A beloved, blameless teenager died in custody because there’s nothing officers in 2026 fear more than allegations of ‘racism’
I am crying. It is hard to write down the circumstances of the death of Henry Nowak without crying. Each time I think about how that young man met his end, I find myself consumed with sadness and a sense of raging disbelief. I admit I’ve become somewhat obsessed with the case because Henry’s murder, and the way Hampshire Police not only failed to help him but actively supported his killer to the point where they handcuffed the 18-year-old student and cruelly mocked him as he drowned in his own blood, is emblematic of how Britain has lost its way.
“I have been stabbed,” Henry told police officers. Four times, he told them he was stabbed. And then, “I can’t breathe.” Nine times, he told police he couldn’t breathe. We can imagine, I think, how the lad’s fear eased a little when he knew the police had arrived. “Help is here,” Henry must have thought. Reassuring figures in uniform. They will protect me from the “bad man” with the blade. But help was not at hand. The police did not protect him. Quite the opposite, for all humanity had been trained out of them.
“I don’t think you have, mate,” was one officer’s response to Henry’s insistence he’d been stabbed. (Such unforgivable breeziness, such a callous disregard of suffering, all apparent in the horrifying bodycam footage of Henry’s last moments.) Somehow, the coppers missed the bloody slash on Henry’s face and the four other stab wounds inflicted on his body by Vickrum Digwa’s eight-inch knife.
Admittedly, it was late, and Henry had worn dark clothing for a night out with his Southampton University football teammates, so it was hard to see the puncture wounds (the same applied in the Stephen Lawrence case). But the fact is the officers’ main concern was not Henry’s reported injuries. They were doing exactly as they had been programmed to do by all those DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) seminars. Digwa had brown skin, was a Sikh man carrying a traditional knife and had told police he had been attacked “racially” – and the lad on the ground claiming to be wounded was white. There is nothing a police officer in 2026 fears more than an allegation of “racism”, and there’s nothing that could do more harm to a career. As a result of these extreme impediments to common sense, a wonderful, beloved, blameless son and brother died in their custody.
And so Digwa, who knew he held the race trump card, became the “victim”. Henry, who was in too much distress to sit up, was dragged across the gravel – his hands were forced behind his back, and the cuffs were put on. (Why in God’s name do you handcuff someone who poses no threat?) He had minutes left to live. The police officer told Henry he was under arrest for assault and read him his rights.
“Those were the last words he heard,” his father, Mark Nowak, said on Monday in a quietly devastating statement outside Southampton Crown Court. Mark’s impeccable dress and measured speech had all the decorum and solemn respect his son had been denied. Henry’s mother, Lucy, and his big sister, Olivia, were alongside, with savage sorrow etched on their exhausted faces. Occasionally, the woman and girl flinched at a particular detail, and started to weep again.
“Henry did not die with dignity,” his father observed, “He did not die with the care he deserved.” (I thought of Henry’s stepmother, Katie, who recalled the night of December 3, watching Mark “unable to stand” and “hearing his raw unfiltered sobs” when police came to the door to tell him his son had been stabbed, and was dead. Katie found their 10-year-old child “curled up at the top of stairs, alone and frightened”, having “found out in the worst way possible” through overheard conversations.)
Only 10 weeks earlier, Mark had dropped Henry off in Southampton, his “intelligent, funny, kind, most inclusive” son, and the first in his family to go to university. As he drove off, shedding a few tears, Mark was immensely proud of his boy. He couldn’t know he would soon be “sitting in a mortuary holding his hand, the same hand I held when he was born”.
Understandably, Mark suffers nightmares in which the father, who was known within the family as being able to fix anything, is “completely helpless”. He says he is tormented by thoughts of Henry’s final moments lying bleeding on the ground. In his victim impact statement, he apologised to Henry: “To my dying son, who I love beyond words, I’m so sorry that I let this happen.”
You didn’t let it happen, Mark. It’s not your fault. The Prime Minister, successive governments, the woke College of Policing and their awful, discriminatory Race Action Plan (“Improving policing for Black people”), chief constables who have to be word-perfect in the mantras of the diversity cult to climb the greasy pole, a complicit Left-wing media, and all the brainwashed agencies of the British state that have forced multiculturalism on a reluctant population and indoctrinated police officers to show bigotry against white people – they are the ones to blame.
