This is the moment I knew I had to quit the police. I was a counter-terrorism expert with 24 years of experience but it was the final straw… and it explains why Henry Nowak’s horrific death was no surprise
It was in 2024 that officer Paul Birch decided he could no longer remain in the police. The veteran counter-terrorism expert, with 24 years’ experience and a raft of commendations in his pocket, was sitting in a tired suburban training centre, attending a ‘mandatory leadership course’ on ‘anti-racism’, hosted by the Metropolitan Police.
‘We were all bored and just wanted to get out of there,’ he tells The Mail on Sunday – but then his ears pricked up.
In a section about British history, instructors told the officers that Caribbean migrants had been forcibly rounded up and marched aboard the now-famous ship the Empire Windrush – whose journey to Britain in 1948 arguably marks the beginning of modern mass migration to Britain – before being ‘transported’ here.
This apparent attempt to falsely link 20th-century economic migration with the monstrous Atlantic slave trade of centuries before was, he believes, sinister and deeply offensive.
‘Totally unbelievable. Totally untrue,’ he says. ‘These were people who came voluntarily to Britain to help build our country after the war.’
He was so furious at the misinformation being disseminated by ‘experts’, he challenged the claim publicly. ‘I questioned it,’ he says. ‘I was the only one who did. A lot of people my age there knew it was rubbish, but didn’t speak up.’
That day was the ultimate proof for Mr Birch of what he now describes as the force’s ‘ideological capture’ and a ‘top-down obsession with political correctness’ – an obsession that would finally drive him out altogether later that year.
That ideological transformation, which Mr Birch argues has been undertaken in forces up and down the country, resulted in a style of policing that he believes contributed directly to Hampshire Constabulary’s handling of the fatal stabbing of 18-year-old Henry Nowak in December last year.
Mr Birch believes that an ideological transformation has taken place in the police, resulting in a style of policing that he believes contributed directly to Hampshire Constabulary’s handling of the fatal stabbing of 18-year-old Henry Nowak (pictured) in December last year
In a section about British history, instructors told the officers that Caribbean migrants had been forcibly rounded up and marched aboard the now-famous ship the Empire Windrush
‘Totally unbelievable. Totally untrue,’ says Mr Birch. ‘These were people who came voluntarily to Britain to help build our country after the war’
As the world now knows, Mr Nowak was stabbed five times by a Sikh man, Vickrum Digwa, who falsely claimed that he had been racially assaulted by the teenager when Digwa’s brother called 999. Mr Nowak was put in handcuffs, despite telling officers he had been stabbed, before dying at the scene.
Police body-camera footage of the arrest has sparked national outrage and raised serious questions about how officers could have treated a critically-injured teenager with such indifference.
Mr Birch points out that the number of officers attending the scene is highly revealing. ‘At least four were present: you don’t see that for a burglary or theft,’ he says. ‘This must have been because Digwa had falsely reported a “racist assault”.’
That, he says, would have immediately upgraded the alleged crime to a ‘serious incident’ trumping other emergencies on the call queue.
How has British policing come to such a sorry state?
Mr Birch, 57 – who held roles in response units, public order, intelligence and finally counter-terrorism in 2009, where he stayed for the rest of his career – has more than a good idea.
He has shown the MoS a document commissioned and published by the Metropolitan Police a few months after he left. The London Race Action Plan proves, he says, the extent to which the force has fallen in thrall to an activist cabal.
Written by Dr Shereen Daniels, the ‘founder of the African Diaspora Economic Inclusion Foundation’, it is prefaced with a ‘trigger warning for black readers’.
Mr Nowak was stabbed five times by a Sikh man, Vickrum Digwa (pictured), who falsely claimed that he had been racially assaulted by the teenager when Digwa’s brother called 999
‘This review names and details patterns of racial harm that many of us have lived, witnessed, or survived, in silence, in resistance, or in exhaustion,’ writes Dr Daniels.
‘Please approach the text at your pace, with what you need around you. Step away when you must. This was not written to retraumatise, but to confront what has been systematically denied.’
It is littered with activist buzzwords like ‘blackness’ (according to the report a word used to ‘refer not only to racial identity but to how institutions respond to the presence, proximity, or even suggestion of blackness’) and ‘misogynoir’ (the ‘intersection’ of sexism and racism).
As a piece of arcane literature in an undergraduate essay, it would be one thing. But this has been circulated inside the Met to dictate how its officers should carry out their duties. The ‘action plan’, says Mr Birch, severely undermines the notion of neutrality – critical, of course, to the police whose job is to enforce the law equally.
Yet Dr Daniels claims that neutrality is ‘often presented as a position of fairness, balance, or objectivity. But in practice, especially in institutions like the Met, neutrality is not neutral . . . It is structurally coded. It hides power while appearing impartial.’
Mr Birch says: ‘The purpose of the Met is to look at people for what they are, not who they are’
Mr Birch says: ‘The purpose of the Met is to look at people for what they are, not who they are. Policing’s not like working at Tesco.’ Yet if the British police have now become indoctrinated with this far-Left dogma, the rot, he argues, set in years ago.
On his very first day as a young constable in a Cambridgeshire force back in 2001, he was presented with a leather ring binder containing the ‘standard induction materials’ for new recruits.
