By Claudia Sanchez
Eighteen-year-old finance student Henry Nowak was killed on a street in Southampton in December 2025 while handcuffed by police officers who had been told, falsely, that he was the aggressor. His killer, Vickrum Digwa, has been jailed for life with a minimum term of twenty-one years. His father, Mark Nowak, stood outside Southampton Crown Court and said his son should not have died in police custody, that the treatment he received was inhumane and degrading, and that the family demands a full, fearless and transparent investigation by the IOPC. He also said this: the family do not want Henry’s murder used to create further hatred, division or tension.
That request has been ignored. Within hours of the sentencing, Nigel Farage broadcast what he called an “emergency address to the nation,” claiming that Britain is “a two-tier culture where the rights of white people matter less than those of ethnic minorities.” He called for an end to “anti-white prejudice.” He demanded “pure cold rage.” He compared Nowak’s death to George Floyd’s, a comparison that deserves to be turned around and examined carefully, because it proves the exact opposite of what Farage seems to intend.
Neo-Nazi sect White Vanguard called a vigil in Southampton purporting to remember Nowak. Tommy Robinson announced he would attend future protests. Elon Musk used his platform to amplify misinformation about the case. The Nowak family’s grief has been turned into political material by people who have no interest in the family, in justice, or in the structural failures that allowed their son to die as he did.
The two-tier system is real. It runs in the opposite direction to everything the far-right claim, and it has been doing so for decades, documented in government reports, independent reviews, parliamentary inquiries, and official statistics. The people who experience it most acutely recognised the footage of Henry Nowak immediately. Not because we are indifferent to his death, but because being treated as the perpetrator when you are the victim is a structural feature of policing in this country, not an exception to it.
The bodycam footage from Southampton shows Henry Nowak, bleeding from stab wounds including one to his heart, telling officers repeatedly “I’ve been stabbed” and “I can’t breathe” while being handcuffed. An officer responds: “I don’t think you have, mate.” The footage shocked white Britain. Black Britain recognised it.
What happened to Henry Nowak is the product of the same institutional dysfunction that has seen black and brown people criminalised, disbelieved, and killed in encounters with British police for decades. The difference is that when we describe this experience, we are told we are imagining it. When a white victim’s case becomes useful to the far right, it is suddenly proof of a national crisis.
In their statement posted to Instagram on June 2nd, BLM UK has listed some of the names of those killed: Chris Kaba, Rashan Charles, Kingsley Burrell, Sean Rigg, Dalian Atkinson, Brian Douglas, Christopher Alder, Joy Gardner, and many others. There is a painfully long list of black people who have been killed in police custody in degrading and dehumanising circumstances, either through direct police force or negligence. The far right is trying to erase that history to push a narrative that police protect Britain’s racialised communities at the expense of white people. The data says otherwise.
The Manchester airport case makes this inversion visible. Mohammed Fahir Amaaz and Muhammad Amaad, two brothers from Rochdale, have been formally acquitted of assaulting PC Zachary Marsden. The acquittal followed a far-right campaign that worked systematically to turn the facts of the situation on their head, recasting the officer who kicked a subdued man in the face as the victim and the brothers as the threat. PC Marsden has not faced charges. He remains under a criminal probe by the IOPC, which confirmed in late 2025 that its investigation had expanded after new evidence emerged.
Floyd’s killing triggered a global reckoning because it was not an isolated incident. It was the visible expression of a pattern that black people in America had been documenting for generations. It is galling to invoke Floyd’s name while refusing to ask whether the same pattern exists in Britain. The answer, as the data shows, is yes.
Deaths Following Police Contact
Black people are seven times more likely to die than white people following restraint by police. This figure comes from INQUEST’s 2023 report I Can’t Breathe: Race, Death and British Policing, based on previously unpublished IOPC data covering 2012/13 to 2020/21. BLM UK has also highlighted this figure in their response to the Nowak case. The INQUEST report found that of 119 deaths involving restraint in that period, 23 were of black people and 86 were white, producing a disproportionality seven times higher than population share would predict (INQUEST, 2023; BLM UK, 2026).
The INQUEST report also found that no death of a black person following police custody or contact has ever led to officers being disciplined for racism, at a conduct or criminal level.
As the Home Secretary now demands accountability for Nowak’s death, it is worth asking: where was that demand for Chris Kaba, Sean Rigg, Dalian Atkinson, or Kevin Clarke, who died in 2018 after being restrained by up to nine officers in Catford, south-east London, as he called out ‘I can’t breathe’ and ‘I’m going to die’?
