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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.
Some years ago, I wrote an article complaining about an irritating tic wherein progressive journalists will assert "Alice has faced controversy in the past for her problematic opinions" but will refuse to tell the reader what those opinions are, thereby allowing them to draw their own conclusions. I argued that this should always be taken a tacit admission that the problematic opinions in question are ones that the average reader can be assumed to agree with. If there was a smoking gun (e.g. Alice has consistently argued that the Holocaust didn't really happen), the journalist would say that outright. Their reluctance to tell the reader what the opinions in question are illustrates a lack of confidence in their own opinions to win in the marketplace of ideas.
I now think this is a specific example of a general rule: if a political partisan doesn't want to talk about a particular story, it's because they know that it favours their ideological opponents' worldview more than their own.
Andrew Doyle has an article called "Henry Nowak and the politics of deflection" in which he notes that a Spanish newspaper, El País, has published exactly one article about the case, which takes Nigel Farage to task for cynically "weaponising" the case to further his supposedly far-right agenda. (The article doesn't even include a photo of Nowak, but does include a photo of Farage.) The woke gobshite I mentioned a couple of hours ago insists that, because Digwa was arrested, convicted and sentenced to life in prison, therefore there's nothing to see here and anyone who wants to talk about it is a "racist idiot".
The reason this man wants to focus on the fact that Digwa and his mother were convicted is because it's the only aspect of this case which is remotely flattering to the British establishment, and to the progressive worldview more broadly. In every other particular about this case, progressives know they haven't got a leg to stand on, and that it vindicates just about every complaint conservatives have been making for years about immigration, ethnic enclaves, clannishness and two-tier justice. Consider:
Read down through the numbered list above: there is no element of it which casts the progressive worldview in a positive light. (Even the fact that Digwa and his mother were convicted is far from a slam-dunk: although his father and brother have appeared in court on weapons charges, they really ought to be charged with obstruction of justice or whatever the equivalent crime in the UK is.) In other words, this is an anti-scissor statement: there is no possible way you can spin it that is remotely flattering to the progressive worldview. In this scenario, short of admitting that a stopped clock is right twice a day, the only winning move you can make is to ignore the case altogether and loudly proclaim that anyone who wants to talk about it is either a far-right racist, or "legitimising" complaints made by far-right idiots. Goodthinkers do not Notice™: they ignore the evidence of their eyes and ears.
And he is correct. A society doesn't normally prosecute soldiers for murder, because they are killing that society's enemies. Why else do you think only that group is de facto allowed to go around armed? (Canada at least requires you to have it zip tied to the sheath so it can't be drawn, but in fairness that was 10 years ago.)
Here, though, English society gets to have its cake and eat it, too- killing its enemies while at the same time being able to claim murder is bad. Certainly confusing for the soldier in question- because here his claims that he was acting on society's general orders (to kill its enemies for their crime of existing, or "racism" for short) won't save him from prosecution.
Then again, soldiers get thrown under the bus all the time.
"Violent Sikhs are just modern UK soldiers" is a hot take, but if he is getting convicted, isn't that evidence against the entire idea? And what you're left with is just inflammatory rhetoric?
Hence "have cake and eat it too".
Just because they're throwing the killer away does not imply [those who define UK society] are not in complete agreement that what the killer did was justice.
It might not imply it in a strict sense, but I would hope that you can at least bring a concrete example of someone "who defines UK society" saying that what the killer did was justice.
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