As a serving police officer, I found it dispiriting, if entirely predictable, to read the way in which the awful murder of Henry Nowak was hijacked as evidence of “two-tier policing” and anti-white racism (What to do as murder is exploited to spread lies about race and privilege? Stand firm – fight back, 8 June).
On watching the body-worn video, I saw the terrible consequences of a lack of professionalism and compassion meeting difficult and confusing circumstances, rather than the legacy of diversity training or wokeness.
However, on reading the reaction from both sides of the political spectrum, my mind also turned to what the response would have been if the ethnicities of those involved had been reversed. I have no doubt this too would have been seized on as clear evidence of police racism by different voices with their own agenda.
For me, this terrible incident demonstrates how we place too little emphasis on individual failures and instead extrapolate and then sensationalise perceived societal or organisational issues at every opportunity.
This is not to say that institutions escape accountability, but rather that, in much the same way that the police are duty-bound to investigate, conclusions are drawn on objective analysis of all the evidence rather than snap judgments that reaffirm our own worldview.
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