Why Nigel Farage is accused of exploiting Henry Nowak's murder

0:02The murder of an 18-year-old has led to claims of so-called two-tier policing, and this is why.

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0:48Have you heard of two-tier policing? That's the idea that different ethnic groups experience different treatment when they encounter the police. And it's all over the news right now. after 18-year-old Henry Novak was murdered by 23-year-old Vikram Digwa. Digwa lied to police at the scene, saying he had been the victim of a racist attack, whilst Henry tried to alert officers to what proved to be a fatal injury. What's happened to you, all right? You've been stabbed. You've been stabbed? Whereabouts? I don't think you have, mate. But he had. Stab wounds to his legs and a fatal blow to his heart from a knife Digwa said he carried as part of his Sikh religion.

1:29Images of Henry pleading for help as he was put into handcuffs have now gone viral. Some, including the Reform Party's leader, suggest that officers prioritise Digwa's accusation of racism over saving Henry's life. I suggest the rest of us respond to this with pure, cold rage. Enough of anti-white prejudice. Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary have apologised after Diglett was jailed for life on Monday. There is an investigation underway by the IOPC, the Independent Office for Police Conduct, and additional charges are being brought elsewhere, so we need to be just a bit careful about what we say on the podcast.

2:08But here's the thing. For many years, we were told that policing was institutionally racist against ethnic minorities, not in favour of them. So is there any hard evidence that two-tier policing actually exists? Clifford Stott is Professor of Policing Research at The Open University.

2:29You will have seen the reporting around the death of Henry. What were your initial thoughts? Well, it's a tragedy. You know, obviously, first and foremost, we've got to recognise it in that context and applaud the bravery, I think, of the family in allowing the police to release the video and as a consequence to bring some objectivity to our need to understand what has gone wrong. And clearly something has gone dreadfully wrong. And we see that writ large on our screens when we look at that video and look at how decision-making was being conducted in that context. Dare I say it, a kind of George Floyd moment in terms of the severity of the extent to which the parallels are there, my thoughts were that this is another critical incident for policing that exposes some major underlying issues that are going to need to be confronted.

3:31That need for us to understand what has happened that you've just spoken of, I think is a very important point, because already, I think a lot of people, rather than questioning what has happened there have already arrived at their own conclusions as to what happened there. What are the questions that you would wish to be answered before yourself arriving at complete conclusion as to what went on? Well, absolutely. We need to understand the details of the decision making processes that those officers went through. And we need as much of the data and the evidence that we need to be able to draw a conclusion.

4:12And I'm sure that the IOPC will draw out that evidence and somewhere further on down the line, a conclusion will be brought. But absolutely, it needs to be evidence-based. And I think that that's part of the issue at work here is the rush to judgment and the attempt by political actors to gain political capital out of this tragedy, which is deeply uncomfortable, given our need to understand this tragedy analytically, objectively, in an evidence-based way, so that policing can ensure that it does things to try to prevent these kinds of tragedies happening again in the future. Let's talk about the politicians then.

5:01I mean, he's certainly by no means alone, but of course Nigel Farage has been the most prominent to have articulated a position on the death of Henry. And again, I'll say he and others have pointed to this case as evidence of the phenomenon known as two-tiered policing. I mean, when people use that phrase, what is it that you think that they mean by that? Well, I think it's very, very clear to people what is being meant by those who are bringing that terminology into contemporary currency. Data is very clear that inequalities exist in policing and that certain sections of our community receive forms of policing in ways that are unequal to other sections of our community.

5:46But the idea that somehow there is an issue at work here where white people are subjected to policing in a way that leaves their security fundamentally compromised, I think is completely unsustainable from the data. Just to clarify, I mean, is two-tier policing a phrase that academics like yourself recognise and use or has it emerged from elsewhere? It's a political term. It's absolutely a political term. It's only emerged really quite recently in the popular currency. It's not a term that is an academic phrase. We don't use it. I mean, in many ways, like so many things, these new terms like woke and so on have come into currency.

6:34They're not analytical terms. They're not based on evidence or theory or academic analysis. their political expressions and part of wider political campaigns to mobilise public concerns in particular ways. Well, let's look at the evidence base then. There is a growing body of opinion in this country that if you are white, that you will be treated differently by the police force than if you were from an ethnic minority or some other minority background. Is there evidence of that? No. And is there evidence to the contrary then? Let's run through a couple of the examples that are commonly used. We think of two sets of public disorder.