That’s the same establishment which couldn’t wait, back in 2020, to flaunt its progressive credentials by taking the knee when the American criminal, George Floyd, died after rough treatment by Minneapolis cops (the statement on Floyd from Britain’s police chiefs was notably nauseating). That same state had remarkably little to say when the case of Henry first became known. Like Henry, Floyd died in police custody, protesting: “I can’t breathe.” Where were the public genuflections by Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner for the British boy who was a victim of anti-white racism?
When Nigel Farage gave a national address calling out our appalling two-tier justice system, some had the gall to say the leader of Reform UK was a “race baiter”. The two-tier system is no longer hidden. Henry’s treatment by the police was “inhumane and degrading”, as his father says, while his murderer was “afforded decency – he was believed”. Digwa was never handcuffed, not even after he was arrested. (Kid gloves, Sergeant! Don’t want to be prejudiced or inflammatory against a protected characteristic, do we?)
At the police station, officers took the suspected murderer to the kitchen and offered him a selection of food while Henry’s still-warm body was on its way to the morgue. “The contrast is unbearable,” says Mark.
It is. Unbearable and unforgivable, and profoundly racist against a young white man. This tragedy may yet turn out to be another of the sparks that light the fuse on the civil war many of us fear is coming. (The Southport massacre was the first.) You see, police didn’t fail Henry by mistake, as Robert France, deputy chief constable of Hampshire, tried to claim. It wasn’t “complex”, it was really simple. Those officers who arrived at the scene were following orders. They had been trained – many would say brainwashed – to give priority to ethnic minority “victims”.
Digwa’s family was well aware of their privileged victimhood status and how to use it to wrongfoot the cowardly, craven forces of law and order. Henry was stabbed at 11.30pm, but he wasn’t pronounced dead until 67 minutes later. When police eventually turned up, Moga Singh, the father, was propping Henry up against a wall, claiming he was helping him. Meanwhile, Digwa’s mother, Kiran Kaur, spirited away the murder weapon. Instead of phoning an ambulance, the brother, Gurpreet Digwa, called the police, accusing Henry of a drunken assault. This is part of the transcript: “We’ve just got attacked racially by some white person… he’s physically attacked my brother, we’re Sikhs, we wear a turban, and he’s just attacked my brother. We’re restraining him right now because he’s just attacked my brother and took my brother’s turban off.”
He went on: “I can’t let him go until this gets sorted. I am not being racially attacked and letting him get away with it. I am not having this as a regular occurrence. I live here. He ain’t fighting people, he’s racially attacking people, that’s what he’s doing. Nah, he sees some brown people, that’s what it was.”
Wicked lies, according to the judge, who believed that the brother “may just have been accepting that which [Digwa] had told him, rather than lying himself”. But hugely effective and persuasive lies because they flattered the police profile of a “racist” offender. Let there be no mistake, dear reader – Henry died of DEI.
How the hell did we end up with police who work against the interests of the law-abiding white majority? Witness my interview last week with Elaine, the chairman of a Bradford police scrutiny panel, who was sacked after several Muslim members of the committee said she had shown a lack of “impartiality” by calling out the “elephant in the room” – Islamists killing Jews. Looking back to the 1980s, no fair person could doubt that there was discrimination in the police that needed to be rooted out.
Following the 1999 Macpherson report into the racist murder of Lawrence, a bizarre swing of the pendulum led to today’s obsessive, unhinged DEI culture. The vast majority of chief constables are “children of Macpherson”. They are cult leaders, and God help anyone who fails to pay lip service to their warped, anti-British belief system. Ideological capture has led to previously sane coppers consulting “community leaders” who, in many cases, are about as reliable as the charming Digwa family. Think of West Midlands Police shamelessly using falsehoods to discredit Israeli football fans so they could do the bidding of Birmingham Muslims.
There are still many excellent officers out there who know what “without fear or favour” means, but they live in fear of losing their jobs and pensions if they speak out. “For years, officers have been subjected to cultural awareness and DEI training that… presents policing as institutionally racist by default,” says one experienced serving police officer. “Officers are often left feeling collectively labelled as prejudiced.
“Operationally, there are clear differences in scrutiny depending on ethnicity. For example, if an officer stop-searches a person of colour, that interaction may be reviewed within 24 hours, whereas searches involving white individuals are often processed routinely at a later stage.”
“Positive action” initiatives have become deeply embedded. Officers from ethnic backgrounds are actively encouraged towards promotion and specialist roles, with additional support that is not available to white colleagues. “Standards can appear secondary to demographics.”
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