we say, in the best traditions of policing.
But this may not be the real reason why the victim was arrested and handcuffed. There is a more worrying possibility, at least hinted at in the reports: that Nowak’s arrest was an immediate reaction to the suggestion that he had racially abused Digwa, and had this simply been a case of a person alleged to have started a fight he would not have been cuffed but simply rushed to hospital. If this is right, then the Hampshire Police have a serious case to answer, and not simply because their arrest of Nowak may have led to his unnecessary death.
For one thing, a policy of almost automatic arrest for any allegation of a racial slur, whatever the circumstances, is a grossly one-sided use of police resources. The police are supposedly trained to act proportionately, which means occasionally exercising discretion not to arrest, and always having in mind their priorities for keeping the peace and preventing more general crime. Events like this provide disconcerting grist to the mill of those who allege that the police unduly concentrate on speech crime rather than, say, burglary, car theft or shoplifting, which affect a good deal more of us. But more to the point, they leave room for an uncomfortable suspicion that police policy is being dictated not by ordinary policing considerations but by optics, public relations concerns and a felt need to appease certain pressure groups or special interests.
Does all this matter? The Nowak case, with an obvious victim, shows clearly that it does. But it is not the only example. At least one cause of Axel Rudakubana’s rampage in Southport appears to have been the police’s failure to arrest him earlier when he showed disturbing signs of violent psychopathy, when one suspects that had he been a middle-class white child they might have acted very differently. The cutting back on the use of stop and search powers in order to avoid a disproportionate effect on black youths may well lead to a preventable deadly stabbing, and so on.
We’re told we need policing by consent. So we do. In the end, however, the policing that truly gains respect is dispassionate policing. True, it must respect the views of those representing minority communities. But it must also keep onside the majority of people, those who believe it is more important to deal with crimes such as theft that affect all of us, rather than more niche affairs merely affecting particular interest groups.
There will almost undoubtedly be an internal police inquiry into the death of Henry Nowak, and possibly a further investigation. And rightly so. But if it is to do any good, those conducting it need to keep these matters firmly in mind.
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