Irate_Jobbie

The police keep a written rule for what to do with the family of a murdered child, the beats of which it looks like the Nowak family have been going through for the past 11 months. It comes from the National Police Chiefs' Council, which sets practice for every force in England and Wales. "The primary purpose of a Family Liaison Officer (FLO) is that of an investigator," it reads. "Their role is to gather evidence and information from the family." Families are to be kept informed "in accordance with the needs of the investigation". And the role, it adds, "may also be critical in maintaining the reputation of the police service." The Nowaks' account matches it line by line. Hours after they learned Henry was dead, police asked them about his political views and their own - grist for the statement they intended to put out the next day. His father, driving home from identifying his son's body, took a call asking him to approve a press release that cast Henry as the aggressor in the encounter between himself and his murderer. Then came the story of the night, which changed each time they heard it: officers gave first aid at once; officers detained everyone; officers detained only Henry; officers handcuffed him; officers arrested him. "The story was evolving every time we had an interaction," Mark Nowak has said. 'Kindness' is in the official guidance given in the handbook, just as it's in the handbooks of every government and HR department around the world which have become hotbeds of repressed opinion and total intellectual intolerance over the past six or so years. It should be a crime - with a penalty weight to match the moral outrage of the thing - carrying a minimum term in prison, for any public official to lean on a victim's family over what they say in public about the crime. At Progress, we'd levy this, and we'd give the Victims' Commissioner the powers of a statutory inquiry to investigate every such complaint, and put body-camera footage of every arrest on a national register within 24 hours. Nowhere to hide from bad behaviour - for anyone. Henry's father learned how his son died from the footage, played to him in a side room at Southampton Crown Court on the first day of the trial. He watched, like we all watched, exactly what happened, exactly what those officers did. We may see a form of negligence costing a young man his life. But every one of them was, to a greater extent, doing their job. Doing exactly what they were told. That, in this case, is - fatally - the point.