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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.
The solution is to check anyway but that doesn't necessarily help unless you constantly reinforce it, since the officers will eventually default back to ignoring it again. Heck one of the cops even acknowledged it, like "oh well I think we have to check anyway don't we?". They knew better but they were used to just ignoring it. They really didn't believe he was stabbed and defaulted to their base assumptions and base behaviors
Now this is something I think is always ridiculous. Religious exemptions are a nonsense idea.
Either a rule is genuinely important to have and exceptions shouldn't be given out (because it's important!), or the rule isn't actually important and therefore shouldn't exist. Almost everything that has a religious exemption to it should just be gone! Why should you lose more freedoms than someone else just because you believe in a different sky man?
Yes, but are you willing to fight for it? I don't necessarily mean e.g. murdering people (though that happens too) but actively and consistently pursue the change as a major life goal that is so important you are willing to put yourself and others in danger to achieve that? Religious exceptions, at least in theory, are born when some people are, and it's more convenient to let them be as they like than fight with them. However, it turns out that virtually nobody in Britain is willing to fight for the right to bear arms. So, they don't get it. Except for Sikhs which apparently did fight for it, one way or another, and got it. But I haven't heard anybody in Britain saying "we also need this right!" - only "they are not good enough to have this right, take it from them!". With this attitude, no wonder they don't have it.
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This is the exact element that makes it culture war. (I don't mean to pick on you by saying this.)
Basically, there's a moral and spiritual shift in how the right perceives crime. Violent crimes like these used to be seen as tragedies. Now they are seen as injustices. The difference is that that a tragedy is something that you have to endure and an injustice is something that cries to heaven to be addressed.
Take the murder of Iryna Zarutska. She was stabbed by a career criminal who had been let out of jail before. If this is just a tragedy, there is not much to do except arrest the perpetrator and try to put him in jail. But if this is an injustice, it's an indictment of the entire judicial system that the criminal was not already in jail. The murder isn't just something that happens but is something that was "allowed" to happen.
Anyways the divide is precisely between those who feel apathetic and those who don't. It's not a culture war divide between two opposing interpretations. The scissor statement is whether you care, or whether you don't.
This is just a reversion to the - at the time successful - Willie Horton strategy.
You forgot to attach the gigachad.
In all seriousness, your comment implies (derogatory) but should instead be read (admiring).
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I remember seeing a video, I want to say it was in Germany? of a non-white person engaging in a mass stabbing act of terrorism, the police arrived on scene and assisted him because they assumed he was being attack by the native white Germans (and got injured in the process).
This is a pattern.
The white German was attempting to stop the terrorist. The police arrived on the scene and immediately tackled and began cuffing him, at which point the terrorist started stabbing one of the cops while he was restraining the white Good Samaritan.
Honestly, it was poetry.
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The Mannheim stabbing (iconic photo included). The police officer actually died as a result.
Despite American police giving it a go and this recent valiant effort from British police, I say German police still holds the title of most cucked police action via the Mannheim stabbing. Total Axis Victory.
Nature is healing.
That’s what upsets me most about Muslims committing violent crimes against the native populace, the backlash against peaceful Muslims.
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If it's not unique, please provide the other examples of this happening, but with white/non-white flipped.
I don't believe you're saying these things for remotely principled reasons. Based on the many, many comments of yours I've read, I don't believe for one second that you'd view a race-flipped version of this as: sad, but nothing to see here.
As I said in another comment, I already did! In the original comment I gave a whole category of crimes where it's common.
domestic abuse victims.
It's common enough to make this mistake that some more experienced officers and departments have adopted the practice of arresting both in response and sorting things out after.
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You could apply this retort to 90% of political opinions on the Motte. On that matter, I don't believe you have any real principled reason behind making this post either - I don't believe for one second that you'd view a tribally-flipped version of this as a case of "the poster needs to provide tribally flipped examples, or else he's a dirty hypocrite".
Right-wingers will continue posting that things that make the Right look good are actually a big deal, and things that don't are actually nothingburgers. Left-wingers will continue doing the same with s/right/left/. Should we all just pack up and go home?
