A question about Henry Nowak….

[CurlewKate]

Is there any actual evidence to support the suggestion that this completely awful event had anything to do with with “two tier policing” and was a hideous example of appalling policing and in particular, appalling first responding? It is unforgivable that the police didn’t check Nowak properly for injuries. But there was no weapon at the scene and the police were met with 4 people who had called them and were all telling the same story.They made assumptions which they would probably have made regardless of the ethnicity of the people involved. And in 999 cases out of 1000 the assumptions would have been right. The sort of judgement call the police have to make all the time. So it seems to me that it’s not about policy, it’s about incompetence.

I think the 'bit in his mouth' was from the words of the brother. I don't know how big the slash was to his face but presumably big enough for an onlooker to think that the blood in the mouth was from there at first, and realise after that the blood wasn't only from his face and maybe running towards his mouth but was actually coming up into his mouth from his body.
The knife had gone through several layers of clothing, I think. I don't think there was a great gush of blood from his body to make it obvious to anyone.

If you are on this thread and you haven't yet read the judges summing up statement, please to go to Google and read it. I can't remember what I put in. Something like 'The judge's summing up in the Henry Nowak murder trial' should find it.

'blood in his mouth' could be due to anything though - bit lip or something from falling over or scuffle. Again, on the video, you see the stabber tell the police officer HE is injured - part of their role is to try and work out what is true - if HN wasn't so severely injured they would have asked more questions and eventually established what had actually happened/that he was injured in sufficient time to do something. If he hadn't been seriously injured then talking politely to everyone, keeping the situation de-escalated, taking initial accounts rather than poking holes in inconsistencies, rather than jumping in and handcuffing everyone, is exactly how they should handle that sort of situation.

Or, if he was more obviously injured - i.e. completely unconscious, wearing lighter clothing so it was more obvious he was bleeding, had been stabbed somewhere else - they would have taken more reactive action straightaway.

Unfortunately it seems like just a perfect storm of events whereby in retrospect the way they handled it looks awful - but they didn't have that benefit of hindsight.

You also don't know how much of what the person told the police call handler was passed on to the dispatcher and then to the attending officers and how accurately.

the other thing to take into account is that it is very unlikely an ambulance would have attended a) at all until they'd definitely established he'd been stabbed and b) fast enough to make any difference.

Again - I'm not saying there's no room for criticism. But I'd be highly surprised if the individual officers had any serious misconduct actions brought against them. It's incompetence rather than malice, and, if there is an element of reverse racism again criticism of this should be aimed far more at the senior staff enforcing these policies rather than the staff on the ground struggling to often combine contradictory philosophies while severely understaffed.

This! Over and over again.

On an earlier thread I said I'd wondered why the Stabber and his brother didn't disappear and someone suggested that it was because there were already other people about. There must have been some noise and there was one neighbour at least, soon there, maybe more. If the Murderer and brother had run then, it would surely have been fairly obvious what had happened, so they were more or less obliged to stay around and blag it out. They could have told the police the absolute truth of course but I think it would have been a slim chance.

Well but you can't see a clear pool of blood and you can't see an obvious knife wound to the face. Although of course the police cameras are probably less good than eyesight presumably they couldn't either. It wasn't pitch black, but it's harder to differentiate colours especially reds and greens in gloomy conditions and your brain starts to fill in what it expects the eyes to be seeing more than you'd think. Again, not making excuses. Also, remember people will have been replating the footage and analysing it frame by frame which makes it easier to notice things.

The most bizarre case I ever heard about was a man who was shot in the head along with his girlfriend who was killed. Police arrived and didn't believe he'd been shot and arrested him on suspicion of murdering his girlfriend. He was notnonly arrested, but taken into police custody, and interrogated for six hours all the whole slurring that he'd been shot. It was only when he collapsed and the police checked that they saw he had indeed been shot and he went to hospital bit he died. This was in America and I think the family sued because the police had been incredibly negligable. But ordinarily you would not expect someone shot in the head to be still conscious able to talk and without a very obvious head wound. But he was. Injuries don't always look how you expect them to.
https://www.ladbible.com/news/detective-interrogates-murder-dying-440677-20230505

Edited to say, he wasn't telling them he's been shot, he was telling them he couldn't remember what had happened. Because he'd been shot in the head.

I think you have a point, OP. People don't really seem to realise that the footage around the arrest covers only three minutes. From the police point of view, they were called to an incident they knew nothing about, and they chose initially to believe the four witnesses. Their reaction was almost certainly conditioned by countless incidents they have dealt with where they have received incoherent accusations from drunken or drugged young men who turned out to have nothing wrong with them.

However, as soon as the police did realise what was happening they called an ambulance and started investigating properly, and so far as I can see the subsequent investigation into the offence and preparation of the prosecution were all very efficient.

The truth is, unfortunately, that the likes of Robinson and Farage saw this as a brilliant opportunity to whip their followers up and encourage rioting. Given that neither reacted in anything like the same way when a police officer actually killed a woman, their hypocrisy has been glaringly obvious.

I saw a video about that man a while ago, absolutely horrific 😢

I deliberately didn't post the video because I also saw it accidentally a while ago and it is really upsetting. In the same way the Novak video was. I hesitated mentioning it because it feels kinda of intrusive but it is relevant to the discussion as that was a man who was literally shot and no-one noticed for 6 hours. You'd hope they'd changed their policies since.

