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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.
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?
I agree for the specific case. If a society decides that knives are bad, it seems silly to make exceptions.
Other things are more general rules than hills society is willing to die on. If you get a court date, there is a strong expectation that you will appear on that date, but you can probably get an exemption if your best friend is marrying on that day or you have an important medical appointment scheduled. There is little lost in also making "it is sabbath and it would be really inconvenient for me to get to court" also a valid excuse. Likewise, if Christians want to take a sip of wine with the Eucharist, it would be an asshole move to require their church to get a liqueur license. If kids miss a day of school a year for an important religious holiday, we can probably make an exception from the rule of mandatory school attendance, nor does there seem much point to require someone to take PE classes during Ramadan (or ever, but sadly society disagrees with me on that one).
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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.
People have tongue in cheek started pushing for ethnic weapon carrying. For the English this would be the Seax.
So, for those of us with mixed ancestry, do we pick one, or turn into a Wayne Reynolds character?
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Unfortunately this gives me the choice of two guardless folding knives, and the jawbone of an ass.
Carrying a donkey's jawbone on your hip would certainly lend a certain gravitas in the courtroom.
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In America, it would be the KA-BAR combat knife, wielded by our most deadly warriors.
I personally would broaden that to any kind of Bowie knife, of which the Ka-bar is a superlative example, in honor of our frontier heritage.
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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).
It was more that I was skeptical that the mindset is actually new. I think people just have way more channels to spread this stuff outside of respectable media.
And whether it'll stick this time. The left didn't win on Horton at the time, but they attempted to frame all such measures (including Clinton's crime bill) as modern racism and they succeeded well enough to get themselves a repeat experiment in coddling criminals for a couple of years.
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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.
One of our own was killed by a violent terrorist. We must therefore make sure to never make violent terrorists upset and make every effort to accommodate them so they are spared the trauma of murdering our own people.
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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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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.
Meanwhile, in my actual comment -- not the more convenient one you're invented to respond to -- I was asking about where this has happened with the ethnicities flipped.
In my reply to your comment, I was aware of the examples you gave in your comment; this is how time works. Those are not examples to my actual question, as you know.
A brown man stabbed a white man. The police showed up and arrested the white man. I can't imagine a good-faith version of your comment where you transport this into "Well, sometimes the police arrest both people in domestic abuse cases!"
Fortunately, I know now not to waste time attempting to imagine the hypothetical good-faith version of such a comment.
There's barely any of those, in the same way there's barely any of white victims with colored aggressors being left free. In reality the ordinary large majority of cases of police believing an aggressor over the victim are same race friends/family who knew each other beforehand and the aggressor calmly lies while the victim responds "inappropriately" and stupid cops assume calm = innocent while not obeying orders/being emotional/whatever = guilty.
It is a real documented and known issue, but most violence works that way. It's almost always people you already know. And therefore almost every case of cops making stupid assumptions is in situations of violence between people who knew each other.
Are there... more than zero?
Because you're the one saying this isn't "unique", it's not representative of a pattern, yawn, it's an everyday occurrence, nothing to see here.
You present a completely unrelated category of domestic abuse as if it proves your position.
When asked for evidence (by two different people!) you pretend that your previously-presented unrelated category is the thing they asked for, and they apparently just failed to read your comment correctly.
When pressed further, you say "there's barely any of [the thing you asked for]". Well, sorry, but I don't even believe you have any of the thing I asked for, or you'd have triumphantly presented it.
I restate that you wouldn't be putting in a fraction of this effort to obfuscate the truth if the ethnicities had been different. I don't pretend to understand why you do this, but I see you doing this.
One of the most common categories of violent crime seems pretty relevant to violent crime discussions. Feel free to disagree, but clearly we're talking past each other at that point.
We're not "talking past each other"; you are being deliberately obtuse.
As has been explained to you multiple times, by multiple people: "the police sometimes arrest both people in domestic violence" cases has nothing to do with "the police arresting solely the guy who had been stabbed instead of his murderer".
Fortunately, as you continue to pretend not to understand what people are telling you, we can defer to ChatGPT. Normally I wouldn't do this, but you, specifically -- magicalkittycat -- as a poster, have previously claimed that AI output is "impartial" and "neutral", which you then use as evidence for your positions ("the robot agrees with me!"). So let's see what it says:
So, would you prefer to (a) retract your claim that the domestic violence thing is relevant, or (b) retract your claim that AI is neutral and impartial, and never use it again to try and score points on TheMotte?
