In a BBC interview, Zia Yusuf was asked "what needs to happen now?", for which he did not have compelling answers. He rightly noted that the religious exemptions on knives must end along with the dismantling of "anti-white racism", but this requires a much more in-depth analysis because we have to recognise that the state the police are in is the culmination of decades of political meddling, demoralisation, centralisation, and bureaucratisation. It may even take decades to reverse.
In recent years the police have become a bloated, corporatised unresponsive bureaucracy, that actively deters serious people form joining, in favour of bland functionaries who cannot think for themselves. The force is in the midst of a serious retention crisis meaning that the rank and file have very little in the way of experienced supervision, while the senior ranks shape their forces to a political agenda because political narrative conformity is the path to promotion.
What you then have is a neutered police force, afraid of its own shadow, where every decision is micromanaged and scrutinised and officers have to watch what they say and what they think, in public and in private - where even something as basic as professional banter can be career ending.
We then have the disgusting spectacle of Chief Constables insulting their own commands by branding their force "institutionally misogynist and racist". Officers then have to work under greater surveillance than the citizens of East Germany.
What you then have, is a court system that works on the presumption that the police are racist, and criminals have learned how to exploit liberal anti-racism dogma to insulate themselves from punishment. We've seen exactly the same in schools where teachers are no longer confident of imposing discipline in fear of having a parental complaint to deal with.
Anyone with half a brain will not stick around in a dangerous, often tedious job, to then be a political functionary saddled with endless compliance paperwork, when they can make more money and work fewer hours doing virtually anything else.
While we very much do need to shitcan the College of Policing and purge wokery from the system, most of the rot predate these political fads, and much of the problem stems from a police force that has lost its way, lost any concept of what they are actually for, and amalgamated to the point where they have little knowledge of the communities they notionally serve. They spend half their shift either driving around a massive patch or waiting in the detention centres to fill out forms. They are glorified delivery boys and taxi drivers, occasionally expected to be paramedics, social workers, riot control and community outreach worker.
With the system as rotten as it is, nobody serious would want to be a copper, which is why we're seeing police who are too young, too naïve, and too indoctrinated - lacking supervision and too stupid to be let out on their own. You then get to a point where the arrival of moronic plod stands to exacerbate already tense and dangerous situations - which is exactly what's happened in the Nowak case.
What you need is seasoned grown-ups and a system that has their backs. You can't have that if the ground troops have their every decision second guessed and evaluated for political conformity.
I was recently arrested for posting a meme on X. What staggered me was not so much the arrest. It was that nobody in the chain of command questioned the stupidity of driving halfway across the county in the middle of the night to put someone in a cage for posting an anti-Hamas meme. The entire force is intellectually subnormal and nobody had the gumption to push back on it, probably because it wasn't worth the political argument. That's how we got where we are today, with jobsworth coppers too afraid to put their heads above the parapet.
As such, when a politician is asked "what needs to happen now", if we are to take them seriously, we need better answers than the ones given by Zia Yusuf.