Stop and Search
In the year ending March 2025, black people were stopped and searched at a rate 3.8 times higher than white people across England and Wales (Home Office, 2025). The Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime, in conjunction with King’s College London, found that the grounds used to justify stops of black Londoners were vaguer than those used for white Londoners: “wearing concealing clothing,” “being in a high crime area [known for robbery and weapons].” Suspicion coded by race (MOPAC and King’s College London, March 2026).
That research, analysing 152,000 Metropolitan Police stop records from 2023, found that in East Sheen, an affluent area of Richmond upon Thames, black people were 48 times more likely to be stopped and searched than white people. In Dulwich Village, 40 times. In Hampstead Town, 38 times. These are not high-crime areas generating legitimate suspicion. These are affluent areas where black people are treated as anomalies requiring investigation.
The disproportionality carries through into strip searches. Black children are eight times more likely to be strip-searched than white children, with 89% conducted on suspicion of drugs possession. A five-year study by the Children’s Commissioner, published this year, found that force was used in nearly one in five stop and searches on children, with black children overrepresented and more likely to have their size, gender or build cited as justification. In 47% of cases involving girls strip-searched by the Metropolitan Police between 2021 and 2022, the subject was black. In 75% of those cases, no further action was taken (IRR, 2026; Liberty Investigates, 2023).
The ineffectiveness of stop and search compounds the injustice. Between 2020 and 2021, the Home Office found that 77% of stop and searches across England and Wales resulted in no further action. The power is not working. It is being used disproportionately against black communities regardless.
Arrest, Remand, and Sentencing
The Lammy Review, published in 2017, found that black men were more than three times more likely to be arrested than white men, and that men from black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds were more than 16 per cent more likely than white men to be remanded in custody. For every 100 white women jailed at Crown Court for drug offences, 227 black women were jailed. For every 100 white men, 141 black men (Lammy, 2017).
The average custodial sentence length was 27.1 months for black, Asian and minority ethnic offenders compared to 19.5 months for white offenders, a gap that was widening. Between 2009 and 2019, sentence length rose by 4.9 months for white offenders and by 8.0 months for BME offenders, almost double the increase (IRR, 2026; Lammy, 2017). Six years on, ESRC-funded research by the EQUAL project found that defendants from ethnic minority groups are still treated more harshly than white British defendants at the court stage, with no evidence-based explanation for the disparities (Lymperopoulou et al., 2023).
The charging stage compounds this. A University of Leeds study of Crown Prosecution Service charging decisions, published in 2023, found that mixed white/black Caribbean suspects were charged in 81.3% of cases, compared to 69.9% for white suspects, nearly 12 percentage points higher for similar offences. Black Caribbean suspects were charged in 77.5% of cases.
The lower guilty plea rate among black defendants, 54 per cent at magistrates’ courts compared to 68 per cent for white defendants in 2022, is itself a product of low institutional trust, as the Lammy Review identified. Because guilty pleas attract a one-third sentence reduction, this structural distrust compounds into longer sentences. The system punishes black people for not trusting it. In 2022, black defendants were imprisoned on average for 70% longer than white counterparts on remand, despite being more likely to be acquitted (Guardian/Liberty Investigates analysis of Ministry of Justice data, 2023).
A survey of 373 legal professionals, published in Racial Bias and the Bench (University of Manchester, 2022), found that 95% said racial bias plays some role in the processes and outcomes of the justice system, and 56% had witnessed at least one judge acting in a racially biased way. The most frequently cited targets of judicial discrimination were young black male defendants.
Inside Prison
The government’s use of force evaluation report, published in April 2025, found that black prisoners were nearly twice as likely as white prisoners to experience PAVA synthetic pepper spray and baton use: 409 per 1,000 black inmates compared to 208.6 per 1,000 white prisoners (Ministry of Justice, 2025). This was documented despite prior findings from the PAVA pilot evaluation that the weapon does nothing to reduce violence and damages staff-prisoner relationships. It was rolled out across the entire male public prison estate regardless.
The trajectory of PAVA use shows escalating disproportionality. By November 2021, 39% of those on whom PAVA was deployed were black/black British. By December 2022 that figure had reached 43%. By September 2023 it had become, as the Prison Reform Trust put it, normalised, accounting for 41% of all incidents. Black prisoners make up approximately 13% of the prison population. They are not nearly twice as likely to be violent. They are nearly twice as likely to be pepper-sprayed (Prison Reform Trust, 2023; IRR, 2026).