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Why is domestic violence a "category" of crime, instead of simply being rolled into the non-specific whole? You don't see people talking about near-fire-hydrant crime, after all.
I think it's categorized separately because it's different. And because it's different, it might not make for a good basis for comparisons.
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I fail to understand how the claim "police officers are sometimes unsure of who to arrest in domestic abuse calls" somehow proves your contention that there's nothing remarkable about police officers only arresting a clearly incapacitated man while making zero effort to arrest the man who stabbed him in what was not a domestic abuse situation. They are entirely unrelated claims.
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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).
Tourists and lurkers break silence at moments of intense rage. Let it die down and the normal posters will go back to asserting the teenage student deserved to die because he had racist thoughts.
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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.
The modal white collar criminal is probably a homeowner knowingly paying a contractor cash under the table to help the contractor avoid taxation.
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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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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 on his own blood like this is just another day at the office.
The video here is not someone defending race-based policing. It's someone from the opposition (not sure if Tory or Reform) attacking the government (i.e. Labour) for race-based policing and asking them to stop it. The reply could well have defended it, but it's not included in that video.
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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.
Its too late. Too many minorities have fucked over the community. We need to bring back the death penalty. Him, his brother and his mother at a minimum need to be executed. Sikhs need to lose their privilege of wearing knives. They can wear a harmless knife (i.e. plastic or restactable or something. If they don't like that, honestly they can fuck off. I'm sick of white people in their own country having to bend to accommodate immigrants. I'm sick of white people being blamed for everything.
If this community wants to survive in Britain it better bend like the fucking willow tree.
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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.
Yeah it does sound like Digwa/his family were outlier-level belligerent and weapon-hoarding amongst the Sikh community. Afaik the brother had also had some legal troubles due to being armed?
Yes, the brother and father have both appeared in court on weapons charges.
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Actually the bigger issue that stuck out to me is the calmness the police exhibited in bringing Digwa to jail. He had a knife on his person, had just stabbed the guy who by this point was dead. Why didn't the police immediately cuff him or at least make him surrender his knives. Is it religious exemption? Maybe once muslims say raping little girls or killing infidels is religiously sanctioned the police will back off and oh my I just remembered it IS religiously sanctioned. Looks like I'm gonna set up a religion where white people are obligated to transfer 10 quid to my bank account every time they breathe, and if they don't its racism. I'm shitskinned enough to pass off as an oppressed minority this could probably work.
I believe the actual murder weapon had already been taken away by his mother, though I'd imagine he'd probably still have had his other smaller legal knife on him as a Sikh.
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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.
Also, even assuming this really was a legitimate self defense situation, YOU STILL HANDCUFF, SEARCH, AND ARREST THE KILLER. This is standard procdure and it was drilled into me when I did the training for my CCW: if you shoot someone for any reason, the cops have to assume (for their own safety, if nothing else) you are a dangerous criminal and will arrest you with 100% certainty. They will not calmly take your statement and leave. They will draw weapons, order you to the ground, cuff you, and place you under arrest. Only after an investigation will you be allowed to leave, and you should assume you will be spending at least the night in jail.
The fact these cops are just hanging out shooting the shit with someone who they know, at the very least, just laid some dude out on the ground after a physical confrontation is fucking insane. I've seen enough bodycam footage to know it's only by the grace of god that nothing happened to them as well, with how carelessly they acted.
I think I read somewhere that the Digwa family told the police that Nowak had attempted to climb over a fence, on which he'd cut himself, hence his injuries.
To be fair, this claim is significantly more plausible if you've seen UK fences.
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A closer match (though still much more ambiguous) than the domestic violence red herring:
https://sfpublicdefender.org/2024/08/06/charges-dismissed-against-black-crime-victim-who-was-wrongfully-charged-and-jailed-after-muni-altercation/
Old white guy took black guy's dropped money, black guy asks for it back, white guy refuses, eventually reaches out and scratches black guy's face, after which the black guy pushes the old white guy to the ground. Police arrive and arrest the black guy. Security camera recording confirms that sequence of events (though SF Public Defenders office is infamously unreliable in their narrations).
