Clark Davison
2.2K posts

Clark Davison
@ClarkDavison
Working towards a Connected and Collaborative Community







































I'm ex-UK Law Enforcement. And the Novak case shows racism has crept into British policing — just not in the way anyone wants to admit. I'll say something that will make a lot of people uncomfortable: UK police officers are now, by definition, racist against White British people. And looking back honestly at my own career — I believe I was too. When I joined the force, racism training, unconscious bias training, and equality reviews made up a substantial part of our workload. If any job we attended had a racial element, the paperwork doubled. The scrutiny intensified. The message, drummed in relentlessly, was clear: ethnic minorities need the police for protection. That was our duty. I don't think that message was wrong. But I can now see what it quietly produced. When an ethnic minority told me they were a victim of racial abuse, it never crossed my mind that they might not be telling the truth. Not once. That instinct wasn't conscious. It wasn't malicious. It was trained into me. That's exactly what you're seeing in the Novak case. Henry Novak, 18, was stabbed and bleeding out on a Southampton street. When officers arrived, bystanders accused him of racism. And those officers — trained, as I was, to treat that accusation as credible, to treat the ethnic minority present as the party requiring protection — arrested the bleeding white male. UK police are trained above almost everything else to prioritise safety. Their own, and the public's. A person bleeding from a stab wound is, by every instinct and every protocol, a victim. That training evaporated the moment race entered the picture. That is racial assumption. Applied to someone because of their skin colour. That is, by definition, racism. Nobody programmed these officers to hate white people. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying the opposite: years of necessary, well-intentioned training has created an unconscious hierarchy of believability — and white victims now sit at the bottom of it. We created this problem trying to solve another one. And until we're honest enough to name it, it will keep happening. #HenryNovak