I mean, sometimes the race/gender flipped version never actually happening is a part of the reason people are pissed off. There is not, nor will there ever be, a story in which a white male attacks a bunch of brown people in Germany and the cops defend the white guy while arresting the brown guy who tries to stop the mass stabbing. That is part of the story which is the quiet part out loud: the cops are so concerned about looking racist that they will assume the white guy is guilty before even bothering to realize that the brown guy is actually the perpetrator.
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It's worth pointing out that the various UK subreddits, even the typically left-wing ones, are seething with rage at this. It really has cut across the political divide. Nobody in Britain thinks this is a nothingburger (although left-wing politicians are trying to 'depoliticise' it in the expected way).
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I could; and if I did, I would be incorrect.
I thought the words in my comment made this clear, but I wasn't generically responding to a comment I disagreed with: I was observing that magicalkittycat, consistently, as a poster, is not a person who I would believe is (1) making that comment honestly, and (2) makes comments honestly.
That's fine; you are wrong.
Like, you're welcome to hold that belief, but you are factually incorrect and holding it for poor reasons. "I can invoke a superficial symmetry" is not a universal counterargument. Happy to expand on why you're wrong -- I obviously don't expect this comment to suffice as reasoning.
That's fine; again, this reflects on a flaw in your reasoning process, not mine.
Yes, this is true. I don't believe it's true of "90%" of posts on TheMotte, and I don't believe you really believe that either. Otherwise, what's the point in us being here? I'm happy to be here because I don't believe it's true. If you believe it's true, then you're the one who needs to explain that.
No, I think that would be an absurd and stupid thing to think. Why would you ask that?
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I wish more people would come to this conclusion in light of his posting history.
"Prison abolition" has long meant "let my friends out, but we need somewhere to lock up my political enemies so keep the institution."
"It's bad when cops randomly kill people" has long been less popular than "it's bad when cops kill friends, good when they kill enemies." (With the caveat that most take "enemy" and "not person" as synonyms.)
His comment history is freely available and speaks for itself. Why bother pretending to discuss it one more time? We all know what people like that do with power, whatever nice words they say when they haven't got it yet. And whatever anyone else might be willing to say in public. If you prefer life to death, act accordingly.
It is telling that many voices that advocate for not incarcerating for non-violent crimes also declare white-collar crime (which is almost definitionally non-violent) something that needs more prosecution and jail time.
"You may not like it, but Bernie Madoff and Ken Lay are what these non-violent criminals look like" isn't exactly wrong. Although I don't know if it's really a modal example of such: perhaps our attorney members could weigh in.
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Well, I think a lot of people have come to that conclusion; I'm certainly one of them. But you can't win them all. Some people don't use this forum as much as others, and some people don't diligently read the usernames of posters.
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Why bother? Anyone who can't contain their urge to use a term like 'sky man' is outing themselves as too obnoxious to worry about. If it were marginally easier to do so I'd probably just hide all comments with such strings.
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Without commenting on anything about the actual facts of the situation, I think the very fact that one side of the metaphorical culture war believes that it's particularly culture war means that it's necessarily culture war. As in the case of Floyd & Chauvin, it doesn't matter if the killed/killer were unfairly treated because of their race or status or whatever, all that matters is that enough people on any given side believe that it's particularly culture war, and it seems evident to me that enough people do, among the people who do know about it. The absolute total number of people knowing about it is also, of course, particularly culture war, due to how issues like this tend to get covered in mainstream media, and it seems to me that the people who do know about it are trying to increase that absolute total number, which is, again, also particularly culture war.
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I was actually in the process of writing a post on this story myself as I was genuinely surprised when a search for "Henry Nowak" turned up nothing given how throughly this story has dominated the right-wing/MAGA media space for the last week.
Here are some of the links I had collected for the post i was writing:
For me the most disturbing thing is how the cops are just chatting amicably with each other the whole time. No apperant concern for the man coughing up blood, no attempt to assess his injuries or render first aid, no call for back-up or an ambulance, just 2.5 minutes of casually watching an 18 year-old gurgle and choke like this is just another day at the office.
Yes, this is the same impulse that caused me to write what I did. I was talking about it with a friend I talk about politics with in a Discord server and found that there was actually a lot to say about this one. Too bad I beat you to the punch! You had a lot of good links there.
Don't worry about it.
