Floyd v Nowak. The story isn't so black and white after all.

I Can't Breathe… Either.

This image poses the question on purpose. The piece is where it’s complicated

What a depressing start to the day. Right? You’ve seen it by now. Of course you have, it’s been everywhere. It arrived with yesterday’s breakfast.

It’s the tragic story of Henry Nowak. Eighteen. Away from home. His first year in university. Walking back to his halls in Southampton after a night out watching football, filming himself on his phone the way they all do. Nothing happening. Just a lad talking to a camera on a dark street. The way people do. Nowadays.

Out of seemingly nowhere. Somebody puts a knife in him. Five times. One straight through the chest. A call to 999 followed. An emergency like probably no other, this night in Southampton.

In a situation such as this, the sound of blues and twos, and flashing blue lights arriving must feel like salvation.

Henry informs the attending officers he’s been stabbed. The reply to this, word for word: “I don’t think you have, mate.”

Sit with that a minute. He’s bleeding to death and being told he’s imagining it.

Please, brother, he says. I can’t breathe.

The response to this, the call for an ambulance, perhaps? No. Handcuffs.

He dies right there on the pavement. And the man who knifed him? Stood a few feet off, calm as you like, telling the police he’s the real victim here.

Plausible deniability, in the moment. And. From the police.

Just short of, “is there anything we can get you — a cup of coffee maybe, are you in shock, is there a relative we can call on your behalf, perhaps?”

The almost typically British, tea and sympathy moment. One might think.

No. Meanwhile. Henry is left to die.

The killer’s called Vickrum Digwa. Twenty-three. Had his story ready before the blood went cold — said he’d been racially abused, turban knocked off, called a name. None of it happened.

Here’s the kicker. Henry’s own phone, the one he was filming on, ends up in Digwa’s pocket. Gets played back in court. Not one word of abuse on it. The lad’s killer invented a hate crime and pinned it on the boy he was busy killing.

Southampton Crown Court had a name for it. A wicked lie.

This. Got him a murder conviction. Another for carrying a twenty-one-centimetre blade about in public. Life, twenty-one years minimum. His mum, Kiran Kaur, was convicted too — for carting the weapon off afterwards like she was clearing the tea things.

This is someone who’d been training with weapons since he was twelve. A nobody. In all respects. Who slept in a room done out like an armoury.

A nobody who talked about the knife that killed Henry — the prosecution’s words, not mine — in loving terms.

Oh. And that religious exemption everyone’s suddenly shouting about? He had two knives on him. One tucked away, which the faith allows. The big one out on show, which it doesn’t.

This wasn’t a man observing his religion. This was a man who fancied carrying a sword. A man out to kill.

We’ve heard those words before. Haven’t we?

I can’t breathe. You know exactly where you’ve heard that.

In case you needed reminding. It was six years back, near enough to the week, George Floyd said it under a police officer’s knee in Minneapolis. And the whole Western world lost its mind — in the proper sense.

Stopped. Turned. Roared. And.

If you really want the scale of it? An outfit called Signal AI counted Floyd’s name in 1.88 million news stories in a fortnight. More than the President of the United States managed in the same two weeks.

About a fifth of everything the planet was saying about the pandemic. And the pandemic was the only thing anyone could talk about.

Other matters, by all accounts? Let’s just say, academic.

Meanwhile. Prime ministers got down on one knee. Boardrooms rewrote their values by the weekend.

It was, possibly, a long weekend. Otherwise reserved for short breaks.

Henry, phrased it differently. Henry said, “I can’t breathe.”

The police officer tells him he doesn’t think it’s happening. And the country? Nothing. Silence.

Right up until a court verdict and a leaked bit of bodycam footage dragged it out, blinking, into the daylight.

The easy answer — and why it’s only half of it.

Of course. Now, the more amplified voices have got a one-word answer for all this. White. Henry was white, so nobody marched. Simple as.

Half right. Which is the most dangerous kind of right there is.

Because hang on — Stephen Lawrence wasn’t killed by the state either. Private blokes, a police force that didn’t want to know. His death turned into Macpherson, a public inquiry, the actual rewriting of what racism means in British law.

So a private killing can move a whole country. The colour of the victim was never the whole story.

Here’s the real switch. A death moves this country when you can hang it on a grievance that’s already got a cathedral built round it — the offices, the training days, the friendly newsdesks, the march that turns up on its own.

Henry’s death doesn’t fit any cathedral. It fits the heresy. It’s the story all those institutions exist to deny. So it went down the back lanes — talk radio, the timeline — and never once got on the motorway of the breakfast telly.

Some deaths get a cathedral. Henry’s got the heresy. That’s the whole thing, right there.

How you end up cuffing a dying eighteen-year-old student. On his deathbed. So to speak. Is the question. Isn’t it?

So how did we get here? Moreover. How do trained police officers end up cuffing a stabbed teenager instead of saving him?

Nobody sat down and decided it. That’s the bit we’ve yet to understand. So. Again. I ask you. Isn’t it?

