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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.
This is consensus building. [A jury convicted Chauvin of murder 2] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_of_Derek_Chauvin). I am sure that his defense made pretty much the same arguments as you did, and obviously did not convince the jury.
Generally, you want to deter people from doing stuff which contributes to bad outcomes even when it is unclear if their contribution alone would have caused the bad outcome. If three people stab a victim and cause it to die from blood loss, we are not generally going to determine if the any of the assailants caused woulds which would have ensured death on their own, or if perhaps the victim might have survived if he had not taken an Asprin beforehand. Instead, we say that they all maliciously contributed in an attack which predictably resulted in death, so they are all murderers.
For Floyd, it seems plausible that Chauvin contributed to his death. He certainly acted with reckless disregard for his life. I do not give a rats as if his behavior was department policy, he can join the illustrious group of all the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg defense who were convicted despite claiming superior orders.
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I will grant you that the optics in the new case are almost as terrible as for Floyd. But while the police response was inappropriate in hindsight, it certainly lacks Chauvin's recklessness, the contribution to the death is less likely and there is a convenient guilty party on which to focus the ire.
Personally, I think that an absolute no-brainer would be to cancel the religious exemption to the laws forbidding knives. An openly carried weapon is a promise of violence. Religious exemptions are for stuff like keeping the sabbath or covering your hair on your passport photo, not for rules society really cares about, like bodily integrity of kids or public safety.
Chauvin judged that Floyd was in a state of excited delerium and placed Floyd in the officially taught prone restraint position (ctrl-f “Minneapolis police training slide”) for cases of excited delerium. Restraining subjects in ExDS was department protocol. Actually there’s a recording of Chauvin and another officer articulating this, and that the reason they had him in this position was because of ExDS. And Floyd’s behavior was classic ExDS. You should probably care if Chauvin was performing departmental policy conscientiously because otherwise you’re punishing the innocent, which is 100x worse than failing to punish the guilty. Why would you want a police officer to be deciding on the fly a new restraint technique? He’s not an expert in restraint, and he’s not a medical expert, and he is being placed in an extremely high stress situation. Would you be okay with sending doctors to the Rape Dungeon if they prescribe something that is only proven to be deadly post-hoc?
I thought this was a fake thing cops made up. I'm sure their internal documentation refers to it and recommends methods of dealing with it. Pretending as though it was a medical diagnosis they are sensibly dealing with. That way when they get caught behaving in an unjustifiable manner they can use procedure as a shield from criticism. A procedure they made up and may not be legal if actually applied. As seen by this cop following procedure and then being convicted of murder.
The reason ExDS fell out of fashion is that it’s overwhelmingly a phenomenon of young black men on drugs. For progressives, this means it can’t possibly be real. But it’s possible that there is a rare gene that makes some populations violently resist confinement which, when in combination with certain drugs, results in a heart attack. Why would that be impossible? We can imagine that such an instinct would confer an evolutionary advantage in violent regions of the world and in regions which did not face cold winters where confinement and close proximity would have weeded such an instinct out. And indeed certain Arcticism theorists note that East Asians have 12x less claustrophobia than Arabs, a population with African admixture. So the mere fact that Blacks experience it more frequently is not actually valid grounds for the illegitimacy of the psychiatric state, though this is the primary reason why doctors have become uncomfortable with the syndrome / state / diagnosis.
Unfortunately, multiracial jury trials are a meme.
Or it's totally fake, and "excited delirium" is just a medicalization of people fighting cops.
“People fighting cops to the point of a heart attack” could have a genetic etiology, in the same way “pitbull biting hard and never letting go” is a trait you can breed in dogs. This is a useful medicalization because it explains why these people are dying in custody sometimes. Please describe what you would like police to do about the 0.001% risk of ExDS death when they are arresting people. Should they refrain from restraining everyone altogether, and let them run amok? Do you want them to be restrained in a hogtie position, like Chauvin’s colleague suggested, which has a higher rate of death? Personally, I’m fine with police using enormous net guns to restrain anyone who resists, just like a canon that shoots a heavy net at the subject. Do you think the image of white police officers capturing black people in nets and then dragging them to jail would assuage the public’s tendency to crash out at racism?
If people die when fighting cops, such is one of the risks of that course of action. But defiance is not a medical condition; that's "sluggish schizophrenia" by another name.
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