‘The first page was nothing to do with fighting crime, or a precis on policing history,’ he reveals. ‘It was a map of Britain annotated with arrows showing the waves of immigration – from Anglo-Saxons to Vikings, Eastern Europeans and French Huguenots – portraying it as a “glorious melting-pot”. Diversity was already top of the agenda.’
Police forces across the country were then reeling in the wake of the 1999 Macpherson Report, commissioned after the murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence six years earlier, which had branded the Metropolitan Police ‘institutionally racist’.
Mr Birch insists the Met did, then, have genuine problems with racism, and says much progress was made. But, he says, the force’s approach ‘got rocket boosters under it’ after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, when debates about race in the US spilled into British institutions.
‘I am not saying we didn’t need to make progress,’ he says. ‘I am not saying that there were not racist officers or there was not a problem with racism – far from it.’ But senior officers embraced the language and priorities of the Marxist-aligned Black Lives Matter movement ‘hook, line and sinker’.
In June 2020, police officers ‘took the knee’ outside Downing Street during a Black Lives Matter demonstration
As Mr Birch rose into management roles, an increasing amount of his time was consumed by implementing ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ (DEI) policies with which he fundamentally disagreed – rather than his considerably more important job of helping to mastermind Britain’s efforts on counter-terrorism.
‘If you are in any form of managerial role, this DEI gremlin just sits there, dominating everything’, he says. ‘It wasn’t good enough that you just weren’t racist; you had to be anti-racist.’
He remembers a counter-terrorism meeting he attended with Home Office officials. The gathering was supposed to focus on issues affecting Britain’s Muslim communities, but he was baffled when civil servants opened proceedings with ‘a 15-minute lecture’ on ‘the evils of the British Empire. It had no relevance to what we were talking about – or to policing in modern London’.
Indeed, he suggests, by focusing on historic grievances, it risked distracting from the very real current threat from Islamist terrorism – at a time when roughly 75 per cent of the terrorists on MI5 watchlists are suspected Islamist extremists.
Few were willing to challenge such misplaced priorities, according to Mr Birch, owing to a pervasive culture of fear. Officers might express doubts in private, he says, but few were prepared to do so publicly, terrified of the professional consequences.
‘Some people would say behind closed doors or in hushed tones, “This is ridiculous”, or if they’d go for a drink after work, they’d say that it was nuts. But in an office environment, very few people would open their mouths and discuss it. No one was interested in questioning it on pain of being dismissed out of hand – or actually being dismissed,’ he says.
He could see those concerns about accusations of racism increasingly seeping into operational policing. Birch says fellow officers stopped pursuing uncomfortable lines of inquiry.
‘We’ve seen what the consequences of those beliefs are,’ he says. ‘We’ve seen it in the grooming gangs issue in northern towns and cities, where fear of being called racist meant that the girls’ pleas were ignored and they were stigmatised.’
The strain became overwhelming. ‘I just got to the point where I would dread going to work,’ he says. ‘Not only did I not believe in this stuff, I thought it was utterly dangerous. Looking back – and especially following the terrible case of Henry Nowak – I see I was right. I remember sitting in the office and thinking, “I can’t do this any more.” I spoke to one of my managers and started getting really emotional. I said, “I’ve got to get out.” ’
On New Year’s Eve 2024, Mr Birch – who has two adult sons and is planning to marry his partner this year – handed in his badge and walked away from the career he had spent more than two decades building. He’s now focused on finding a solution to the policing crisis.
He believes the police have abandoned their founding principles, established by Sir Robert Peel in 1829 when he set up the Met.
‘Anti-racism’ doctrine openly promotes “equality of outcomes” rather than equality of treatment,’ Mr Birch says. ‘So we’re being told to treat people from different backgrounds differently just to even up the outcomes.
‘Go back to the Peelian principles, which say everyone should be treated fairly and impartially. They are noble and should apply today. But they’ve gone out the window.’
Is it possible to restore faith in our broken police? Mr Birch believes so, but says reform can no longer come from within.
He says front-line officers are not to blame. He points out that officers today face unprecedented levels of scrutiny. Body-worn cameras record their every interaction, while members of the public routinely film incidents on mobile phones. Split-second decisions are endlessly replayed and dissected online.
‘I am sure a lot of young officers would have seen that horrible footage [of Henry Nowak’s death] and thought, “There but for the grace of God go I.”’
Instead, it is the rotten leadership institutions, he says, which must be broken down and rebuilt, in particular the College of Policing – which sets policing standards and official guidance – and the National Police Chiefs’ Council, which represents senior police leaders and decides how policing is run nationally.
These are the institutions responsible for pushing the diversity, equity and inclusion agenda, he says. ‘I think the whole thing needs to be swept away and started again. We need different governing bodies made up of different people. Senior police officers need to have to reapply for their jobs and have a completely different mindset.’
Mr Birch adds: ‘This lad Henry – he’s never going to get married, he’s never going to have children, he’s never going to have a career, and he was 18 years old. He was a young boy who died because of DEI policies, ultimately.
‘And if that doesn’t give these people a shake-up, I don’t know what will.’
