Michael Roberts
The Nowak Killing and the seeming police failures in its immediate aftermath is cause for reflection. A violent black man was believed and a dying, voiceless white man left to whither away. To what extent one can generalise beyond this tale to trends in the police establishment in Britain is amoot point.
However, as I lived in Britain for four years in the early 1960s and had sisters who resided in the Brixton-Streatham areas of London …..and visited them every now and then in subsequent decades — I can tell the younger generations in the world today that this kind of police failure would have been unthinkable THEN. For a Blackie –whether West Indian, African or Asian — to be taken at vocal face value in such a scenario was extremely unlikely. The coloured man who was assailant, Vickrum Digwa, a Sikh migrant from India, is now under arrest. But it is the initial Police failure that I am marking here.
There I seek your responses to my reading. But do please go beyond that comparative issue to provide pertinent information on the Nowak Incident.