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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?
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.)
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.
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