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With Fear and Favour

6 June 2026

Britain's Policing Emergency

By David Rose, FSU Director of Research, with a foreword by Rick Prior, former chair of the Metropolitan Police Federation.

On the evening of 3rd December 2025, an 18 year-old finance student named Henry Nowak was stabbed to death on a residential street in Southampton. The man who killed him, 23 year-old Vickrum Digwa, then told the arriving police two lies, backed up by his brother: that Nowak had racially abused him, and had knocked the turban from his head. On the strength of those lies, the officers arrested and handcuffed the dying boy. Six months later, sentencing Digwa to life imprisonment, Judge William Mousley KC found that Henry had said and done nothing racist, but the false accusation “misled the attending police officers” and “influenced their decision not only to arrest and handcuff Henry but also to give subsequent emergency first aid in ignorance of the fact that he had a serious chest wound”.

This briefing suggests reasons why that lie worked. It is not an attack on the two officers who handcuffed Henry Nowak; the judge expressly found they were doing their best, and were misled by “a convincing but wholly false narrative”. It describes the policy climate that made a false cry of racism the most powerful card a guilty man could play – a climate that has been building for more than 30 years. Its foundations lie in Sir William Macpherson’s report on the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993, which accused the police of “institutional racism” and suggested that police should treat any incident as being racially motivated if its victim or anyone else claimed that it was, and became more intense in response to the moral stampede that followed the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020. This helped create new operational doctrines, which replaced the concept of colour-blind equality before the law with a search for equity of outcomes between ethnic groups as policing’s central goal. This briefing will reveal:

• Why Nowak’s killer reached for the race card as a master key – and it turned.
• A doctrine that openly rejects treating people equally has come to govern policing.
• The Met rejected a free-speech and impartiality policy – and then embraced one that called impartiality a racial myth.
• The Free Speech Union foresaw all this and its likely consequences in 2022 – and was ignored.

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