What has been remarkable about Henry Nowak’s case was not the story itself, tragic though it is, but the potency of it to spark public anxiety. The anxiety is born of an in-built and nascent popular resistance to the idea that certain groups, the victims of unconscious bias, need special consideration in order to counteract that potential disadvantage.
The expression ‘two-tier’ has in the Nowak case been applied to policing, but the principle is more general, and lies behind (for instance) campaigns to nudge public attitudes (and sometimes public policy) towards the disabled, older jobseekers, plus a ‘group’ which in fact comprises half of us: women. You can call it positive discrimination.
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Belfast and the truth about ‘alien cultures’
I’ve been unable to make myself watch the bodycam footage of the moments before Nowak’s death. An inquiry is under way and we can expect the story to resurface. It has become a catalyst for a wider public debate on the application of positive discrimination to policing: so called ‘two-tier’ policing.
