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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.
The specifics of "random guy attacks another random guy" is pretty rare in general yeah, including across racial boundaries. Most violence is done by people who knew each other beforehand.
The phenomenon of "cops assume calm person who spoke to them first is innocent" is not so rare. That's extremely common and happens across the board. Mostly to "they knew each other beforehand cases" but that's because those are the large large majority of violent crime!
If you want specifically race, sure https://atlantablackstar.com/2023/01/28/colorado-police-arrest-black-woman-after-74-year-old-white-man-objected-to-how-she-parked-at-store-and-scuffled-with-her/
That too of course is rare though, because most violence is done by people who knew each other beforehand. And therefore cases of police arresting the wrong victim in stranger on stranger violence in any racial direction are inherently rare, while the overall phenomenon of police making mistakes is not.
Okay – so if it's not so rare, it shouldn't be difficult for you to find an example which is at least broadly comparable to this one, but with reversed racial dynamics. It doesn't have to be an altercation between two strangers: surely it shouldn't be difficult for you to find an instance in which two male friends of different races (or even two female) got into a fight, the non-white one was clearly more severely injured, but the police arrested him rather than the visibly less injured white party. There must be tens of thousands of hours of publicly available bodycam footage out there, and I'm confident that woke people would be screaming the house down about racial profiling if an event like this had transpired. But despite claiming that Henry Nowak's case isn't especially unique, you can't come up with even one example with the racial dynamics reversed. How strange.
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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.
Looking through some court documents it looks like there is a lot of confusion if the McMichaels actually every told Arbery they were detaining him until the police arrived. But it looks like under cross they admitted they had not, they just chased and cornered him.
src: https://lawandcrime.com/live-trials/live-trials-current/ahmaud-arbery/accused-murderer-travis-mcmichael-concedes-ahmaud-arbery-was-just-running-when-he-drove-after-him/
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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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