British police forces have been told that they should disclose the ethnic background and nationality of suspects in at least high-profile cases to rebuild trust with the public amid accusations of politically correct cover-ups.
The National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) and the College of Policing have issued interim guidance to forces across England and Wales, advising them to disclose more information about suspects in high-profile cases, rather than merely disclosing their age and location of arrest, London’s Daily Telegraph reports.
The guidance comes in the wake of controversy surrounding the alleged gang rape of a 12-year-old girl in Nuneaton last month. Police faced accusations that they tried to prevent the public from being informed that the two suspects in the case, Ahmad Mulakhil and Mohammad Kabir, were asylum seekers from Afghanistan out of concern that it would inflame “community tensions”.
Warwickshire Police Chief Constable Alex Franklin-Smith denied that there was a “cover-up” but said that the decision to not publicly reveal the immigration status of the suspects was a result of “national guidance”.
A similar excuse was reportedly used to keep the Liberal Democrat-run Portsmouth Council in June from disclosing that a rape suspect in the area was being housed in a government-funded migrant hotel, leading to accusations of an intentional cover-up amid growing public anger and safety concerns over often young male illegal migrants being housed in communities across the country at the taxpayer’s expense.
The head of ethics at the National Police Chiefs’ Council confirmed the updated guidance, saying that it is important to release more information to prevent “disinformation” from spurring public outbursts of violence.
“We saw during last summer’s disorder, as well as in several recent high-profile cases, what the major, real-world consequences can be from what information police release into the public domain,” she said.
“We have to make sure our processes are fit for purpose in an age of social media speculation and where information can travel incredibly quickly across a wide range of channels.
“Disinformation and incorrect narratives can take hold in a vacuum. It is good police work for us to fill this vacuum with the facts about issues of wider public interest.”
The issue of police withholding information about criminal suspects came to the fore last year following the mass stabbing attack at a ‘Taylor Swift’ children’s dance party that left three young girls dead and ten others injured at the hands of then-17-year-old Axel Rudakubana.
Amid an information vacuum in the immediate aftermath of the attack, speculation on social media incorrectly claimed that the attacker was a Muslim migrant who illegally crossed the English Channel. In response, police merely stated that they had arrested “a 17-year-old male from Banks in Lancashire, who is originally from Cardiff”.
It was later revealed that Rudakubana’s parents were migrants from Rwanda and that searches of his property found an al-Qaeda jihadist manual and the bioweapon ricin, information that was withheld from the public for months. The public was also not informed for months that Rudakubana had been referred to the anti-terror Prevent programme multiple times, but the police had dismissed him as a threat.
For having questioned if there was a potential terror motive, figures such as Reform UK leader Nigel Farage were accused of spreading “conspiracy theories” and establishment media even blamed the Brexit boss for stoking the riots which broke out in the wake of the attack.
However, the government’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, Jonathan Hall KC, later vindicated Farage by acknowledging that the information released by the police was “inadequet” and that the “public could have been told immediately that there had been an attack by a 17-year-old male who was black, British, born in Wales and has lived in the UK all his life.”
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