Thank you. Clearly, the Nowak case is not quite as unique as I had erstwhile believed.
A bit different when there's a noted disparity of age.
If this had hypothetically been a 75 year old Digwa and a 20 year old Nowak I feel like the optics would be slightly better
The even more obvious dissimilarity is that Digwa was clearly uninjured, while at the very least Nowak was obviously immobile and incapacitated. But I am nonetheless pleased that someone was able to find a case which fit the broad contours of a case like Nowak's with the racial valence reversed.
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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.
Are you trying to claim there's a widespread epidemic of white victims being left lying on the ground while colored attackers are left alone? That's not true at all, a case like this is extremely rare. The only reason it's generating so much discussion, just like the Floyd case, is because such extremes are very rare.
The ordinary large majority of cases of police believing an aggressor over the victim are same race friends/family who knew each other beforehand and the aggressor calmly lies while the victim responds "inappropriately" and stupid cops assume calm = innocent while not obeying orders/being emotional/whatever = guilty.
Of course not! This sort of issue being rather common is exactly why some more experienced and smarter officers and departments do dual arrests. Lots of cops are stupid or uncaring and don't do that. It happens often, and is a well documented recurring issue.
Nice judo flip, but -- like you're doing with my comment -- you're deliberately trying to mislead anyone reading.
You claimed this isn't unique. Both FtttG and myself asked you for examples of it happening with different ethnicities. You don't get to then go "Oh, you're claiming that there are a thousand Henry Nowaks?!?" to distract from your failure to actually answer the question, twice.
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No: I asked you for a specific example of the reverse, wherein a brown victim is handcuffed while the white aggressor is left alone. I don't know why you brought up domestic abuse calls, as that doesn't seem remotely relevant to my request.
Okay, but again – why are you bringing this up? What does that have to do with this case?
"This man got stabbed, and when the police came they put him in handcuffs without bothering to cuff the man who stabbed him."
"Yeah. Sometimes when responding to domestic abuse calls, police will arrest both parties just to be safe."
That has literally nothing to do with this case. I don't know why you're bringing it up. It's completely irrelevant. We're not talking about police arresting both parties out of an excess of caution. We're talking about the police arresting one person, and it being the wrong one.
I share your frustration with magicalkittycat's rather confused line of argument as I'm reading through this comment thread, but if I may steelman the basic point just to satisfy my own OCD-esque tendencies: I think the valid argument that magicalkittycat has been failing to make in an intelligible way goes something like "mistaking a rational-seeming attacker for the victim and a panicked, incoherent victim for the deranged attacker is a standard police failure mode, as shown by this error's prevalence in domestic abuse case, which is so great that steps have sometimes been taken to circumvent it ie dual arrests. Therefore, the null hypothesis in the Digwa case should be that the races of the parties is flatly irrelevant, and it was just an example of this welll-known, non-race-based failure-mode at work."
To which you're essentially preemptively objected that if that were so, then we should expect to see instances of this race-neutral bias affecting cases with a rational-seeming white attacker and a frantic POC victim. Which is sensible, though I don't think it necessarily suffices to defeat the argument. (It may be, for example, that pro-minority bias is involved in cases where police officers are confronted with a visibly distressed person of color in a way that 'cancels out' the usual 'believe the more put-together person's claim' bias - but that in the Digwa/Nowak-shaped case, race never becomes a relevant factor because the pro-minority racial bias would simply have been reinforcing the already predetermined outcome, and can thus be discounted.)
My other objection to his explanation is that it's simply untrue that Nowak was panicked. Rather, he was incapacitated, not moving, and lying on his side (unlike Digwa, who was standing, lucid, talkative and uninjured), which should have immediately raised the police officers' suspicions that Nowak was severely injured and hence not the aggressor. Likewise, he was not incoherent: every factual statement he made with what little strength he had left ("I've been stabbed", "I can't breathe") was both true and articulated clearly enough to be easily understood via heavily compressed bodycam footage.
The police officers did not accept the word of a calm actor over a panicked and incoherent one. They accepted the word of a calm actor over one who was visibly on death's door, presumably for reasons of their respective races. That's what people are so enraged about.
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It barely happens in any racial direction!
