Woke kills
Institutional anti-racism aids and abets murderers
Why was 18-year-old Henry Nowak handcuffed and arrested by police, even as he lay bleeding to death, telling officers he had been stabbed and could not breathe? Why was his murderer, Vickrum Digwa, treated with dignity? He was not handcuffed and was allowed to choose his meal while in police custody.
The answer, of course, is anti-racism. Digwa lied about the fact that he had been racially abused by Nowak. The police not only believed him but - crucially - decided that apprehending a (presumed) racist was more urgent than helping someone struggling for their life. The upshot is a shocking reversal of expectation: the victim, criminalised, dies, while his murderer is afforded respect.
The Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary is now under investigation by the Independent Office for Police Conduct. Some of the officers involved in Nowak’s arrest are believed to have resigned. Good. But it would be wrong to conclude that the differential treatment of Nowak and Digwa was all down to a couple of credulous officers lacking in common sense. Even the suggestion that the police who arrested the dying Nowak were unusually zealous or woke overlooks the bigger picture. Anti-racism is now built into policing. It is a core institutional value that underpins all activity - even, it seems, administering medical help to people who are dying.
To understand how we got to this point, we need to go back almost three decades.
The report into the death of Stephen Lawrence in 1999 (known as the ‘Macpherson report’) introduced the idea that Britain’s police service, as well as other public bodies, did not simply harbour individual racists, but was structurally and institutionally racist. As the report notes:
Whilst we must never lose sight of the importance of explicit racism and direct discrimination, in policing terms if the phrase "institutional racism" had been used to describe not only explicit manifestations of racism at direction and policy level, but also unwitting discrimination at the organisational level, then the reality of indirect racism in its more subtle, hidden and potentially more pervasive nature would have been addressed.
This view of the police force as pervasively and unwittingly discriminatory at an organisational level came to be widely accepted, and institutional transformation became a priority. As new understandings of racism, grounded in Critical Race Theory, came to the fore, these, too, were taken on board, often thanks to the efforts of groups such as the College of Policing and the National Black Police Association.
Two contested assumptions became central to police training and practice in the 2010s. First, the idea that racism is so embedded within culture that it colonises the unconscious minds of white people - meaning that all white people, whether they acknowledge it or not, are racist. Second, the harm of racist speech goes far beyond ‘incitement’ to hatred or violence. Instead, racist speech is itself an act of harm, and even violence. The logic of these assumptions - backed by legislation such as hate speech laws and the practice of recording non-crime hate incidents - suggests that the values of the ‘attacker’ are assumed to be inherent in racist speech, and these values strike at the core of the victim’s identity, causing irreparable psychic harm.
Fast forward to June 2020, and we have the spectacle of police officers taking the knee at the behest of Black Lives Matter protesters, following the killing of George Floyd in the US. There was no better visual representation of the extent to which anti-racism had become the guiding principle of policing.
In September that same year, a Law Commission Consultation Paper made clear the justice system’s view that, for black people:
hate crime serves as a painful reminder of the cultural heritage of past and ongoing discrimination, stereotyping and stigmatization of their identity group. When an anti-black racist hate crime occurs it brings all of the dormant feelings of anger, fear and pain to the collective psychological forefront of the victim. This is not the case when whites are the target of racist hate crime.
We need to understand the terrible events that occurred in Southampton, and led to the death of Henry Nowak, in this context.
Nowak was not simply unlucky to have had his case dealt with by woke officers overly keen to respond to what they mistakenly believed to be a racist attack. Far more troublingly, those officers were acting on the logic of their critical race theory-inspired training and practice. In other words, they were not rogue zealots but model officers who behaved according to an ideological approach that others determined should shape policing.
Nowak’s family deserve an inquiry on the scale of the 1999 Macpherson Report. Where once it was considered a priority to rid policing of institutional racism, we must now rid the force of institutional anti-racism.
For more on the problems with woke policing, see my 2020 Civitas report: Policing Hate.
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