What were they thinking?
The police response to Henry Nowak is impossible to justify, but if we want policing to be better we need to understand the day-to-day reality of the job.
Written by Jonathan Hinder, Labour MP for Pendle and Clitheroe and former police inspector.
None of us really know what was going through the minds of the officers who were called to Henry Nowak by his killer’s brother. Watching the body-worn camera footage as a former officer, I cannot understand why the officers were not quicker in treating this as a medical emergency, but the ensuing public debate has been woefully ill-informed. It was ever thus when it comes to policing.
When I told peers, having just graduated from a top university, that I had applied to be a police constable, it was often met with bemusement, with comments like, “is that really for people like us?” It did not put me off – I wanted a meaningful, important, interesting job, and I certainly got one. So I spent a decade in policing before leaving to pursue election to Parliament, but I knew what my university friends meant: is policing “high status” enough?
Police officers need to be emotionally intelligent, mentally resilient, physically fit, willing to work punishing shifts, deal with the most vulnerable people in society, and all of their frontline work is now filmed either on their own bodycam or often on a bystander’s phone. In my first year as an officer, I arrived at the scene of a mother having killed her own three children. I attended mentally ill people who had self-harmed down to the bone, saw people take their last breaths on earth at road accidents, and was spat at by suspects I was arresting. This is normal frontline policing. Except it’s not really normal, is it?
When you are on a local response team, you are dispatched to emergency calls by the control room operator, via your police radio which is clipped to your stab vest. The control room will be speaking to the informant, passing you information before you arrive at the scene. You will inevitably arrive with very incomplete information, typically only covering one “side” of the story.
We know that this is precisely the kind of scenario the attending officers faced on the night of Henry’s tragic death. The judge’s sentencing remarks suggest that the officers believed that there was a reasonable chance that the account they had been given was correct. Of course, we now know that it was all lies, but the officers’ starting point was the account given by the Digwas, first in the 999 call, and then reiterated in person when they arrived on scene.
Based on what we have seen, and Henry’s harrowing words that we can hear repeatedly in the footage, the officers’ inability to quickly switch to treating him as a medical emergency is impossible to justify. Initial officer training includes emergency life support training, and regular refreshers are mandatory. Not to mention the fact that preserving life is drilled into officers as being the highest priority at any policing incident throughout all training.
The apparent indifference in the officer’s voice is so upsetting to hear, but I do recognise this sort of tone from my time in policing – weary, sceptical, wondering if you are being lied to, again. While the average person is likely to experience three or four traumatic incidents in their lifetime, frontline police officers will deal with hundreds over the course of a career. Police officers are much more likely to experience what is often called “compassion fatigue” – you are not as empathetic as you once were, because you so often experience trauma that it becomes normalised.
I do not know if that contributed to what happened here, but I know this effect is very poorly understood within policing, and so little effort is made to mitigate its impact or reduce its likelihood. This needs to be put right, because it is not only about officers’ mental health, which is extremely important, but it impacts the service they are offering to the public. As I used to tell recruits, the calls that will become entirely normal, even mundane, to you, can be one of the most significant moments in the lives of the public involved. Easy advice to give, of course, but much harder to remember as the years go by.
The armchair critics, dug into their opposing positions as they are, seize on any individual incident to support their sweeping conclusions about the motivations and performance of 140,000 officers. So are the police now “woke”, or racist? It is hard to keep up as the pendulum wildly swings. In public commentary, from Black Lives Matter to claims of anti-White two-tier policing. In politics, from the Conservatives’ tightening up stop and search laws to loosening them to encouraging them much more, all within the space of a few years in the mid-2010s. Police are known for being cynical – who can blame them? Serving officers can only roll their eyes as the debate goes on, detached from the day-to-day realities of the role.
Are there racist police officers? Of course. Police officers are drawn from the society they police. Given there are racist people in society, the challenge for policing is weeding out these people out at the earliest possible stage of recruitment. But are the police, taken as a whole, racist? Of course not. Have the police gone “woke”? British policing has been struggling under the weight of poor leadership, with constantly changing priorities, and huge involuntary “mission creep” over decades. Amid this drift, some policing leaders have allowed, or even encouraged, policing to be seen as progressive activism rather than impartial enforcers of the law. Some of the more egregious cases of this have understandably damaged public confidence in police impartiality along the way, but British police officers still deal with thousands of incidents a day without fear or favour.
As terms and conditions have become less appealing, our society less deferential, the policing mission increasingly blurred, and the public scrutiny even more intense, voluntary resignations have surged to record highs. When I worked in police training, a number of high-profile policing scandals hit the news. Talented recruits, set to start their training imminently, would call up to say that they no longer wanted to join the ranks, often citing pressure from friends and family. We risk entering a dangerous spiral, whereby the talent policing needs to solve its problems, is put off by the spotlight being shone on those very problems.
Who would be a police officer? Well, someone wanting a job with a purpose, being part of a team that serves the public, protects good people from the bad, and plays such a vital role in our society. As I found before I had even joined, policing does not command the respect that it should. If we want policing to be better, and restore public confidence across society, perhaps we might start by genuinely appreciating its value, and respecting the people brave enough to do it.