The Reaction of My Mental Health Nursing Students to Being Shown an Image of a Black Murderer and White Victim Shows Why Ideology is Putting Us All at Risk

With a spring in his step, senior lecturer Jeroen Ensink left his home in Holloway, London, to send cards to his friends and family, announcing the arrival of his baby daughter. Seconds later his life was over. A young black male (the relevance of which will soon be clear) suddenly pounced on him, and in a state of frenzy savagely stabbed his random victim. Femi Nandap, a psychiatric patient, was arrested and sent to a high-security institution.

We can only imagine the trauma for Ensink’s wife. Originally from the Netherlands, Ensink had lectured for seven years at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, where he was an expert on sanitation and water management. He had led a large study to improve water supply and prevent cholera in Congo and other undeveloped parts of Africa. Ironically, he was murdered by an African migrant.

Having spent most of my career in mental health, I know of dozens of incidents of homicide by psychotic men and women, their targets often unknown to them. Victims were in the wrong place at the wrong time – it could be you or yours next time. But I was particularly affected by Ensink’s killing back in 2015, not only because I was also a lecturer and a citizen taking my chances in the streets of London, but due to the response when I used his case in a lecture to mental health nursing students.

Lecturing at King’s College London for 10 years, I worked with two distinct groups of learners. Of gradually declining proportion were white middle-class students, many of whom were doing the postgraduate mental health nursing course as a stepping-stone into clinical psychology. The other group, of increasing number over the years, was from Nigeria. The former were of progressive outlook, with a few ‘social justice warriors’ among them; typically they excelled academically and used psychological jargon. The latter were not, on average, as intellectual, but I appreciated their common sense whenever their white peers were virtue-signalling their woke (as we now call it) ideology.

This division was very apparent when I used the Dutch lecturer’s case as an example of the consequences of systemic or individual failure in psychiatric care. On my Power Point screen was a Daily Mail report of the incident, which showed two photographs – one of Ensink and the other of his killer. I have never forgotten this experience, because it showed everything that is amiss with white middle class ‘values’ and why incidents such as that on a train at Huntingdon last weekend recur with no lessons really learned. 

The topic of the lecture was assessing and managing risk – a priority for practitioners. My emphasis was on students understanding that their focus should not only be the patient but also public safety: care in the community requires eternal vigilance, and it is better to err on the side of caution than to face a coroner’s court. By referring to Ensink, a tragedy that had occurred a few months earlier, I intended that students would feel for the unfortunate deceased and bereaved, and be motivated to learn how danger can be reduced by safe practice.

Instead, I was criticised by some white students. In their view I was reinforcing racial stereotypes by presenting a white victim and black perpetrator. I had also committed the cardinal offence of using a Daily Mail report. They railed against the politically incorrect message on the screen and briefly turned the lecture into a media studies course. The Nigerian students, meanwhile, did not see any problem with my training material: they know the violence of their homeland and would not pretend otherwise. They probably regarded the white students as well-intended but naïve. But I feared for the near future of such students, who appeared so indoctrinated on institutional racism that they might, as registered mental health nurses, put such sensitivity before safety. And the lack of emotional reaction to the tragic death was astounding – similar to the behaviour of H.G. Wells’s Eloi when one of them is taken by the Morlocks.

I was reminded of this experience by an outstanding article on Daily Sceptic following the multiple stabbings by a black male on a high-speed train. Retired police officer Paul Birch recounted a litany of violent and fatal attacks by psychotic black men. The latest incident involved Anthony Williams, who was charged with 11 attempted murders including 10 on the train at Huntingdon and another, earlier on the same day, against a passenger on the Docklands Light Railway.

According to Birch, the carnage continues because professions and the political establishment are more concerned with race equality than preventing homicide. The Mental Health Act is a vital instrument to keep dangerously disturbed persons off our streets, he writes:

When I was a police constable in London, I was involved in the sectioning of a number of people under the Mental Health Act. On each occasion, it was the informed decision of the duty office (an inspector) and the officers on the ground that the individual in question posed a physical risk to either themselves or members of the public. Nearly all were black men, and nearly all were known to psychiatric services.

He concluded, rightly, that “progressive dogma should have no place in decision-making where psychotic individuals are concerned”. I hope that those students of mine, if they are practising today, have learned ‘safety first’. But Birch’s catalogue suggests that incidents happen and are soon forgotten as society soon reverts to the pretence that psychotic black men can be trusted with knives because it would be racist to suggest otherwise.

As a Workers of England trade union officer I represented, unsuccessfully, a NHS worker who was dismissed for social media posts following the murder of three young girls in Southport by the crazed son of Rwandan immigrants. About four days after the horrific event, the chief executive of the NHS trust had issued a message that I felt was worse than anything posted by our member. She called for staff to give extra support to colleagues of minority ethnic groups, who were already exposed to enduring racism but were likely to be targeted in the atmosphere of protests and riots. Not a single mention was made of the three victims.

Warped middle-class ideology is a danger to us all.

Dr Niall McCrae is a registered nurse who was on the editorial board member of Journal of Advanced Nursing.