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There's so many stories that I just gloss over nowadays. It's been years since I noticed that somehow, no matter how egregious the situation, we never get a reaction symmetrical to the MeeToo / BLM / Smirkening / PrettiGood cases, so I don't even put pen to paper unless there's something I find personally interesting in a story.
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This is one of those multicultural, creedal national, propositional nation fault points. The way to not "inflame division" is to ensure there's no other side. Not "inflaming division" would entail Digwa's family turning him in. It would involve his community turning on him, condemning and outcasting him. That's the bare minimum buy-in for a post-racial or multicultural society. You have to be willing to put the common good, including for non-ethnics, above base tribalism and ethnic nationalism.
Instead, Digwa's family actively helped him lie and cover up his murder. They were screaming "Racist!" at the judge during the trial. The Sikh community online seems to be largely pushing the completely counterfactual story invented by Digwa, in which Henry was a violent racist and Digwa was only defending himself.
If I were British, I would demanding that every member of that community who wasn't willing to side with the outraged native Briton protestors against their own co-ethnics be deported, regardless of immigration status. The other acceptable option would be fedposting in Minecraft.
In fairness, Digwa had already been barred from his local gurdwara at the time the stabbing took place, and in response British Sikh leaders are revisiting their policies around ceremonial blades:
Maybe nothing will come of it and these are just empty statements made under the advice of a lawyer until the case leaves the public imagination. But I've been legitimately impressed by the Sikh community's response, and think they've handled this a lot better than Britain's Muslim community would have done.
AIUI, for stealing from them. He was banned for intra-group anti-social behavior. Now, if they follow-up by banning and outcasting the whole family, I'll happily call them good people.
Yeah, I'd say that's the least they could do.
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Show me an example of a white Briton (or hell, let's make it easier for you: a white person from anywhere) stabbing a brown man, the police arriving on the scene to find the white aggressor clearly uninjured and the brown man visibly incapacitated, the white man claiming to have been attacked first, and on his word alone, the police handcuffing the visibly incapacitated brown man. If you can show me that, or even something vaguely analogous, I will consider the possibility that there are no real CW aspects to this awful case.
Nowak was not "panicking and freaking out". He was lying on his side, clearly incapacitated, and summoning what little strength he had remaining, he claimed that he'd been stabbed and couldn't breathe. Vickrum's father even told the officers that Nowak kept falling over. I believe the family made up some silly cover story about Nowak attacking Digwa, attempting to flee and cutting himself on a fence. Even if that was how Nowak got injured, it was obvious from the first that he was injured and Digwa wasn't. They should have attempted to render medical care to the clearly injured or incapacitated person. Instead, they put him in cuffs because he allegedly did a racism.
Oh, so in other words there are culture war aspects to this story? You changed your tune from one end of the comment to the other.
In my original comment I gave a whole category of this, domestic abuse victims.
It's common enough to make this mistake that some more experienced officers and departments have adopted the practice of arresting both in response.
Are there really so many domestic abuse cases in which the aggressor is a white man and the victim a brown man? I had no idea there were so many interracial gay couples.
Which, you'll notice, is not what happened here. They put the victim in handcuffs despite him clearly being immobile and incapacitated, and didn't put the aggressor in handcuffs, even though he was standing, lucid, talkative and showing no signs of visible injury at all. If they were unsure of how the altercation had gone down and decided to cuff both parties out of an abundance of caution, that would be one thing. Only cuffing the party who clearly poses no threat, claims to have been stabbed and is acting in a manner entirely consistent with that claim, while declining to cuff the other party? Inexcusable, and you know it.
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Not a clear example but your question makes me think of the Ahmaud Arbery case, where the killing was video-taped and no charged for months.
The video shows he got shot at only as he charged the shooter, and only actually got shot after he landed a few punches.
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The fact that their base behaviours seem to be to trust the brown guy levelling accusations of racism over the white guy who's dying on the ground is basically what people are upset about.
The culture war aspects are:
And that's just for starters.
To be clear here, they didn't know he was dying. The wound was not visible from their perspective.
I don't know if they ever said it anywhere but most likely they just assumed that he was pretty much every other case of a guy freaking out, an addict having an issue.
