Last night, Hampshire Police released body-worn camera video of Henry Nowak’s arrest. It shows officers responding to a dynamic incident, in the dark, having been sent to deal with an allegation of racially-motivated assault. The murderer, Vickrum Digwa, gave a shamefully persuasive performance as the victim, aided by his family. Yet, as Labour MP and former policeman Jonathan Hinder pointed out on BBC’s Newsnight yesterday evening, the officers’ “casual indifference” to Henry’s claims of being stabbed, their lack of investigative rigor, followed by the use of handcuffs, were genuinely “troubling”. The response on social media to the incident was less measured, with the officers involved allegedly identified online. The sense of fury is palpable.

This morning, as Britons recoil in horror at Nowak’s treatment, chief constables face an existential challenge. It is not only a matter of professionalism, but a fatal erosion of police legitimacy. The question is, will they understand the gravity of the situation? After all, the antiracism orthodoxies inside policing, borne of the 1999 Macpherson Report, are deeply embedded. Senior officers have forged entire careers toeing a line painted by activists and ideologues, and supported by successive governments. Will chief constables, directed by a keenly progressive Home Office and Labour government, double down? Or will there be a “reverse Macpherson” moment?

Currently, the picture is mixed. Officers across all ranks feel instinctively sympathetic to colleagues, bewailing the lack of context. This problem, they would argue, goes beyond two hapless police constables. Indeed, I hear that officers close to the case were keen to see the video released, believing it would help the public understand the pressures faced by first responders. That they did so, I would suggest, shows how normalized poor performance and a lack of investigative rigor have become in UK policing.

The officer who primarily dealt with Nowak showed a startling lack of curiosity over the dying man’s welfare, combined with an egregious display of confirmation bias — something usually associated with racism against minorities. Critics will say this was inevitable, and perhaps even understandable, given 30 years of aggressive antiracism training. Some will point to how underinvestment in policing has led to a diminution of standards and morale. Yet the Nowak video speaks to something much deeper. To paraphrase John F. Kennedy, if a “society gets the police it deserves”, what does this case say about the United Kingdom?

British chief constables are beleaguered on all fronts. The country’s criminal-justice elites are wedded to the current model of antiracism, and challenging it would require a near-Lutheran level of heresy among senior officers who made their careers inside that same system. A few may, however, rise to the challenge. Alexis Boon, Hampshire’s chief constable, had only been in the post four months when Nowak was murdered. Boon is notoriously ambitious, but is this matched by strategic and political nous? Will he acknowledge systemic failures in his force’s unquestioning approach to “racist” incidents, or simply announce a new focus on response policing and emergency life-support training? His actions will have consequences far beyond Hampshire.

This is the most significant moment in mainstream British policing since 1999. After the Macpherson Report was published, police forces implemented a sea change in attitudes to race. This shift brooked no argument or compromise, the antiracist ratchet moving only in one direction. As so often happens, the baby of common sense was thrown out with the bathwater of racism. It would be similarly tragic if the same happened again, but in reverse. Yet this is the minefield our criminal-justice elites must navigate. My gut instinct, sadly, is that they will almost certainly fail.