For a clearer understanding, I hope. Let’s go back to Macpherson, 1999. It gave us a rule: something’s racist if the victim, or anyone watching, reckons it is.

Fair enough. Built to protect people who’d been ignored for decades. I can see this.

Then the College of Policing bolts more on top: treat a claim of racial hostility as a priority. Then the inspectors start marking every force on how seriously they take hate.

Now. If you think I’m making this up, think again.

Their own Anti-Racism Commitment, written with the police chiefs, says it in black and white. “It does not mean treating everyone ‘the same’ or being ‘colour blind.’”

They’ll tell you it’s not even policy. Just an aspiration. Something they aspire to, not something that has to be done.

Right. I could aspire to win the lottery jackpot. Hasn’t made me a millionaire yet.

That’s the whole trick. An aspiration orders no one and binds no one — so no one’s to blame when it shapes the room. It doesn’t need to give the order. It just has to be in the air.

On top of all that sits the quiet little sum every copper’s doing in his head at midnight — a complaint of racial bias ends my career; a wrong call on a dark street is just a bad night.

Not one of those rules says cuff the bleeding man. They don’t have to. Stack them up and you build a reflex that hears the accusation quicker than it sees the wound.

Now. Policing’s got one rule that’s meant to sit above the lot. Save the life in front of you.

They even call it the preservation of life — first principle, written into the heart of the job. So we believe.

Yet. And, you might choose to take a moment to run this through a couple of times, at least.

On that pavement, the newer rule beat the oldest one. The instinct to honour a shout of racism got there before the duty to keep a lad alive.

They sorted out who to blame before they sorted out who to save.

I’ll just take it as read that you’re pausing here, before we continue.

The lie worked precisely because more than two decades of training had taught them to take that exact lie seriously. A man who knew the magic word said the magic word.

Did the doctrine actually tip these officers that night? That’s for the IOPC to rule on, not me. That it made the lie worth telling in the first place — that’s already nailed on.

In fairness — and it changes nothing.

Now, in fairness, and you’ve got to be fair or what’s the point — the force, Hampshire Police, says they were had. Says the wound was deep, inside, hard to spot. Says the cuffs were off within three minutes. Fine. Grant them every word of it. He might’ve died in the ambulance anyway.

Doesn’t matter. That’s the bit that gets me — it doesn’t matter, and the point still stands.

The failure was never whether they could save him. The failure is the order they did it in. They investigated a man before they tried to save him.

So who’s it actually for?

So who’s all this for? That’s the question I keep landing on when everyone else has picked their team.

One machine made a saint out of Floyd. Another one’s making a saint out of Henry right now — Nigel Farage‘s emergency address, the call for “pure cold rage,” the slogan lifted straight off the movement he claims to hate.

Give Farage his best point, because it’s a good one: a copper more frightened of a bias complaint than of getting it badly wrong is a copper the system’s broken. He said it plain, and he’s right.

Then watch him take that one true thing and fold it into immigration, integration, the whole turning tide. The point was real. What he’s doing with it is a recruitment drive.

Both machines need the dead lad to be a symbol before he’s finished being somebody’s son. I’ve watched the pair of them run for six years now, and under the paint it’s the same engine.

You don’t owe either of them your anger. The only honest grief in this whole business belongs to Mark Nowak, who buried his boy — not to anyone building a turnout operation on the grave.

Look what it took.

Look what it took to shift this even an inch. A grieving father going public to beg for his own son’s footage. An emergency video statement. A Police and Crime Commissioner calling his right to carry that blade central to the whole thing.

The Speaker of the Commons, Lindsay Hoyle, having to step in before the government would even stand up in the House and say a word.

There’s your two-tier policing, playing out in slow motion right in front of you. Floyd needed a phone. Henry needed a viral video, a watchdog, a party broadcast and the Speaker’s elbow in the ribs — just to get himself mentioned in Parliament.

The thing sat quiet in the middle of it.

Here’s the one question left. The one that ought to keep you up at the hour I’m writing this.

The watchdog has to work out whether those officers broke their training — or followed it, to the letter, all the way to that pavement.

Pray it’s the first one. You can sack the first one. Retrain it, discipline it, put out a press release about lessons learned.

The second one, there’s nobody to sack. Because nobody broke anything.

It worked.

That’s the thing sat quiet in the middle of all this. Quiet as a wound that doesn’t show. A system doing its job exactly how it was built to. And a boy telling the truth, in handcuffs, to people trained to hear a lie.

Nothing on that little phone screen to tell you the ordinary was about to stop. It always is. You just never see it coming.

Floyd, the world knew within days. Henry took the best part of six months — a murder conviction, and footage finally prised loose — before any of us knew his name.

Same three words. Same plea. Days, against half a year.

That’s the distinction. Two-tier, with a stopwatch on it.

The Almighty Gob is a Bristol-based publication founded by John Langley — independent mayoral candidate in 2016 and 2021, and one of Bristol’s most forensic observers of institutional power. Writing since 2010, well over 1,000 pieces across seven platforms and, here on Substack, at thealmightygob.com — no party allegiance, no press accreditation, no interest in acquiring either.

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