𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

Henry Nowak’s tragic death has shocked the nation. I met Henry’s family on Thursday, and I will never forget their grief – or their bravery in wanting to see positive change come from a tragedy.

So this has been a week for honest reflection as policing has rightfully come under great scrutiny. It is important to remember the brave and vital job thousands of individual officers do every single day to keep us safe. They run towards danger, making split-second decisions on incomplete information in situations most people will never encounter.

They keep us safe, but this everyday work rarely makes the news precisely because it is what we expect.

Without our police forces, society would collapse. But sometimes terrible mistakes are made, and we must be honest when that happens.

The bodycam footage released this week showing Henry telling police officers that he had been stabbed as they handcuff him and read him his rights is harrowing to watch. It shows a dying man being ignored and disbelieved because he had been the victim of a false allegation of racism by his killer. And the police believed Henry’s killer, not Henry, as he lay dying.

Apparently, a false allegation of racism was more important than saving a life. We do not fix this by whipping up anger or grievance. We need a serious understanding of what went wrong, and serious plans to fix it.

It has taken this horrific incident for Labour and so many others to see what the Conservative Party has been saying for over a year. The Police Anti-Racism Commitment is racist, divisive and dangerous.

It expressly calls for different ethnic groups to be treated differently to artificially engineer the same arrest rates, even though offending rates are different between different ethnic groups. I have been calling this out for the last year, and the Home Secretary has been repeatedly ignoring me. This divisive ideology now needs to be rooted out of all of policing and the whole public sector.

The ideology that produced the Police Anti-Racism Commitment emerged from a Left-wing grievance-based ideology that treats people as members of an ethnic group, not as individuals.

It demands the same outcomes for ethnic groups. That view has been disastrous wherever it has been applied, producing exactly the kind of racist injustice it claims to oppose.

The differential treatment mandated by the document destroys the foundation of fair justice. The same is happening across the whole public sector. Cases like Henry’s are victims of this sick ideology.

Scrapping the so-called anti-racism ideology, which is in fact itself racist, is the right place to start. But it runs far deeper than just one police document. The Conservative Party will push for this ideology to be rooted out in full – across all of society. These are necessary steps towards restoring equality under the law, but they are not sufficient on their own to keep us safe.

Police recorded around one million incidents of antisocial behaviour in the last year, and more than a third of the public have personally experienced or witnessed antisocial behaviour. Knife crime remains at worrying levels, with almost 50,000 incidents in the past year, while shoplifting has also surged.

Under Labour, serious crime has been rising, as police officer numbers fall and tens of thousands of criminals have been released early. Labour have been soft on crime and soft on criminals.

The Conservatives have set out a serious alternative. Our Take Back Our Streets plan would deploy 10,000 extra police officers, with an investment of £800 million to concentrate them on the 2,000 crime hotspot areas where a quarter of all crime occurs.

We would also triple stop and search to take knives and drugs off the streets, and we would scrap non-crime hate incidents entirely, ending the practice of officers policing thoughts rather than catching criminals.

That is what honouring the principle of equal treatment requires. The practical, unglamorous work of putting more officers on the streets, targeting crime where it concentrates, and building a system in which every person, whatever their background, can expect the same standard of protection and the same standard of justice.

Real equality and real policing. That is what I stand for.