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'I can't breath' - The murder of Henry Nowak
Recently a story that was bouncing around right-wing circles on Twitter has broken through to the front pages. Henry Nowak, an eighteen year old white (Polish) man was murdered in the UK by Vikrum Digwa, a Sikh, with his ceremonial blade (a Shastar). When police arrived, Henry was on the floor telling police that he had been stabbed (four times) and that he couldn't breathe (nine times). However, the police ignored Henry's pleas and instead believed the story concocted by Vikrum and his brother, that Henry was a drunk racist who had attacked an innocent brown man.
In a chilling exchange, a policeman responds to Henry's plea that he has been stabbed with 'Don't think you have mate', before dragging him across the gravel and handcuffing him. A policewoman agrees with Vikrum's brother that he hasn't been stabbed, saying 'I know, but we should probably check'. By the time they realise the truth and try to administer first aid, it is too late. Henry died knowing that the people who should have come to save him, instead believed his murderer.
Some other details:
Comparisons are rightly being drawn to the killing of George Floyd. Nigel Farage has demanded 'white hot rage' and has in turn been accused by MPs of inciting violence (there have been riots outside the local police station). The Police Minister has denied that Britain has two-tier policing, while also condemning police guidance that seems to mandate it.
The Independent Office for Police Conduct is investigating the local police force, and one of the arresting officers has already resigned. We'll see if anything comes of these investigations, although the most likely outcome in my opinion will be just the usual 'lessons will be learned'. Police currently working for the constabulary speak of a climate where an accusation of racism can ruin careers, and where staff are trained to always take the side of racial minority complainants, so it'll be interesting to see if the IOPC investigation finds this to be the case.
The 'two tier justice' claim seems to be cutting through with the public, and clearly rattles the government. One can hope that Henry's death leads to less antiracism training, affirmative action and race action plans, but we'll see.
I don't think we can say these comparisons are right. In the George Floyd killing, it was the police who were responsible. In this killing, it was a civilian. Now did the police get the situation utterly wrong? Absolutely. But this is quite different from the police actually killing Nowak.
That's a point very much in contention. Floyd responded to his arrest by swallowing a bunch of drugs to avoid possession charges. His tox screen showed more than enough fent to kill a man. He actually had a nearly identical situation 13 months prior, where he was arrested for being a general lowlife criminal, swallowed all his drugs, ODed and nearly died, but in that instance the ambulance arrived in 4 minutes instead of 9 and he was revived.
It is not in contention. Multiple autopsies confirmed George Floyd's death was caused by homicide. A court found the police officer who sat on his neck guilty of second degree murder. You clearly do not like the man, but that doesn't change the facts.
Ultimately, I don't know what best practice for maximizing a fentanyl-overdose patient's chances of survival looks like, but I would be very surprised if it looks like pinning him down in a chokehold, any more than best practice for a stab victim is to try to handcuff him. Whether Floyd died from physical choking or as a result of the drugs he'd ingested doesn't let Chauvin off the moral hook; in Floyd's as in Nowak's case, it would still leave us with officers who wasted time "restraining" an already-dying man instead of trying to save his life.
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Reddit levels of _"nuh-uh!" with nothing to back it up.
The Fall of Minneapolis is an entire documentary, that you can watch for free, about the extensive fuckery around the George Floyd case. While, charitably, there is room to argue about Floyd's cause of death, the idea that any sort of fair process of justice was carried out after the fact is close to laughable at this point. Chauvin being in sentenced to over 20 years is perhaps the most recent and glaring example of a literal political prisoner.
Then you have to layer on the contest of lackdown double-standards from 2020. "Stay home with no exceptions unless you want to murder your whole neighborhood" gave way to "It's not possible to catch COVID at a George Floyd rally" awfully quickly.
The entire George Floyd meta-cycle ought to be studied as one of those particularly shameful mass events in American history. I'd put it up there with, ironically enough, something like the spontaneously lynchings in the South over the first 20 - 30 years of the 20th century.
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No, two autopsies found different results. The original one "revealed no physical findings that support a diagnosis of traumatic asphyxia or strangulation."
The second autopsy, the "independent" one, was hired by the family, represented by race-baiting huckster Benjamin Crump.
The tox report found Fentanyl 11 ng/ml. 2-3 ng/ml is lethal for someone without a high tolerance
“[Dr. Baker] said that if Mr. Floyd had been found dead in his home (or anywhere else) and there were no other contributing factors he would conclude that it was an overdose death,” the memo said.
That's not utterly conclusive, but I think any reasonable person would consider it a reasonable doubt, especially given the unprecedented pressure campaign going on. If you were a medical examiner during the Summer of Love, would you have been willing to send all the people burning cities into a berserk rage by declaring it an OD? At what confidence level?
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