I don’t know how you can watch the footage and empathise with any of it.

The footage was worse than I thought!

The dad clearly says he has jumped over the fence, landed on the car and can’t sit up. It’s clear he can’t sit up.

So the police drag him along the floor. Taking the stabbing out of it you never move someone who’s had a fall and is immobile because he could have a broken back or neck. This is basic basic stuff. Everyone knows this! They did not give a shit about him.

They were talking to him like he was drunk.
You are right, you don't drag someone who might have a spine injury along the floor or try to encourage them to sit up. Police/first responders should have basic first aid training and an understanding of that. I wonder if either they didn't (in which case it's a huge failing for the police force as a whole) or they did but didn't think to put it into practice. Either way there was a failure somewhere. I think also the fact the police were conditioned by experience to interpret people as drunk is quite likely true but is a problem because stab wounds aside people can also seem drunk because of diabetes, head injury, stroke, date rape drugged etc. BUT I don't think the other poster saying she can imagine how it happened means she thinks it should have happened.

By way of explanation about the wound, the body is made up of layers which move independently of each other. If a medical professional wants to give an injection into a muscle, one method that can be taught is to stretch the skin of the leg towards you, then inject. When you let go, the skin goes back to its normal place and the injected fluid can't leak out because the hole in the skin isn't in the same place as the hole in the muscle.

Henry wouldn't have been passively standing, awaiting his stabbing. He would likely, for example, have had his hands raised defensively. That would shift the skin on his chest upwards. When he was stabbed, the knife went diagonally upwards under his collar bone. When his arms reverted to normal position, the skin on his chest would be in a different, lower, position, which stopped outward bleeding. The vein that was damaged was deep so the only place for the blood to go was in his chest cavity. Hence no blood to be seen around him. The pressure of the blood being where it shouldn't be would have made it harder to breathe because there isn't room for long expansion.

Yep

You have done exactly what the Police did. "In 999 cases out of 1000 their assumptions would have been right."

You assume all accusations of racism are true. So did they.

So yes you have proved that two tier policing is a thing.

It wasn't an accusation of racism, it was an accusation of assault. They didn't arrive on the scene thinking a bad word had been said. They thought someone had been assaulted (someone had but not who they thought). Yes the assault included a racist aspect, but the public figures saying "accused of racism" are I think deliberately focusing on a small part of the story that fits the narrative they want.
I disagree that "in 999 cases out of 1000 theirvassumptions would have been right" because actually fights/assaults often have multiple dimensions to them.

But the people saying "this must be two tier policing/because the victim was white" are also making assumptions/extrapolating from minimal evidence the same way the police they are so angry at seem to have done.

No. I’m saying that people make assumptions based on their experience. Because that’s how humans work. Including police officers. It seems to me highly unlikely that in the heat of that moment, the police officers acted in a way that policy told them to. They were catastrophically incompetent. They appear to have had no first aid training.

If you listen to police speak on this you’ll see you’re not correct.

Well, we won't know whether it is correct or not for the police involved in the incident until an inquiry actually pulls out more information on what the policies were what the police were thinking at the time, their training etc. which hasn't stopped some people deciding their version of what happened is true.

Yes @BillieWiperallowing a murderer to go to the kitchen at the station, to choose his own food is pandering. And upon futher research into the arrest of Digwa, reports say he arrived at the police station still wearing a kirpan, so looks like they didnt search him properly either. The man who had fatally stabbed another and had his whole family lie and cover it up.
They have finally been charged for their part in the crime after the video was released. Which some people have obviously not watched , as one poster claimed Henry was behaving erratically.

The op had decided she knows. You too.

Given the training and experience of other police it’s more likely than not.

Not correct about what? That the police were catastrophically incompetent?

The other part of your post, that training doesn’t matter ‘in the heat of the moment’. You’ve got that wrong generally.

I listened to the 999 call that the murderers brother made.

He told the police that an aggressive drunk man had been racially abusing his brother. The 999 operator specifically asks a couple of times if an ambulance is needed- he said no, if there are any weapons at the scene- again no. The murderers brother said that Henry fell over and has injured his face.

The police arrived expecting to find a drunk man who had fallen over. Henry presented like this - sadly because he was bleeding to death not because of the lies that were told to police- and they followed protocol especially in the low light. Plenty of people say extreme things to get out of an arrest. The remark that was made was incredibly unfortunate given the outcome, but given the injuries they wouldn't have been able to save him.

I know that the mother is being tried, but I would love to know if the brother knew he had been stabbed when he made that call. If he did - and he gets a way for it- I hope he lives a long life, ostracised from the entire community and is constantly haunted by the fact that his actions caused the death of a young man.

I don’t think I did. And I think I’ve explained why I think that-the police officers were called to an incident that seemed like countless others- a run of the mill bit of racism. Obviously it wasn’t, and they were lied to by appalling people. They read it catastrophically wrong. But it seems incredibly unlikely that they would, in that 3 minutes, have thought “well, this guy is obviously innocent, but we’re going to arrest him anyway because he’s white”

No,
I specifically said that we didn't know. I said that it might have been police procedures (including but not only I'll thought through procedures on race) but might also have been something else. The phrase "I can see how it could happen that" does not denote certainty.