The Police Foundation is a non-partisan think tank and we are independent of both the police and government. This means that we focus on analysing the real state of play and try to design policy that can actually fix the problems that policing faces. When we comment we use evidence or research to support our views, or we reserve judgement until the real picture is clear.
Politicians and commentators naturally have different incentives, and the media circus of the last week or more has shown how individual cases can become weaponised to advance political agendas, even despite a lack of evidence. This is not a new phenomenon.
The human tragedy of the Henry Nowak murder, and the dignified response of his family, are undeniable. However, there remains, sadly, a lack of facts and a lack of evidence around this incident, and this has allowed a lot of people to hijack this case to make wider arguments about our country that they already believed.
Our Senior Fellow and former Assistant Commissioner Neil Basu has rightly called out the behaviour of certain political figures in their response last week, as well as defending the efforts that policing has made over several decades to improve how it treats people from ethnic minority backgrounds. His podcast is one of the better commentaries on the Nowak case and the fall out.
The facts we need
Some politicians are drawing confident conclusions without the full facts. Nor it seems with any care for the impact of their rhetoric on the police service as a whole. What has been lost in all the noise and ‘rage’ around the case, has been a sober assessment of the police response – which was clearly unacceptable – and what this might say about the wider pressures on the service.
There remain lots of facts in the Nowak case that were not relevant to the verdict itself, or the sentencing, but which are material to shaping any assessment of the policing response. We also need this information to guide debate about the policy questions of how we confront knife crime, or manage risks of disorder in our polarised political times.
The judge was clear that Henry Nowak was fatally wounded before officers arrived and their actions did not contribute to his death. But we need the IOPC to report promptly to fill in the gaps in terms of the policing response and the organisational factors that may have been at play.
The first is the operational context. The last HMICFRS inspection for Hampshire from 2025 highlighted their failure to meet their response time targets. The force was far from being the worst in the country on this metric, but it is a part of the story: however fatal Nowak’s injuries were, officers took too long to arrive.
We cannot know what was informing their decision-making, because the controller’s transcript has not been shared. This means the excerpt body-camera footage provides only a partial picture. However, we do know that frontline officers today are over-worked and under-supported, especially those in response roles.
Since the pandemic there has been high churn and a loss of key experience and frontline street-craft, with a drop in the proportion of long-service constables and sergeants. The rate of voluntary exits for sergeant and inspector ranks has almost doubled in the last five years, and overall, more than a third of all officers now have less than five years’ service. That is a lot of inexperienced officers with inadequate supervision.
We need to lift the burdens on frontline supervisors and pay more attention to how regulations and bureaucracy force them to work. We also need to review what resources – people and technology – are available to support decision-making in high stress environments. Policing is still not properly supporting its frontline staff, and cases like this are some of the foreseeable consequences.
Training may also be a factor. The amount of scheduled training opportunities for the police is insufficient and when it is made available, training days are often postponed because of high shift demands. Rest days are frequently cancelled, and current public order pressures, especially in metropolitan forces, are creating even more abstraction.
We do not know how young in service, or how well trained (or not), the Hampshire response officers in the case were, but the IPOC investigation will hopefully tell us. What we do know is that that night shift will stay with those officers for the rest of their lives.
Policing is till not properly supporting its frontline staff, and cases like this are some of the foreseeable consequences
Decision-making
Given this context, what should we make of the inferences being drawn by so many media commentators about race? The assertion is hard to prove. Diversity, Equality or Inclusion training is widespread. We know a version was developed locally, and offered to officers, but we simply do not know what these officers actually received, and we certainly cannot say definitively that it impacted their decision-making on the night of Nowak’s murder. They might exist somewhere, but I have never met a ‘woke’ response officer who would put race theory ahead of a professional duty of care.
The much-quoted NPCC policy document is not new, but it is just that – a statement of guidance – and anyone familiar with policing knows that frontline officers live in a jungle of guidance and for good reason are very often not steeped in NPCC policy. How could they be, given how demanding their jobs are?
We also know that far from being some powerful doctrine, the Race Action Plan has had very little impact on some of the key metrics it was designed to influence – like diversity ratios in recruitment for example. It seems incredible that decision-making on that night in Southampton would have been warped in the way that has been implied, but again the IOPC report should tell us if it was a factor, and if so, how.
The trials of transparency
The Nowak case reminds us that policing and politics cannot be separated – they never could be. But the world has dramatically changed since the murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993 – and that now, in similar cases that might spark public concern, the police have two key challenges: they must deal with the radical transparency of body-worn video that previous generations of officers did not have to navigate, and they must deal with the fall-out from difficult cases in a much more volatile information environment.
The Foundation has supported the roll-out of body-camera technology, and I personally promoted the idea in the Mayor’s Office in 2013 which eventually enabled the Met Police to undertake the first robust field trial of the technology. The opportunity it affords the police to have an ‘independent witness’ is incredibly valuable. It has helped officers and given victims and the courts an account they can rely on. It has also empowered internal investigators to root out misconduct.