Almost every bit of violence is done by people who knew each other beforehand. Therefore, almost every case where this stupid assumption gets made is done in cases where people knew each other beforehand.
But also nice changing your words
As you said
You don't think that one of the most common forms of violence regularly having this exact issue is even "vaguely analogous"? I would say it's not even vaguely! It's one of the most common forms of violence!
Yes, cops do that pretty often. Which is why the smarter departments and officers take a dual arrest approach, cause they don't want to make that common mistake. There are still plenty of stupid or lazy or uncaring cops who just assume calm = good.
Dude, apparently it didn't get through when FtttG said it, so let me try (using his exact words):
It's not "vaguely analogous", and he explained exactly why. The words in people's comments are there to explain things to you; they're not just for decoration.
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So, you can't cite an example of the thing I requested? You mean (contrary to what you earlier claimed) this case is unique?
When I said "vaguely analogous" I was referring to the white aggressor/brown victim component of my request. I would have accepted, for example, an instance in which a white aggressor non-lethally assaulted a brown victim, and the police arrested the brown victim while leaving the white aggressor alone. But it seems you can't even produce one of those.
If it's the case that cops arrest the wrong party pretty often, show me one. Show me a case where the cops arrested the wrong person, and that person was non-white while their aggressor was white. Otherwise I don't even know what we're doing here.
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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.
The video shows a violent confrontation initiated by the McMichaels. Their legal argument was that they were making a legal citizen's arrest, not that they were acting in self defence. Based on the video alone, the McMichaels were obviously guilty notwithstanding Arbery throwing the first punch - indeed if the case had somehow ended with the McMichaels dead, Arbery would have had a decent self-defence claim. The reason why they were not charged until the the case attracted media attention was that the local police in a Georgia small town thought that it was normal pro-social behaviour for a retired cop to round up a posse in hot pursuit of a jogger who trespassed on a construction site.
Where? They weren't hitting him, they weren't even threatening him. You can make the argument that they shouldn't go around armed, and "arresting" people, but the fact remains he's the one that initiated violence.
In what world is detaining someone with a drawn gun after you chased them down in trucks, not threatening them?? Such a weird position to take. Considering the McMichaels were convicted of this one, its also a wrong position to take. and I say this as someone who was originally on the McMichaels' side when it first all went down.
I meant threatening in the "I'm going to fucking kill you" way. "Wait here with us until the police arrives" may qualify if we're being autistic, but doesn't belong in the same category, in my opinion.
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I believe the legal argument is that by trying to detain him whilst armed they were initiating the confrontation.
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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.
Are you okay with George Floyd's death, since the police were clearly not aware of his drug ingestion?
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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.
The problem for police is that they constantly have to deal with hardcore defectbots, so when they end up with a cooperate bot they habitually hit defect because 9/10 it's the sensible move.
"I know my rights" "You can't touch me that's assault" "I've got mental health" "Fucking racist police" "Stop touching me up you pervert" "She stabbed me" "I didn't do nothing" "He's the one who started it" "I can't breathe" "I get claustrophobia" "You should catch the real criminals" "I need my medicine" "These handcuffs are too tight" "You have to let me go" "You like to pick on little people don't you" "Those aren't mine" "Why aren't you helping me" "I've never seen that before" "He's a liar" "I need a doctor" "I haven't touched a drop" "They're getting away" "I got lost and I thought this was my house" "It's only a little bit" "He was filming me" "I'm allergic" "You're making my baby cry" "I'm dying" "Why should I" "Don't tase me bro" "I didn't see him" "It's cos I'm black" "I want him to leave me alone" "According to the magna carta" "You're giving me anxiety" "She told me she was over 18" "I'm not resisting" "Watch out I'm HIV" "You've got the wrong person" "I paid full price for that" "You're hurting me" "Do you know who I am" "I swear to god I'm telling you the truth" "This is fascism" "You're making a mistake" "I thought it was legal" "It was an accident" "I bet you can't even count to a thousand with your eyes closed"
Which ones are genuine? Did you read all of them and give each one careful individual consideration, or did you tune out as they blurred into ambient whining?
