Cody Harper: another victim of two-tier policing

This week, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) decided to drop the charge against 20-year-old Cody Harper of assaulting an emergency worker.

Harper, a white man, had been arrested and charged after an incident in Birmingham in the early hours of Sunday 21 June. In video footage, which has since gone viral, he is seen being pushed to the ground by a black man, while another black man tries to punch him in the back of the head. Before Harper can properly regain his footing, a female West Midlands Police (WMP) officer slams him up against a shop shutter. Harper then swings his arms and appears to strike the officer in the head – possibly before he realises that the person in front of him is a police officer.

Harper’s arrest occurs seconds after he is assaulted by the two black men. The police officers attending the incident would almost certainly have seen who used physical violence first. However, they appear to let the aggressors walk away while they arrest the victim. For good measure, the arresting officer swears at Harper and calls him a ‘dick’, which isn’t very professional.

If we’re being generous, it could be said that the officers on the scene failed to distinguish between a deliberate assault and a chaotic reaction from a young man who had just been attacked, knocked down and (as Harper possibly saw it) pushed into a shutter by a number of black men. More likely, however, is that the case of Cody Harper is yet another example – as if we needed it – of two-tier policing. The officers saw what happened, yet instinctively chose to arrest the white man rather than the black men.

WMP has since revealed it had identified the two men who attacked Harper, but that neither was charged and were instead given ‘out-of-court’ disposals. This is precisely the kind of disparity that fuels public anger. A young white man at the centre of a confused incident faced the serious prospect of prosecution for assaulting an emergency worker, while others, who appeared to have instigated the violence, and who were black, received much more lenient treatment.

It is now obvious that there is something rotten at the heart of English policing. When the very culture of the institution is permeated with progressive ideology (with the truly appalling quango, the College of Policing, at its heart), is it any surprise that police behave in this way? DEI language slaps trainee officers around the face the moment they cross the training threshold. They then must adhere to this dogma if they have any hope of career advancement or even keeping their job. We saw this at its most disturbing and tragic in the case of Henry Nowak.

Policing has become too inconsistent, too image-conscious and too willing to pursue cases that appear ‘progressive’. They do this at the expense of restoring and maintaining order on the streets – the role that the public overwhelmingly wants them to perform. When the police are applying the law differently depending on a person’s ethnicity, political views or the nature of a protest, it undermines the principle that everyone is equal before the law.

Police officers work in difficult, fast-moving and sometimes dangerous conditions. But difficulty isn’t a blank cheque. The public is entitled to expect discipline, proportion and even-handedness from those entrusted with coercive power. When the police get it wrong, they should say so plainly rather than shelter behind formulaic statements about procedure.

Assaults on police, paramedics and other emergency workers are serious and should be punished where the evidence supports this. But respect for the police is not strengthened when weak or questionable cases are pushed forward because of hard-wired, ideological values. Public trust depends on fairness, sound judgement and – crucially – impartiality.

Paul Birch is a former police officer and counter-terrorism specialist. You can read his Substack here.