But we must be realistic: body-cameras bring a level of unfiltered exposure on the messy realities of the job that no other public servant has to endure. How the footage is released, and the story it tells, is more important than ever – and releases of edited footage that fail to show the whole incident, or which are published too late, can be really detrimental. Policing has not yet fully adjusted to this new level of openness, and this type of transparency can have a cost.
We welcome the fact that the Met Police have recently updated their policy to be much more proactive. When released early and in full, body-cam footage can demystify policing and scotch wild rumours. But even then, the graphic nature of the audio and video can be emotive and unsettling, and can make officers very vulnerable to vilification, community retaliation and disproportionate discipline procedures.
We need body-worn video to primarily be an investigatory asset for securing convictions, and a training tool for officers – not a means to further undermine our frontline cops and make that difficult job even less appealing to new recruits than it already is.
We must be realistic: body-cameras bring a level of exposure that no other public servant has to endure.
The information environment
Unlike previous moments of crisis in policing – in 1993 with Lawrence, or with the August Riots in 2011 – the information environment has also become much more fragmented and hostile. Audiences are harder to reach. Official information is contested everywhere. Social media can escalate the impact of events and drive real-world disorder. And now domestic extremists, or foreign states – using AI and bots – can amplify and drive disinformation to new heights, shaping public debate here in Britain, whilst the agitators are hiding behind Russian or Iranian servers.
This report from Cardiff University last month explains some of this State-sponsored online activity we are experiencing, and why we still lack a good framework for measuring it. We do not know how much of the public reaction to the Nowak case has been fuelled by online accounts with foreign-state agendas, but it was part of the Southport case in 2024 and so reasonable to assume it is playing a part now.
This environment makes it critical to try and avoid a vacuum where lies can take hold. Traditionally, we have leaned on the process of inquiries or reviews to provide full answers, but by convention, this is usually slow and can be self-serving. Inquiries do not always meet public expectations for clear answers and for poor practice to be exposed and rectified. In this situation, a short, focused inquiry by the IOPC can provide us with additional facts, because there are crucial aspects of Hampshire police’s response that are still not in the public domain.
The confidence challenge
The Foundation exists to support the police, and to do that, we have to engage on the issues that impact on public trust and confidence – which is so vital to our democratic policing model. Whether those issues – like ‘two-tier policing’ – are based in fact, or are assertion and grievance dressed up as analysis, is important, because it affects how policing is debated and understood in the public arena.
There are many drivers behind trust and confidence in the police and several good explanations for why it is falling. The trend is apparent from 2016-17, across England and Wales, but also in Scotland – and these drivers need to be properly understood and addressed. Perceptions of police visibility have dropped in parallel, and the two trends are probably connected.
Given the traction in the media of the Nowak case, like the Sarah Everard murder before, this incident could potentially drive these confidence numbers down even more, and that would make the difficult job of policing our communities even harder in years to come.
That is reason enough to take the ‘two-tier’ allegation seriously, and to invite those leading police organisations to engage directly on this issue and respond. Even if police leaders understandably try to contest the label, the criticism continues to shape perceptions across society and the media and in this respect, must be taken seriously and understood, rather than dismissed.
Our major conference at Cumberland Lodge this weekend will be discussing these very issues, and it is in that environment that we will convene key experts and policing figures in a setting that allows for honesty and candour. The summary report will follow later in the summer, and we will convene a public panel event later this year. The current civil unrest in Northern Ireland and the Nowak murder are a sobering backdrop for our annual event.
Leadership when it matters
In addition to resourcing, training, and frontline conduct, the Nowak tragedy is a reminder of the importance of getting the basics right, and the need for good police leadership when the situation is most volatile. Sadly in the last fortnight, clear and visible policing leadership has been absent, and representatives of frontline officers have had little voice.
Communities need to see and hear from police leaders at critical moments of tension like this. At just the time when chief officers might be being advised by lawyers not to get out there, is exactly the moment when they need to. Just as policing is too important to be left to the police, the debate on policing and how we want our officers to be trained and deployed is too important to be conducted without them.
We need the police – both frontline and senior leadership – to have a stronger voice in our public debate, and for leaders in the service to make their case and to confront misinformation directly. The complexity of modern policing is something that most people simply have no understanding of – and that demands education and explanation in as clear and transparent a way as possible.
Whether you agree with it or not, ‘two-tier policing’ is the most serious charge levelled against the police in this country for decades. Even if the critics are only half right in their assessment, they have caught public attention and the police and government must respond. When we all have the full facts about what happened in Southampton, we can make that response meaningful.
Whether you agree with it or not, ‘two-tier policing’ is the most serious charge levelled against the police in this country for decades
There are a handful of conference places left. Find out more and register here.