I assume that police have enough training and common sense to provide first aid or call for an ambulance for anyone who appears to be badly injured. I also assume they have enough negative experiences to be sceptical of a suspect who doesn't appear to be badly injured claiming they are. Since they treated Nowak with scepticism instead of medical attention I assume that his injuries appeared to be minor and in the context more akin to a drinker who had just lost a fistfight.
If you train police to check suspects for unseen injuries all you're going to find is the majority of suspects don't have any unseen injuries, but they do have a propensity to attack or try to escape while you're distracted because they've learnt that saying they're injured creates that opportunity. Of course if you can see they're injured you can make your own assessment and don't need to factor in their honesty.
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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.
I really think people underestimate how much being drowned in these "trainings" for years and years impacts you. I'm pretty damn not-pozzed but I have to do trainings multiple times a year* and it makes it hard not to unconsciously buy their frame on things.
The "anti-racist" training is incredibly racist and it works and it results in stuff like this...
*One employer took us off clinical duties for a full week yearly to indoctrinate us in social justice. And it's one you've heard of.
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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.
What could they have said to suggest this? "okay m8, I see you're coughing up blood, but I'm going to ignore that, you haven't been stabbed, mmmkay?" Kind of an unreasonable expectation on your part. It's obvious that they wouldn't say they're ignoring the wounds if they're ignoring them.
What part of their behavior and words indicates they saw the wounds and purposely chose to ignore them?
The fact he said I was stabbed multiple times. The female cop said his irises were dialating and not responsive. He wasn't resisting, and the "victim" was completely unharmed should have been a fucking clue.
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The fact that the guy's mouth was full of blood and his skin was of a cadaverish shade would be suggestive of injury in my view.
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Quick sanity check: what is a "particularly culture war" situation. Was George Floyd one?
@magicalkittycat, hey bro, how come you answered pretty much every comment except this one?
I haven't answered lots of replies, there's way too many! Just doing a quick check there has been >40 replies to me in 9 hours. I have a busy life with work and my kids and this is just something I'm going to check and reply to casually if there's too many going on.
But sure I'll answer yours
I don't think it's much of a culture war situation because basically no one has been on the side of "police should just make up their mind based off the first person they talk to and police should ignore a stabbing victim's pleas by assuming they're just a druggie or hallucinating or whatever the police assumed there". I haven't seen anyone argue that it is good for police to do that.
For a culture war, certainly there must be a war element to it. Some sort of disagreement on if this behavior was responsible policing or something. But nope doesn't seem to be much, pretty much everyone left and right wing I know seems to agree, police should actually check instead of just assuming it's nonsense.
There it is, the Darwin tell:
@ArjinFerman, just in case you were unaware, you are talking to one of Darwin's alts. (The last one was called @guesswho.)
I have an alternate theory, that Darwin runs a school of rhetoric and we're seeing some of his students.
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By this definition you are a Dean Alt.
It might shock you but not everyone here is a no-lifer who's primary hobby is arguing on the internet. You are kinda telling on yourself, go touch grass. Furthermore when you take a stance that is opposite to the Motte's consensus you tend to get a lot of shit. Not everyone is worth responding to and not getting to someone is not indicative to being an alt.
Just cuz you and MKC got into it in another thread doesn't mean you need to follow them to hear to start shit again.
EDIT: after reading this new thread you both need to get modded, holy shit.
Yeah, no. You're in the wrong here.
In your other comment, you say:
... and then here, you say:
You're reusing the exact antagonistic, insulting language magicalkittycat was using against FtttG, while simultaneously pretending to be some kind of enlightened neutral party going "hey guys, you both need to calm down".
You obviously don't want to calm things down, or get anyone to "cool their jets"; you're just shit-stirring. Like when you called the dead man a "retard".
If you sincerely want people to cool their jets, maybe don't deliberately be as antagonistic as possible.
Apparently not. Maybe you should update your priors about what constitutes good behavior in this place and what is not. They were clearly both rage posting at each other personally, which is frowned upon.
I think its far clear you are pissed that I have a disagreeable opinion, that dares to disagree with you in another thread. As such you feel the need to follow me around and make low effort snipes.
I don't feel the need to shit-stir online, I can do it in person to a far more enjoyable degree. I express my honest 100% opinion. It is always weird to me that there exists a class of people who essentially assume any opinion not agreeing with their own is a troll. And then comes to a debate forum filled with heterodox thinkers.
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What?