7:18We think of the riots that took place after the violent deaths of those young girls in Southport and the way in which the predominantly white crowd there were policed, many of them ending up receiving pretty lengthy jail sentences. compare and contrast with the way in which the Metropolitan Police have policed the pro-Palestinian marches here in London, where phrases have been shouted that have clearly been offensive to the Jewish population. The Jewish population in London have made their opinions very, very clear about those particular marches. Is there not, at least in those examples, some evidence of a different approach being taken, admittedly, by different police forces?

7:59No, absolutely not. It's like comparing apples with oranges. How can one compare the August 2024 disorders with predominantly peaceful protests? These are incomparable. I mean, a reasonable example might be the 2024 riots with the 2011 riots. That was the unrest in London that took place, I think, after the shooting dead of, was it Mark Duggan? Mark Duggan, yes. The last wave of disorder that swept across England prior to the wave that happened in 2024. These waves of riots are very sporadic. They don't occur very often. And that was the last one. So if we were to try to have a conversation about comparative forms of policing in relationship to phenomena that have some shared characteristics, then it would be important for us to compare 2024 with 2011, not 2024 disorder with the policing of a peaceful protest.

8:59What we know is that decision-making in relationship to the policing of crowd events is driven by a framework that is enshrined in law. It flows from the Human Rights Act in 1998. It flows into adherence with the European Convention of Human Rights. And it's based around freedoms of assembly, expression and so on, provided that they're peaceful. What we saw in 2024 was that the authorities essentially gave too much leeway to groups of people who purported to have come to express peaceful political points of view. But when we look at the evidence, what we actually see are groups of people who had come into that situation to precipitate violent confrontation.

9:49And it was the shift in policing from their orientation, as it always is, towards the facilitation of peaceful assembly. It was that slow shift that was where we might be critical in relationship to what went wrong with policing in 2024. Now, let's be clear then that that was facilitating protest by the very people who are purporting this idea of two-tier policing. So if we were to seek evidence for this phenomenon, what would that evidence look like? Where would we need to be looking at the data to see that two-tier policing isn't just a political buzz phrase? Well, we have to look in particular beyond individual interactions.

10:36So part of the challenge here is that we've got one episode involving a group of officers who respond to a call for service where that call for service is made by people who are arguing that they have been subjected to a racist attack by a white man. and they arrive into that situation they make their decisions and those decisions as we are now beginning to understand what incorrect and disastrously things started to go tragically wrong now we can't draw from an analysis of that one episode how the police relate to the communities as a whole so the argument about two-tier policing is that somehow there are disparities where white people are being treated differentially from ethnic minorities.

11:28Now, that is true, but it's ethnic minorities that actually receive more policing, more use of force, more use of taser, more likely to die in custody, more likely to be subjected to prosecution than white people. So I'm not saying that there aren't inequalities. It's not that certain elements of our community, certain parts of our community do receive differential forms of policing. And we measure that on an ongoing basis by looking at the patterns of policing across communities as a whole, across counties, across metropolitan areas, across the country as a whole. So across the country as a whole, you're essentially between four and five times more likely to be stopped and searched.

12:21If you're black, you're more or less the same, more likely to be subjected to the use of taser if you're black than if you're white. So absolutely, when we look at the data and the evidence, it talks to us about policing inequalities, but they absolutely are not about how white people experience forms of policing that are exposing them less so than the minority populations. So if the evidence simply isn't there beyond the purely anecdotal, where has this perception come from that there is this staggered, staged form of policing in the country? Well, you're going to need to ask people who promote that particular point of view.

13:04I'm happy to have that discussion with them. The simple answer to that question is I've absolutely no idea, because there is no basis in data, in evidence, in fact, to sustain that kind of argument. Is it perhaps then just a symptom of a broader phenomenon, a perception that a group is being treated more positively than another group? I mean, going back to the 2024 riots, in the aftermath of those riots, the judicial process was sped up. People were pushed through the courts in great numbers at great speed and entirely deliberately. A political decision was made on that. I mean, whilst that may not be an example of two-tier policing, isn't there an argument that that is two-tier justice at the very least?

13:49No, I don't see how. I began studying riots from a PhD in 1990. If you're old enough like I am to remember back then, immediately in the wake of what we called the poll tax riot, which was one of the most significant political riots of the 20th century. The first thing that the Crown Prosecution Service did was set up a special prosecution unit to process as quickly and arguably as aggressively as possibly the arrests and prosecution from that riot. It is always the case, as it was in 2011, as it was in 2024, that the CPS gears up and mobilises to process people through the courts as quickly as possible.

14:31And that was the case in 2024, precisely because the state and the government understand that having the capability to impose consequences for that kind of behaviour were part of the vehicle through which that violence could be contained. Because you remember that when the prosecution started to happen, Those riots were still ongoing. There was a very real fear that the riots were going to continue. And it was important for the Crown Prosecution Service to act quickly to enact prosecution so that people were very, very clear that if they broke the law in the context of this situation, that they would be subject to similar kinds of sanctions and that that would act as a deterrent.

