The woke lynching of Henry Nowak

For me, the most chilling thing in the bodycam footage of Henry Nowak’s last moments of life is the cops’ cruel presumption that he is lying. As he writhes in terror and agony and cries out ‘I’ve been stabbed!’, a voice in the background – presumably that of the lowlife who murdered him, Vickrum Digwa – says: ‘He hasn’t been stabbed.’ A female officer responds. ‘I know’, she says. ‘But we have to check, don’t we?’

I know. It is delivered with dry, bureaucratic indifference. Henry is heard moaning, begging, ‘I can’t breathe’, yet here is a representative of the state seeming to agree with his knife-wielding tormentor that he is making it up. That cold, cavalier utterance – I know – will have cemented dying Henry’s great dread: that the police were taking the side of his killer rather than him. As his young, precious life came to an end, he heard himself being disbelieved, distrusted, icily written off as a fabulist. His murderer, meanwhile, was afforded respect. The state blindly bowed to his filthy lies.

The bodycam footage of the arrest of 18-year-old Henry Nowak after he was stabbed in Southampton in December last year is horrifying beyond belief. It is one of the most harrowing two minutes of video I have ever watched. Henry can be seen sprawled in agony in a stranger’s driveway, the place he sought sanctuary after being knifed four times by Digwa. His failing voice is thick with pain and fear. What he wanted in that moment – what he needed – was to be believed. The belief of others was the only thing that might have delivered him from his terror-stricken state. But it never came. He said ‘I can’t breathe’ nine times. He said ‘I’ve been stabbed’ four times. ‘I don’t think you have, mate’, said an officer with chirpy, inhumane derision.

It is appalling. A boy’s final moments were filled with the defamatory taunts of his murderer – who falsely accused Henry of racism and assault – and the sterile contempt of the state. With the gloating of the scumbag who stole his life and the clinical disdain of police officers who should have fought for his life. What comes next in the footage is almost unwatchable. The cops drag fatally wounded Henry across the gravel of the driveway. They force his hands behind his back to cuff him. ‘I can’t breathe’, he cries one more time. ‘Put the hand in the cuff, mate’, says an officer as if he were talking to a dog. Seldom has the monstrous indifference of the state apparatus been on such stark display.

Henry was not believed until his life had faded away. As his father, Mark, said in his stirring statement outside court yesterday following the sentencing of Digwa, ‘He lost consciousness before anyone believed him’. The last words Henry heard were the police reading him his rights as they arrested him for assault on the basis of the evil fabrications of his killer. It is difficult to fathom the depravity of these events. A boy manhandled and cuffed as he drowned in his own blood. A dying teen dragged, demeaned, insulted. No nation that calls itself civilised can let an atrocity like this go unexamined. Henry’s life may have ended but the reckoning as to how this dystopic horror could have occurred has only just begun.

The footage from that blood-stained driveway deserves to be a defining moral juncture for our nation. To me, it felt almost like a woke lynching. A dying boy is surrounded by a gawping mob, including the killer and his associates. His killer had already taunted him, filming him as he ran for his life and zooming in on his pain-scarred face as he collapsed in that driveway. Then the forces of the state arrive and compound the savagery of it all by dragging the dying boy across the stony ground and forcing his hands into cuffs. ‘Mate’, they say in mocking tones as he pleads for his life. In that jittering footage we are witnessing the violent humiliation of an innocent lad, initiated by a ruthless knifeman and aided and abetted by an unfeeling state.

This is the barbarism of the ‘caring state’. This is where decades of institutionalised ‘social justice’ have dragged us – into a moral abyss where a boy begging for help can be treated as a criminal because the man who just drove a knife into his legs, chest and face libelled him as racist. Here’s the truth: Vickrum Digwa had two weapons that night – his knife and the racism card. The blade with which he laid waste to young Henry’s life and the venal lie about racist abuse that he knew very well would distract the police’s attention from him. He got the knife himself, but his other instrument of terror was gifted to him by the woke state that has made a holy mission of uncovering ‘racism’ everywhere, even where it does not exist.

Digwa exploited the physical vulnerability of an unarmed young man and the ideological credulity of the captured state. He preyed upon Henry and then he preyed upon the ruling order’s missionary zeal regarding ‘racism’. He understood – as we all do – that the word ‘racism’ has an almost hypnotic effect on the 21st-century ruling class. Bereft of moral purpose, absent political vision, the state has made a religion out of what it falsely calls ‘anti-racism’. Digwa knew the power of the racism charge, and it worked: the police believed this non-white man and disbelieved the white boy. Like magic, the word ‘racism’ turned them from cool-minded cops into bit-part players in a morality play in which whites are always suspect and non-whites always sympathetic.

No doubt the officers on the ground failed in their basic duties. But we mustn’t overlook the ideology that moulds such apathetic cruelty. Police forces across the UK are instructed to instantly believe all accusations of hate crime. They are trained in the warped commandments of critical race theory. Indeed, Hampshire Police, who cover Southampton, have a ‘race action plan’ that teems with critical-race drivel. It describes the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020 as a ‘pivotal moment’ for British police forces, in that it compelled them to recommit to ‘zero tolerance of racism’, to be ‘anti-racist in [all we do]’ and to appreciate the ‘impact [and] trauma’ policing can have on ‘ethnic-minority communities’.

Try to take in the Kafkaesque moral madness on display here. They learn the lessons of a black man killed while saying ‘I can’t breathe’, only to see their own cops horribly mistreat a white boy who said ‘I can’t breathe’. The very ‘anti-racism’ they imbibed in response to an African-American man dying with a cop’s knee on his neck leads to a situation where their officers drag and cuff a dying white kid. It is undeniable now: the state’s overcompensation for past acts of racism has unleashed new horrors. It is now official ‘anti-racism’ that nurtures injustice, unequal treatment and barbaric state behaviour. It is now ‘anti-racism’ that dehumanises the citizenry, dividing us into ‘the oppressed’ and ‘the oppressors’, and gifting or denying us moral worth accordingly. The horror on that driveway was more than a police screw-up – it was the metaphorical boot of wokeness on the neck of a young man, and a whole nation.

Our political class is in for the mother of all awakenings if it fails to recognise the anger this case has caused. Keir Starmer’s belated statement on the Nowak horror was horrendously perfunctory, yapping on about the ‘cycle of tragedy’ caused by ‘knife crime’. All the knee-bending passion he felt after George Floyd’s death seems to have evaporated into the cursory, fleeting angst of the impassive lawyer. Millions are clocking this. That he doesn’t know that is a tragedy – for him.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.