How am I telling on myself?
You are essentially pissed at MKC for that other thread around finding a white perpetrator and a minority victim. You are following them around to start shit with them. You both need to cool jets. You are accusing them of being an alt because they used the same sentence as someone else...
By your accusation, Dean has also accused them of being a darwin alt and followed them around to start shit. Ergo your logic makes you a dean alt. (its shit logic) Pot meet Kettle.
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I swear to god.
Kindly stop with the melodramatic callouts. Perhaps you missed the last round. If you really think Arjin is missing key information, send him a DM.
And you, @magicalkittycat. I know you were paying attention. Falling back on personal attacks does no one any favors.
The closest thing to it was saying that I have a job and a busy life and that it's not unique to do so, and thus assuming that it is so unique or strange to fit the category of "employed with family" that giving it as a response to a question as why I don't reply to every comment is not indicative or whatever weird conspiracy theory he has in his head.
Now I don't know why it comes off as so unique to him. Maybe he's currently unemployed. Maybe he's a NEET and most people in his life are also unemployed.
I don't care, I'm not passing judgement. I have an aunt who lives off social security because she's disabled and hasn't worked for almost two decades. That's fine.
It's just a very strange thing to assume "job with kids makes me busy" is unique. It's not, it's normal and common.
Perhaps I wasn’t clear.
Do not respond to accusations with personal attacks. Block them, address the substance, I don’t care, but do not take the opportunity to speculate on your interlocutor’s life story. Especially do not respond to a warning about personal attacks by making more guesses about what’s going on in his head.
One day ban.
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As I've made ABUNDANTLY clear to you, I never claimed the fact that you have a job and a family is remarkable in and of itself. I was pointing out the specific pattern of behaviour in which you 1) write a lengthy comment in which you employ some extremely specious reasoning 2) multiple people push back on it 3) you airily announce that you don't have time to reply to all the comments because you have a job and a family (and, in a staggering coincidence, the only times your professional and familial obligations present an obstacle to you posting here is when people are criticising your specious reasoning). This was a very specific thing that @guesswho did on multiple occasions, so it would strike me as a massive coincidence if you are not the same person as @guesswho.
You know something else @guesswho did a great deal? Pretending not to understand something which has been repeatedly explained to him in exhaustive detail, as you're doing now. Something else? Denying that he's engaging personal attacks while engaging in personal attacks. You think you're so clever ("Maybe he's currently unemployed. Maybe he's a NEET and most people in his life are also unemployed. I don't care, I'm not passing judgement...").
I'm not unemployed. I have a good job. Most people in my life also have good jobs.
Seriously, mods – if accusing me and everyone I know of being unemployed losers with no prospects (with the fig leaf of "I'm not passing judgement" wink wink) doesn't qualify as "antagonistic, uncharitable or unkind" behaviour, what the hell does?
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You're right, I should have DM'd him, I apologise.
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Wow incredible! I have a job and family and other hobbies and don't prioritize replying to every single comment here.
I feel like you're telling on yourself, and what you think of the userbase, really hard here if you think being a well adjusted individual with an active life is an odd thing. No offense but you might really need some grass touching dude.
This convinces approximately no one, by the way.
No offence (as, apparently, those are magic words that allow you to cause offence), but trying to smear FtttG like this is pathetic.
Well either having a job and family and other hobbies and being busy with them most of the day is a weird thing to do on this site like he claims, or it's not a weird thing and his accusation (that me saying those things is proof I'm some other user who also says those things) doesn't make sense.
It's like if I said
"Sorry, I eat sandwiches for lunch" and he went "you knew who else ate sandwiches? Joe"
Like ok? Tons of people eat sandwiches. That doesn't make sense unless he doesn't eat sandwiches and doesn't think other people do.
That would make sense if me and Joe were the odd guys out for eating sandwiches. It would be wrong, tons of people eat sandwiches but it would make sense as an accusation if that's what he believed.
Like that's fine, I don't judge people who don't eat sandwiches (don't spend lots of their time doing other things and come on here in between stuff on various days (like right now it's decently early before work gets really heavy and sometimes spend days without checking at all.)) He could be a NEET for all I know and care.
But it's still weird to use "you eat sandwiches" as some sort of accusation. That is just telling on yourself.