What constitutes "knowledge" here? The victim clearly articulated several times that he had, in fact, been stabbed and could not breathe. If you invoke enough skepticism, nobody can truly "know" anything.
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At the minimum, they knew Nowak was lying on the ground, immobile and incapacitated, while the man who claimed to have been attacked by him was standing, talkative, lucid and displaying no signs of injury whatsoever (absurdly pointing to a fictitious bruise on his eyelid to bolster his claim to have acted in self-defence). I don't think you need to be Sherlock Holmes to deduce that a) however the altercation might have transpired, Nowak did not pose an active threat to anyone at the time the police arrived on the scene (so cuffing him was unnecessary); and b) Digwa and his family weren't being entirely truthful in their versions of events.
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They should have known he was dying. They should certainly have managed to notice his injuries while they were handcuffing him for doing a racism. And they need to be extensively and explicitly re-trained that:
And that's just lessons for individual policemen to learn. The police force and the government is a whole other story.
I agree! Cops can suck and be poorly trained and we should ensure that they take each situation seriously instead of defaulting to "'calm person I spoke to first is being truthful and unresponsive person is just on drugs".
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A skinny 18 year-old with combed hair wearing a white shirt and tie is so unlikely to be a drug addict that you have to already be profiling like a progressive to consider it. Kid is calling out that he can't breathe and that he's been stabbed while one of the officers tells him that he has not been.
The likeliest explanation is that they believed the stabber because progressive values encourage righteous fury at any accusations of racism. The next likeliest explanation is that they profiled the kid on some other class basis, which is one of those bizarre Britishisms that does come up again and again whenever Britain's new minorities attack lower-class whites. Both of those possibilities are far likelier than a simple misunderstanding.
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How could a man with four stab wounds, one of which is 8cm deep, not have any visible injuries? What's the source for this claim?
It was winter so he wore a heavy jacket, and the bleeding seems to have been mostly internal. From the linked PDF:
Though I saw some mention of witnesses saying his mouth kept filling with blood (though after my first comment turning out to be false, I should point out it's only something I saw skimming the feeds, and don't have link for).
EDIT: Oh, actually it's kinda in the bodycam footage. One of the first things the killer's father says is "he has a mouth full of blood". Also you can hear him choking on his own blood.
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It's obvious the injuries were not very visible to the officers just by looking at their behavior! They don't see any wounds when first addressing him and they don't believe him when he says he was stabbed, being actively dismissive towards it at first.
His face had been slashed, according to the closing judicial remarks. Even if we assume it wasn't obvious, they can't have looked even slightly closely.
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This is equally well explained by the police being trained in systemically racist ideological terms to presume the worst of anyone accused of racism. They didn't even check. They didn't even ask "where". They just denied it without a moment's thought. "Don't think you have, mate" is a term that is going to live in infamy.
Derek Chauvin also didn't see any wounds.
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Assuming the officers acted reasonably when arguing that they acted reasonably is questionable.
Nothing the cops said suggests they saw the wounds and then decided to ignore it, as opposed to them just not seeing the wounds to begin with.
Maybe they didn't see it because it wasn't visible, or maybe they were all incompetents with 20/200 vision. I don't know why they didn't see it, but it seems like they just didn't.
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Quick sanity check: what is a "particularly culture war" situation. Was George Floyd one?
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So Derek Chauvin did nothing wrong?
I wouldn't say "nothing" - he probably should have noticed the suspect is ODing and modify his behavior accordingly, and then maybe the whole debacle wouldn't happen. But he is certainly not guilty of murder. He was sacrificed because the politics demanded it.
Because at the end of the day conservatives are willing to give a W to their culture war enemies and throw one of their own under the bus to keep their city from burning down. Same as for James Fields. And you can see the incentive problem there from Pluto.
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I never said the police behaved appropriately. In fact the last paragraph should suggest I believe otherwise and this is a failure in both police behavior and in training. They should not just be assuming everyone having a crisis is just a druggie or a schizo.
Floyd was actually a druggie. So how was the police reaction to him worse?
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And your first three paragraphs apply much more directly to the George Floyd incident.
Do you not see the parallel, or are you experiencing a pathological nervousness about inadvertently making an argument that could get you fired (or killed and your pleas of help mocked by the police)?
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