Two-tier policing: What is it and why is it dividing Britain?

Shocking images from a recently released police body-camera video have once again plunged Britain into a wrenching debate that is only gaining force.

Do British police go easier on migrant communities and liberal causes?

Critics on the far right point to several examples of what they call a double standard of “two-tier policing.” The most incendiary allegation is that police were loath to investigate ethnically South Asian grooming gangs, which sexually abused young white girls from the mid-1990s to the 2010s, for concern of being thought culturally insensitive.

Why We Wrote This

A central issue in protests over the murder of Henry Nowak in England has been “two-tiered policing,” in which authorities favor minorities and liberal politics. But the data doesn’t bear that out.

But at the core of two-tier policing is the complaint that protests against migration are dealt with more harshly than protests for Palestinians or Black Lives Matter.

These accusations have exploded with the release of police footage in Southampton last week. It shows a young white man, Henry Nowak, being handcuffed on suspicion of racist abuse, even though he had been stabbed by his accuser, a British man of South Asian descent. He died within minutes. Another brazen knife attack in Belfast in Northern Ireland this week – and subsequent riots – further fueled the charged atmosphere around the issue in the United Kingdom.

Isabel Infantes/Reuters

A banner with a message in memory of murdered student Henry Nowak hangs in Belfast, Northern Ireland, June 10, 2026.

Despite these incidents, however, the data presents an opposite picture. It suggests that minorities and migrant communities are much more likely to experience police violence or be subject to search by authorities than white Britons. Yet, at a moment when bonds of societal trust are fraying, the debate of two-tier policing goes to something more than just facts, say criminologists and police experts. It speaks to a country divided about how to move forward, and a police force increasingly caught in the middle.

“We have partly become a more divisive society. It’s a more volatile situation,” says Peter Squires, a criminologist at the University of Brighton. “The police on the front line are out on a limb.”

“A political narrative”

Dr. Squires and others are quick to dismiss the idea of two-tier policing in any formal sense. “To most criminologists, it is utter nonsense,” he says. “It’s largely a political narrative.”

Like many of the examples cited, the tragic death of Mr. Nowak was a case of bad policing, not any larger agenda, others add. In the end, they note, the system corrected itself and found the correct malefactor. Mr. Nowak’s attacker was arrested and sentenced to a minimum of 21 years in prison.

“There are poor coincidences that make it appear it is part of a big conspiracy when it is not,” says Ian Wiggett, a former police officer in London and Manchester who now writes for Policing Insight, a website that analyzes policing trends.

Press Association/AP/File

Doreen Lawrence and Labour leader Keir Starmer attend a memorial service to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the murder of Ms. Lawrence's son, Stephen Lawrence, in London, April 22, 2023. The Metropolitan Police's investigation of Stephen's murder was found to be incompetent because of institutional racism, and sparked comprehensive reform.

But there’s no question that police in Britain are in a delicate situation. An investigation into the 1993 death of Stephen Lawrence, who was Black, revealed entrenched institutional racism. The 30 years since have been defined by comprehensive reform.

Yet now, the rise of a strong anti-migration movement means many of those new lessons are seen as “woke.” This puts policing itself at the center of the political storm. “If you want an issue that highlights all the divisions in society, it’s policing,” Mr. Wiggett adds.

That makes policing harder. Mr. Wiggett and others say different protests are policed differently because of their character, not their political agenda. Some of the anti-migration protests involved young men lighting fires or throwing bricks at mosques, he notes.

Discretion is at the heart of policing. “You’re focused on criminality. Where are the problems? Who is causing the problems?” he says. “You realize you do have to treat people differently.”

This discretion was always based on trust. Indeed, the iconic image of the unarmed British bobby was a product of this trust. British policing has always been about “policing by consent” of the people, says Dr. Squires. But with so much division, he adds, “consent is pretty hard to find these days.”

A system in flux

For his part, Solat Chaudhry says he has “great sympathy” with people who claim two-tier policing exists.

Mr. Chaudhry was a police officer before later going on to found the National Centre for Diversity. He knows the data shows that minorities face disproportionate rates of police violence, and…