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I am a well-adjusted individual with an active life. I was pointing out that you and @guesswho (if we're still maintaining the pretense that you are separate individuals) have an eerily similar tic where you have seemingly limitless time to expound on your opinions (seriously dude, you post an average of 2.5 comments per day here, you're in no position to throw stones), but the second you get any significant amount of pushback, you instantly claim to be far too busy with your other responsibilities to reply to them. I'm not criticising you for not replying to every comment (I routinely have more important things to do than to be posting here). I'm pointing out that the pattern of behaviour is so uncannily similar that I would be flabbergasted if you aren't yet another Darwin alt/sockpuppet. And I really, truthfully, do not understand this weird urge you feel to periodically flounce off, only to reappear some time later under a new username. It's just such phenomenally strange behaviour. I wonder what your next username will be.
Damn are you me too then?
I also regularly go days without posting too and when I do post it's generally in bursts centered together.
Woah, you are a Darwin alt. Your pattern of behavior claiming you have other things to do is just what he did! Holy shit.
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I remain skeptical that he's Darwin. I understand what you're getting at, I recognize the similarity, but I maintain there are also differences in their styles.
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There's still an important part of this question you're not answering for some reason.
George Floyd? It should be obvious he is because people were actually arguing about it. There was a war element to his death.
Some people said police shouldn't kneel on a man's neck for 9 minutes as the man pleads that he is struggling to breath, and others think it is an acceptable restraining method.
There is an actual disagreement over police behavior.
Just adding my 2c, without necessarily disagreeing with you.
The George Floyd saga has permanently warped how people process crimes along racial lines, even if racial motives are marginal or non-existent in the actual facts of a case, both sides now instinctively torture the evidence to cram it into their preferred meta-narrative. The right has been hunting for its own George Floyd (a galvanising martyrdom moment) ever since 2020 to mobilise society against the liberal scolds and their holy cows, who have been hectoring an entire generation of young white men with moral screeds about racism and sexism since childhood, and permanently demolish Floyd's status as a modern day saint.
But there is crucial context that most analysts tend to overlook, BLM 2020 was a 3-standard deviation phenomenon. The scale of the explosion had less to do with the specifics of Floyd’s death or even the popular narrative (unarmed black man murdered by racist white cop) and far more to do with the timing. It detonated in the middle of the COVID lockdowns, when mass boredom, economic despair, social atomisation, and psychological fragility had already pushed people to extremism. Those conditions created ideal kindling for nationwide (and global) hysteria. The racial angle provided the perfect pretext for the rioters to engage in violent acts with total impunity (because only a racist would criticise the so-called resistance). This was also the time when Andrew Tate became the most googled guy. We’re unlikely to see anything on that scale ever again, including from BLM itself. 6 years on, it seems even the kids are joking about it.
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Was there? I'm honestly not seeing one, unless I apply a completely different standard between that case and this. No one was saying the police should never be allowed to restrain a suspect, or on the other side, that they should be allowed to arbitrarily murder black people.
Not really. What I recall from the conversations here was a reaction that was essentially identical to yours: "Its a sad situation but nothing here seems unique or even too particularly culture war". It wasn't until the toxicology report came out that people started making the argument that the method of restraint he used had nothing to do with Floyd's death, and therefore was essentially fine. Progressives never really disagreed with that statement either, they just didn't address it.
So where's the war?
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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.
And the worst part is, the cities burned anyway.
Not after the verdict they didn't.
Well, in some narrow understanding of "after" it is true, the riot activity, while remaining ongoing in the worst places (like Portland) generally subsided in 2021, owing to the loss for Trump in the presidential election, easing up of COVID restrictions, etc. However, since the trial and the verdict were in the spring of 2021, the major burning of the cities - the "summer of love", etc. - happening in 2020, could not have been influenced by it. One could argue that maybe an opposite verdict could re-ignite the riots, but I kind of doubt that, with Democrats back in the White House, they now needed the picture of "we are building back better", with localized pockets of racist insurrectionists stirring shit up and being justifiably suppressed. By that time, the narrative shifted from "rioting is good and righteous" to "public protest against the government is insurrection and justifies lethal response, including using the military". So I don't think there was even anything to pay for by that time with that sacrifice. But it was made anyway, because there was no other way it could happen.
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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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