"I Don't Think You Have, Mate"

Henry Nowak, the police and the banality of evil

Credit: ITV Meridian

The “banality of evil” is probably Hannah Arendt’s most famous phrase.

In 1961, she sat in a Jerusalem courtroom and watched Adolf Eichmann — the Nazi bureaucrat who had overseen the logistics of the Holocaust — answer for his crimes. She had expected a monster, but what she found was a small, self-important, thoroughly ordinary man. He spoke in clichés. He was, she wrote, almost boring.

Arendt didn’t say Eichmann was not evil — he plainly was. What she said was that the evil he represented was thoughtless. He didn’t look at the human beings in front of him and calculate that their suffering didn’t matter. He simply never looked at them as human beings at all. He had a category — Jews, enemies of the Reich — and the category did all the thinking for him. The individual disappeared and the person ceased to exist.

Once that disappearing act is complete, almost anything becomes possible. This is what she called the banality of evil. She warned it was spreading like fungus. And perhaps she was right.

On December 3rd 2025, Henry Nowak was stabbed. He was just eighteen years old, a first-year student, walking home from a night out with friends. He had been at the Hobbit Pub. This young man had his whole life ahead of him. His father would later describe him as his “beautiful son”.

At some point on that walk home, Henry crossed paths with Vickrum Digwa, a 23-year-old man carrying a kirpan — a Sikh ceremonial knife with a 21cm blade. During a confrontation, Digwa stabbed Henry five times. One wound went into his chest and Henry’s lung began to fill with blood. Henry ran and was found lying face down on a gravel driveway when police arrived. A bystander pointed out he was bleeding.

What followed is now on camera. The bodycam footage was released by Hampshire Police after Digwa’s murder conviction at Southampton Crown Court, and you should watch it if you can bear to.

Henry told officers several times: “I have been stabbed” and “I can’t breathe.”

An officer’s response to a dying teenager is now one of those phrases that will stay with you: “I don’t think you have, mate.”

Henry Novak with his godmother. Credit: Facebook

Based on Digwa’s false allegation that Henry had racially abused and assaulted him, the officers treated the injured teenager as the suspect rather than the victim. Henry was read his rights, handcuffed and drowned in his own blood.

The judge in the murder case noted that “Henry Nowak dying alone, humiliated and handcuffed was a direct consequence of Vickrum Digwa’s dishonesty.”

That is certainly true. Digwa murdered and lied. He fabricated a story of racial abuse to officers who believed him and Henry Nowak died for it. Digwa has been convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison with a minimum of 21 years. Justice has been served.

But the question remains: why did the officers believe him? And why didn’t they believe Henry?

Henry told them repeatedly he had been stabbed and could not breathe. The officers’ response required active disbelief. And that followed as a consequence of actively choosing to believe Digwa.

I want to be careful here, because I mean this carefully.

I don’t think those officers were bad people. I genuinely don’t. I feel sorry for them. Although I feel a great deal sorrier for Henry and his family. What I think — and what I find more disturbing — is that they are probably thoroughly ordinary people, caught inside a system that has trained them to process certain information before other information.

Put it this way. They arrived at a scene. One man was standing. He was claiming racial abuse. He was visibly from an ethnic minority. One man was lying on the ground. He was white.

Did the categories do the thinking for the officers?

It appears that Henry Nowak, bleeding on a gravel driveway, was not — in that moment — seen as an individual. People who have outsourced their moral judgement to an institution are the people Arendt was talking about.

While Arendt saw this as a political philosopher, CS Lewis identified something similar, as a theologian — the ‘Devil’s Strategy’. He warned that the devil rarely tempts you into evil directly, rather he relies on your intense dislike of one error to pull you into the opposite one. In this case, we might deduce that a fear of racism became an overcorrection that obscured individual accountability. And a commitment to protecting minorities cost a young man his life.

Bodycam footage.

While Arendt drew on the incomparable horror of the Holocaust and Lewis was writing about Christian ethics, the observations are universal. When virtue is unmoored from a belief in the dignity of the human individual, it becomes its own kind of danger. Errors and tragedies will continue while human beings — complex, morally distinct, each carrying their own story and their own dignity — are sorted into categories and assigned a hierarchy of importance and credibility. Identity politics creates this trap at a civilisational scale.

The less important groups are the people Arendt termed the “superfluous people”. Once you have decided that some people’s lives are less important, or less believable, than others, you are already walking into very serious trouble. In this case, it appears obvious which character was the “superfluous” person.

And if you want further evidence that some groups of people matter more than others, notice how the people who dropped to their knees for the criminal George Floyd are emitting mealy-mouthed useless too-little-too-late statements, blaming “knife crime”.

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So what do we do?

The solutions require more than any single article can provide, but I will say this: it doesn’t begin and end with the IOPC investigation or reviewing the training protocols at Hampshire Police and across every other force. Obviously, the question must be asked: has equalities and diversity training introduced a dangerous bias? If the answer is yes, that needs to change. And in that case, vigorous public debate, journalism that names things plainly, political accountability and retraining the police are all key.

But will that go far enough? I’m sceptical. It never has before. Institutions investigate themselves, reports are commissioned, inquiries burn from taxpayer pounds, well-meaning training is revised.

Free thinking is the deeper requirement. You need to be able to look at the person in front of you and see a person and refuse the pre-packaged category. This has been a preoccupation of mine since the Covid-19 pandemic and it’s why I wrote Free Your Mind after A State of Fear. Free thinking has never been more urgent.

There is hope. The most interesting thing about all those conformity experiments — Milgram, Asch, Zimbardo — is not that most conform but that some don’t. Still, even free thinking is not the firmest ground.

More and more, I think the firmest ground is older than any of this. I think we need to renew and return to the conviction that runs through the entire tradition of Western law and civilisation, that each human being carries an intrinsic dignity that must not be revoked or harmed by any institution, state, ideology, or group identity.

That conviction has a source. And I’m afraid that some of you might consider what follows to be a little bit old-fashioned. It is not a product of liberal democracy — rather, liberal democracy depends on it. It comes from the understanding that human beings are made in the image of God; that we are sacred. The source of the conviction is Christianity.

Whether you are Christian or not, whether you believe in god or not, nevertheless we built a civilisation on Christian foundations. More and more, I come to the conclusion that the true source of so many of today’s existential problems is that we have been have been enjoying the protection of a building while ignoring its foundations.

I keep going back to so many details of Novak’s death. The “mate”, the apparent adherence to procedure down to the blue gloves, and the fact he was making his way home from the Hobbit Pub. Evil threatened the folk in the Shire, too.

Identity politics must have sounded to some people like a nice and kind thing, but truly it has been an instrument for the banality of evil.