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The bodycam footage of Henry Nowak was released. Mostly peaceful protests ensue.
A summary of the story (most of this info is in the PDF I'm about to link, feel free to skip this section and read it yourself): Henry Nowak had had a few beers (still under the legal limit), saw the Sikh man, Vickrum Digwa, pulled out his phone and started recording, and called out to him a few times "Are you a bad man?", with Digwa replying "I am a bad man." The recording ended shortly after Digwa grabbed Nowak's phone. The judge giving the sentencing said that Nowak was not asking this with hostility in his voice (warning, PDF download); he likely was drawn to ask about it upon seeing the larger of the two knives that Digwa carried. Yes, two knives. Digwa was carrying two ceremonial knives that are permitted to him as a religious article, one of them being a kirpan, an 8 inch one, on a sheath over his waistband.
There is no video record of the struggle after the video ended, but Digwa stabbed Nowak 4 times. The stab to the chest was the fatal one, passing through all of Nowak's clothing and penetrating upwards, between the two uppermost ribs, puncturing a lung and penetrating even deeper to cut a vein behind the collarbone, a wound of 8 cm in depth. There was no apparent injury to Digwa himself, though he claimed his eye had been bruised when the police officers arrived. Digwa took some of his own videos of the dying Nowak after stabbing him, telling him he had not been stabbed. His brother, Gurpreet, made the call to 911. Before the officers arrived, Digwa handed his kirpan to his mother and told her to take it away. He also kept Nowak's phone, and didn't tell the officers he had it. Nobody told the officers that Nowak had been stabbed, certainly not Digwa, who might have been the only one present who would know that.
As shown in the bodycam video, the police arrive for Gurpreet's complaint, briefly listen to Digwa's complaint, and quickly determine that Nowak should be arrested, so they drag his limp body into a better position to be handcuffed. Nowak weakly tells them that he's been stabbed, which the arresting officer impassively denies. The other officers investigate this claim a bit more; the female officer can tell that he's in rough shape, and notes that his pupils aren't even reacting to the light. They tried CPR on him after this, presumably; in the judge's remarks, one officer was horrified to learn of the chest wound after having done chest compressions on him.
So, there's rioting. The BBC doesn't frame it quite as sympathetically as they framed the anti-racism rioting from 6 years ago, though. Which brings us to our George Floyd comparison.
George Floyd was accused of using counterfeit bills. He had been arrested many times before. When they arrested him this time, they knelt on his (neck? upper back?) as he slowly died, claiming, as Henry Nowak had when he died, that he couldn't breathe. The public saw it as an execution of Floyd just because he was black, even though Floyd actually died from the fentanyl in his system, and the kneeling was department protocol (inadvised protocol, if the suspect is having trouble breathing).
In this case, the police presumed guilt of the nearly-dead unarmed man, even as his murderer was still upright and telling all kinds of lies. The public broadly sees this as anti-white bias, paralleling the racial claims from Floyd. Unlike Floyd, Nowak was actually murdered, and he was murdered with a knife that the white members of the public can't even own or carry for self defense. They can't even carry pepper spray. That Digwa as a racial and religious outsider to Britain is also an enhancing factor.
I will interject a brief defense of the police in this case: I took a concealed carry class recently, and I have also watched a few Paul Harrell videos on the subject. In self-defense situations, you want the police on your side. The way to do this is to call them first, before the real attacker does, and establish that you are the injured party, the complainant, and he is the injurer, even if he's lying in a pool of his own blood. Digwa did these things, and hid information from the police, so it's a little more understandable that they made a mistake. In light of the Pakistani rape scandal, however, I also find it understandable if the public doesn't find it understandable, and really do suspect that the police have an anti-white bias. And of course, it's completely unacceptable that they dismissed his claims of being stabbed, especially since he was on the ground when they found him.
For me, there's a lot more meat to these protests than the 2020 BLM protests. If I lived in the UK, I would probably be protesting too (peacefully!). If liberal societies continue along their outgroup-favoritism path, they might find that the post Civil Rights Movement atmosphere, whose protocol they were acting in accordance with, has completely evaporated, and they must forge a new and uncertain path forward. That's the human condition.
Its a sad situation but nothing here seems unique or even too particularly culture war. Police have a bad tendency to trust the first calm person to talk to them, which is Digwa claiming that he got attacked first. They especially trust the calm person over the one who is clearly panicking or having some sort of unidentified issue. This is a problem that gets brought up in domestic abuse circles sometimes, that the abuser seems cool and collected when the cops get called in by a neighbor while the victim will often be emotionally frazzled and angry and look like they're a hostile aggressor.
So given this, the police approach the scene and find a calm guy who says he got attacked and another guy who is panicking and freaking out and is like almost every other situation you see a guy freaking out in, probably on drugs. Violence cases are rare, drug guy being crazy or having an overdose is common. They make the assumption this is like every other case. His wounds were in such a way that they weren't easily visible so even when he's saying he got stabbed, they assume it's the insane mutterings of a druggie high off whatever.
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I think the entire family is complicit in detestable tribalistic behaviour here. They deliberately tried to pervert the course of justice by conspiring to hide the murder weapon. The brother and the murderer spoke punjabi about their need for an alibi in the back of the police car on the way to the station. The mother removed the weapon from the crime scene.
Beyond the failure in the police response, the largest thing that makes me upset about this is that while the encounter between Digwa and Nowak occurred at around 11:30pm, the police did not arrive on the scene until after 12:30am. The family knew that Nowak had been stabbed. They called the police and either did not describe the serious wounds of Nowak, or otherwise did not call an ambulance. All of this talk from the pathologist about how the police's actions could not have prevented Nowak's death are irrelevant in so far as an ambulance could have been requested by the family and saved Nowak's life. Instead they let him bleed out.