15:15There's nothing unusual about that at all. It's how the state and how the Criminal Prosecution Service works as a deterrent within the context where civil unrest is spreading across the country and the country is descending into crisis as it was in 2024. So the idea that somehow there was a differential process at work in 2024 to other rights, again, is completely unsustainable.

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16:24Clifford, I am long enough in the tooth to remember the poll tax rights, just about. I'm also kind of long in the tooth enough to remember the death of Stephen Lawrence, the MacPherson Report. For a very long time in this country, and certainly for most of my career as a journalist, you know, 20 plus years at this point, you know, the perception of the police has been around the idea of them being institutionally racist rather than, as the leader of reform kind of suggested this morning, anti-white racist. Your point about Stephen Lawrence and the broader sort of discussions around institutional racism and so on, I think the work I'm doing and involved in at the moment is really trying to unpack what that actually means.

17:04What is institutional racism? And I think at some level, it's racialized outcomes without racist intent. It's about how organizations and societies function to produce these kinds of outcomes. We're doing some really interesting work trying to unpack the disproportionality statistics, this regular annual way in which home office statistics taken from the police lead to the conclusion that policing is disproportionately applied to ethnic minority communities. And we're doing some work looking at that data and relating it to the census data, which tells us a lot about the economic and social conditions within which that policing is taking place.

17:55What we find is that policing is concentrated. It's concentrated into our urban centres and within those urban centres into areas of deprivation. And what we can actually show statistically is the thing that best predicts where policing is going to happen is deprivation. It's economic deprivation that drives policing, because in part, economic deprivation drives crime. So actually, those that are more exposed to policing are people from deprived communities. And that's really the discussion that we should be having here. It's not a race issue at all. It's actually a class issue. But haven't there been occasions in the past couple of decades where it has been quite clear that individual police forces across the country have had ethnicity in their minds when conducting a police investigation to the detriment of that police investigation?

18:56You think of the grooming gangs investigations in particular around the Midlands and your opportunities that were very clearly missed by police forces because of a perception or even a desire not to be accused of being racist. Well, I don't think we know enough about that. I mean, the focus here is again on racial identity in relationship to grooming gangs rather than grooming gangs per se. and when we look at the data about the number of conspiracies to enact these kinds of crimes, overwhelmingly those kinds of crimes are perpetuated by white people. And the extent to which there is some differentiation, some distortion of judgment that's going on at the individual and institutional level within policing that sustains the argument that you just put forward, I'm not aware of it.

19:50I've not come across it. There isn't really, I mean, can you cite that evidence? I think the Victims' Commissioner and the Children's Commissioner have both made the point. I mean, I am speaking in general terms, but it does feel at times during those investigations that there were concerns that were based around ethnicity rather than on quality of evidence and outcome of investigations. Nobody's trying to pretend that policing is perfect. Nobody is trying to pretend that within organisational contexts, decisions get made. But, you know, let's be clear, the injustices that have gone on in the British state over a historical period of time expose the extent to which injustice is endemic in our criminal justice system and what we need to do to work together to try to eradicate that.

20:40But if we then start to try to mobilise ethnic hostility, polarisation on the basis of spurious arguments that have no basis in fact, I would strongly encourage a more objective consideration if we're going to use these arguments to structure how we as a society pull ourselves out of a situation where those kinds of injustices take place. So just to kind of wrap this up with you, Clifford, where does this go next? There is going to be another incident, perhaps even within days, that will be held up by some as two-tier policing. When a case like Henry Novak's becomes a national political argument, what's the danger?

21:25Disorder is the danger. Racial hatred on our streets is the danger. Situation like the 2024 disorders is the danger. The polarisation and division in our society is a dangerous phenomena that destabilises our societies and destabilises our political systems. And we need to be very, very clear that our society is in danger of that. And I would encourage everybody to move away from polarisation and focus on the nature of the facts that are in front of us and use those facts as the basis for driving how we move forward, particularly in relationship to policing. that the decisions that we make are based upon that objective scientific analysis of the underlying realities so that we can move forward in a way that brings legitimacy to our policing because it's really legitimacy that lies at the heart of the British policing model and legitimacy that's being brought into question by these spurious arguments.

22:33Clifford, it's been a pleasure chatting to you. Thanks for your time. And that is your lot for today. Do remember to get in touch with your thoughts on today's episode and I'm sure you have plenty. Why at sky.uk. We're back tomorrow.

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