Britain’s prison population is heavily racialised. Black, Asian and minority ethnic people make up 18% of the population of England and Wales but 28% of the prison population. Within that, black people specifically make up 4% of the general population but 13% of the prison population: more than three times their population share (IRR, 2026; 2021 census). The Prison Reform Trust’s 2023 assessment of the Lammy Review found that many of the issues identified in 2017 remained stubbornly persistent, with insufficient evidence in the public domain that policies had changed when disproportionality was identified.
The criminal justice disparity is consistent with a broader structural pattern. Black women in Britain are three times more likely to die in childbirth than white women (MBRRACE-UK, 2026). Black Caribbean pupils face permanent exclusion rates three times higher than white British pupils (DfE, 2023/24). In the rental market, a field experiment sending fictitious enquiries to over 5,000 London landlords found systematic discrimination against applicants with names signalling African, Indian or Arabic/Muslim backgrounds, with Muslim and Arabic names facing the highest rates of rejection (Carlsson and Eriksson, 2015).
These are not separate problems. They are expressions of the same structural condition: a society that distributes risk, harm, and punishment along racial lines, then insists it does not.
The Institution and Its Leadership
The police are institutionally racist. This is not a campaigner’s claim. It is the finding of the Macpherson Inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence, published in 1999. It has been confirmed by the Home Affairs Select Committee in 2021, the Casey Review in 2023, and an acknowledgement from the National Police Chiefs’ Council in 2024 that structural and institutional discrimination operates at all levels of British policing. The institution has had more than two decades to change. The data shows the degree to which it has not.
The institution is not simply white in its attitudes. It is white in its composition. In 2022, 91.9% of police officers were white. Judicial diversity statistics for 2025 show that the representation of black judges has remained unchanged for a decade at just 1% (IRR, 2026). A 2022 survey of 373 legal professionals found that 56% had witnessed at least one judge acting in a racially biased way, and 52% had witnessed discrimination in judicial decision-making, most frequently directed towards black and Asian people (Racial Bias and the Bench, University of Manchester, 2022). The Casey Review found that black officers within the Met were 81% more likely to face disciplinary action and new non-white recruits over 120% more likely to be served with a Regulation 13 notice, classed as “unsuitable for policing,” than their white counterparts.
Black police officers know this from the inside. The National Black Police Association, routinely attacked by right-wing figures as a “racist” organisation for the fact of its existence, has documented the hostility that black officers face within the institutions they serve. The fight to defend the NBPA is part of the same story as the fight for community accountability: every mechanism that exists to challenge racism within these institutions is targeted for removal. The Alliance for Police Accountability has documented this pattern across forces.
In October 2025, BBC Panorama’s undercover investigation at Charing Cross police station found officers making racist, anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim comments, expressing misogynistic attitudes, joking about the use of force, and warning each other to be cautious around CCTV. Nine officers and one staff member were suspended within 48 hours.
Farage’s intervention is the loudest version of a sustained, coordinated effort to invert the reality of the tier system. The Manchester airport case shows the playbook clearly: take an incident involving a use of force against Muslim men, amplify the parts that show the man fighting back, suppress the context, and run a campaign that reframes police violence as Muslim aggression. The same logic operates in the broader political project of presenting the institutions that enforce racial hierarchy as the victims of it.
The evidence for the real tier system is produced by the Home Office, the Ministry of Justice, the Prison Reform Trust, the Institute of Race Relations, the Macpherson Inquiry, the Lammy Review, INQUEST, and King’s College London.
The gaslighting works by treating the data as opinion. Stop and search figures, sentencing data, use of force statistics, maternal mortality rates are reframed as the grievances of people who are themselves the problem. When black communities describe institutional racism, they are told they are being divisive. When Nigel Farage describes a fictional anti-white prejudice, he is given a platform. That asymmetry is itself part of what the data describes.
Mark Nowak asked for a full, fearless and transparent investigation into the police response to his son’s death. That is a legitimate demand. It is the same demand that the families of Christopher Alder, Joy Gardner, Roger Sylvester, Olaseni Lewis, and dozens of others have made over decades. Most of those families are still waiting.
What the Nowak case exposes is not anti-white prejudice. It exposes a police force that is institutionally dysfunctional and that operates without adequate accountability mechanisms. Those failures fall hardest on black communities in their daily encounters with the institution. They fell on Henry Nowak on one catastrophic night.
The far right are not exposing the tier system. They are using one tragedy to make the tier system harder to see. The forces that produced what happened on that street in Southampton operate under the same institutional conditions that stop black people 3.8 times more often than white people, sentence them to longer terms for the same offences, pepper-spray them at twice the rate inside prison, and make them seven times more likely to die following restraint. Those conditions require structural change. They will not be changed by a man calling for pure cold rage.
The above article was originally published here on the For Liberation, Against Racism blog.