If leaving the scene of a car accident can be considered gross negligence to the point of manslaughter, why isn't this family being adequately punished along those lines? The system is impotently stacking weapons charges on the murderer, his father and brother, but nothing about how they let him bleed out for an hour before the police arrived.
Edit: I should add there is viral picture of henry being handcuffed floating around with his anemic, sliced hand visable (SFL, but pretty chilling).
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sorry, what culture war aspect is there here? UK speedrunning institutional paralysis when the magic word of racism is invoked was the grooming gang case, chris kaba proved that the first instinct of the UK establishment is to find blane in the whites for not letting themselves be victimized by the browns who must have had cause to harm whites if harm was inflicted. Is there anyone who believes that the UK of all places has any appetite to reverse the charities extended to brown minorities? Consideration is the privilege of browns, rich whites can fob off the harms of lacking consideration with the shield of money, and the UK establishment whose primary enemy is the poor native whites will continue happily bringing in either muslim or antimuslim browns depending on whichever flavour of ghoul occupies downing street. Liberal societies will not accept that their axioms were blown apart by reality, they will simply redefine what reality meant so that the outgroup remains noble even when bragging to their kin that the gora are cowards that let their women be raped freely and willingly offer their own as exp for murderhobos.
I feel like this being like street-level instantaneous paralysis in the face of 'racism' is a bigger indictment than it being bureaucratic/legal policy. If a judge lets off a random serial criminal it's bad, but if police flat-out decline to arrest or disable them in the first place it's very very very bad
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Is the video taken by the victim available anywhere? All I see is bodycam footage. Or the videos taken by the perp where he says the stabbed guy isn't stabbed?
Neither of those videos have been released. @FtttG already told you about the murderer's video, but I can't find any reason why the Snapchat videos are not public. I guess they must have been shown to the court, but not made public.
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According to Millennial Woes, even the jury weren't shown some of these videos because they were considered too disturbing.
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I got into an argument this morning with some woke gobshite who insists there's nothing to see here and is more concerned about a hypothetical far-right backlash against the UK's Sikh community than he is about Henry Nowak and for the love of God will that one Norm Macdonald clip ever stop being relevant.
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I made the mistake of watching the bodycam footage yesterday. Just reading about this case made me feel angry and upset enough. Watching the bodycam footage was ten times worse.
The murderer smugly claiming to have been assaulted, pointing to a non-existent bruise on his eyelid as evidence. With his last few breaths, Nowak begging the police for help and insisting that he's been stabbed, only to be calmly told by them that he hasn't been. The police officers' inexplicable insistence on cuffing him in spite of the fact that, even if he hadn't been stabbed, he was clearly incapacitated and posing no active threat. One of the police officers calmly instructing his colleague to get the Digwa family's details, apparently not even considering the possibility that one of them might have stabbed Nowak and that perhaps they ought to be arrested.
I don't know how anyone can look at this case and claim in all seriousness that the UK doesn't have a two-tier justice system.
Yes, that's another parallel to Floyd. That bodycam footage was really, really infuriating. I had to remind myself that the kid was already as good as dead when the police showed up, rather than that they caused his death.
It’s incredibly hard to emotionally ignore the fact that his last moments were so hopeless and alone
Millions of people (millions of Britons) will just ignore it, just as they tried to ignore the story entirely. Because it's inconvenient. Because it makes them look bad. Because if their own logic about systems were applied consistently, they would have to grapple with the fact that they were and are complicit in the murder of Henry Nowak. The Be Kind people who think they embrace empathy are literally out in force doing the Norm McDonald meme and I've yet to see a single one offer more than the stingiest, passive voice PR statement - and that only under duress.
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Also worth mentioning, after Nowak died in their custody, they thought it important to search his phone for racism. When that turned up nothing, they went to his father to inform him of what happened, and searched his phone as well, hoping they can find some racism there. Whatever you think of their behavior in the heat of the moment, their action afterwards is not indicative of an honest mistake, in my opinion.
This specific claim appears to be the product of Chinese whispers; Millennial Woes's exhaustive account of the entire incident can find no evidence for it.
Wow, what a great account! I will have to check Millennial Woes in the future, as the quality of that post is much better than my own and tells me many details I did not know.
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Oh damn. Thanks for the correction.
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The amount of meat has never been an issue. Tony Timpa was just as bad as George Floyd, but Floyd was manufactured into an outrage during an election season by sympathetic media wanting to whip up a race war to discredit the sitting President.
People have noticed the differences, but I need to remind everyone that the difference in coverage is because the official propaganda only ever goes one way: anti-white.
Floyd's optics were the issue and most people being completely ignorant about how chokes are even applied. I wouldn't necessarily want to be in Floyd's position since it'd be painful but there is no positional asphyxiation possible there.
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And Daniel Shaver was so much worse.
Another bodycam video I wish I hadn't watched. I can still hear him drunkenly begging the police not to shoot him. For the life of me, I cannot fathom why they didn't just tell him to lie face down and put his hands on his head.
It's something that seems not uncommon in tense, high-stress police interactions. Multiple cops screaming unintelligible and contradictory orders at people. Midwits screaming at individuals with room-temperature IQs. While screaming in tense situations is natural, I think it also comes from police "verbal judo" training; which was even discussed in the Chauvin trial. I’m sure being in control is central, but I bet “being authoritative” is a big part of it, and for midwit cops that just turns into yelling.
Shaver taught me that in the unlikely event I get in a situation where I'm being screamed at by multiple cops I'm just gonna kneel with my hands on my head and let them do the rest of the work. They'll probably throw my face into the ground, maybe break my arm, but better than playing death Simon says until they shoot me.
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