Police policies must be reformed

The circumstances of Henry Nowak’s tragic death in police custody is an outworking of the conclusions reached nearly thirty years ago by Sir William Macpherson’s Inquiry into the death of Stephen Lawrence. 

Of course, the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry reached a great many essential and correct conclusions — not least that the murder investigation was shamefully botched from the start. But it was as part of that Inquiry that the “Institutional Racism” label was hung around the neck of British policing — a politicised claim from which our police forces have never truly recovered. 

The Lawrence case set the platform for the last three decades in policing; the Nowak case should do the same for the next three decades.

The circumstances of Henry Nowak’s death are catastrophic for policing. Having been a police officer on the frontline, and knowing how difficult it can be, I’m usually reluctant to criticise officers making split-second decisions in chaotic situations. But I’ve watched the footage countless times now and I cannot comprehend the decision-making by the officers involved. 

There must be full disclosure by the Chief Constable of the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary. Every second of body worn video, the full 999-call recording, literally everything that possibly can be put into the public domain must be. 

But as important as individual failings in this case surely are, there are wider issues of policy which must be examined. Indeed, both the officers’ competence and the issue of race in policing may well simultaneously be factors.

Nonetheless it is the policy aspects that must now be forensically examined because they go to the very heart of the concept of equality before the law. 

For we now appear to have reached a situation where the fear of being called a racist is so embedded in the minds of police officers that it trumps everything else — with officers apparently willing to “reject the evidence of their eyes and ears” should the “R-word” be mentioned. 

When I speak with some of my former colleagues still on the policing frontline, this is the climate of fear that they tell me they operate under. 

 Although Macpherson may have started British policing on the path to where we find ourselves today, the rocket boosters were truly applied in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd on an American street some 4,000 miles away in May 2020. 

In response, at least one Chief Constable took the knee. The Chief Constable’s Council — the regular meeting of every Chief Constable in the country — held on the 15th July 2020 recorded that “chiefs realise that events in the US have transcended borders and become a truly international moment that they wanted to grasp as leaders of the police service”. According to the Independent Scrutiny and Oversight Board, six police forces have since declared themselves to be “Institutionally Racist”: Avon and Somerset Police, Bedfordshire Police, British Transport Police, Dorset Police, Gloucestershire Police and South Wales Police.

But in addition to a great deal of virtue signalling, policy — which every police officer in the country would be required to follow — was established. 

The National Police Chiefs’ Council and the College of Policing published the “Police Race Action Plan” in May 2022 — committing British policing to becoming “anti-racist”. Most police forces — including the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary — have adopted their own version of the Police Race Action Plan.

Since 2022, the national policy has undergone a series of “updates” — the 2025 version, with a foreword by then Policing Minister Dame Diana Johnson MP, specifically committed the police to seeking to produce: “equality of policing outcomes for people from different ethnic groups”. The policy makes clear that: “It does not mean treating everyone ‘the same’ or being ‘colour blind’”.

The Police Race Action Plan represents an implicit rejection of the historic British ideal that policing acts “without fear or favour”. 

If we are ever to return to that ideal — as we surely must if there is to be any hope of retaining the trust of the great majority of the public — it can only be by examining, and eliminating, these policies.

Yet when it comes to dealing with the trickier aspects of policing, aspects of the Ministerial playbook are too often well-worn. First, a reliance on investigations which focus principally on the actions of junior officers. Second, the praying in aid of police chiefs’ “operational independence.

There are already efforts afoot to limit the focus away from broader policy questions and concentrate on this case in isolation. That is what is happening when the Prime Minister declares that we must rely on the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) to look into the issues — including those concerning race.

But an investigation by the IOPC alone will not do: the truth is that the IOPC are as ideologically captured as the rest of policing when it comes to race. In November 2024 the then newly appointed Director General of the IOPC announced that she welcomed the Police Race Action Plan. 

As for the second part of the playbook, the Police Race Action Plan could hardly be clearer that it is policy-making in action and therefore well beyond the confines of Chief Constable’s “operational independence”. The Home Secretary, as Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State of Justice, was right last year when she made clear in relation to Sentencing Guidelines that policy-making was the remit of elected politicians. The case of the Police Race Action Plan is no different. 

The idea that police chiefs will be permitted to undertake their own review — perhaps merely smoothing out some of the more “clumsy language” (as if this were simply a case of bad drafting) is utterly insufficient. The Home Secretary should take hold of the Police Race Action Plan and expunge it and its consequences from policing once and for all.

Similarly, every individual forces’ own Race Action Plans must be dispensed with, alongside the myriad of other processes, incentives and training designed to deliver the fundamental unfairness of “equality of outcomes”. If police chiefs will not act themselves and it takes the Home Secretary legislating with an Act of Parliament, so be it. 

“Without fear or favour” is not the only foundational principle of policing in this country; another is that policing is “by consent”. When the police implicitly discard the former, they risk losing the latter.  

If we are to hold onto policing by consent, Ministers cannot delegate away their policy-making responsibilities to police chiefs. As war is too important to be left to the generals, so policing is too important to be left to the chief constables.