Iceland Boss Says ‘Two-Tier Policing’ Happened At One Of His London Stores
Iceland founder Sir Malcolm Walker has publicly accused police of “two-tier policing” after a fast-response unit rushed to his Enfield, North London store following a customer’s false accusation of racism.
According to Sir Malcolm’s statements published by The Telegraph, an Asian shop supervisor confronted a Black customer who was caught taking milk bottles out of a fridge, opening them, and putting them back.
The customer immediately called the police from his phone, claiming he was being racially abused.
A police car arrived at the Enfield store just three minutes later, with officers immediately handcuffing the supermarket supervisor and putting him in a police car.
He was detained at a police station for two to three hours before the matter was entirely dropped.
Sir Malcolm described the police intervention as “madness” and an OTT reaction to an unfounded allegation. He stated that “two-tier policing isn’t just happening on the streets.”
He pointed out that the Metropolitan Police frequently fail to show up at all when Iceland staff are seriously injured, physically assaulted, or threatened with violence by shoplifters. Yet, officers scrambled within minutes to arrest an innocent employee over an unverified verbal accusation.
Sir Malcolm (below) said that he lodged a formal complaint with Scotland Yard detailing the 2024 incident, but is making it public now given the returning discourse over two-tier policing.
It does certainly seem that the police’s policy in the U.K. is to treat “hate incidents” with the utmost urgency and seriousness, which may be well-intentioned, but doesn’t quite work in practice because a) there’s a stupidly low threshold for something to be considered a hate incident and b) they appear to believe the accuser no matter what.
Given this shopkeeper was Asian and the customer was Black, is Sir Malcolm suggesting that the police sided with the customer because he was more dark-skinned? It’s a bit of a complicated one really as these accusations of two-tier policing usually revolve around white and non-white.
Whatever’s going on, something needs to change in the wake of the Henry Nowak situation. Maybe we need more people kneeling on TikTok?
