British police forces have reportedly said that they do not plan to reveal the ethnic background of suspects in every major incident, after Merseyside Police raised eyebrows by promptly informing the public that they had arrested a white British male after dozens of people were struck down as a driver rammed his car into a parade for Liverpool FC this week.
On Monday, 79 people were injured, including four children, as a driver ploughed through a parade celebrating the Premier League title for Liverpool. While British police forces have typically been reticent to provide instant details to the public, the local Merseyside force, apparently motivated by quelling speculation on social media of a potential Islamist attack, announced that they had arrested a 53-year-old “white” British man. The alleged perpetrator is currently being held on suspicion of attempted murder and of driving while under the influence of drugs.
However, a report from The Telegraph, citing police sources, revealed that this will not be standard protocol from now on, and that the public should not expect forces to disclose the ethnicity of suspects in all cases immediately. Often, only age and gender are reported, supposedly out of concern for influencing a potential trial.
The issue has gained prominence in public debate following the protests and riots that broke out in the wake of the mass stabbing at a children’s dance party in Southport last year. The Merseyside Police force, which also handled the Southport case, was heavily criticised for providing little information in the wake of the horrific attack, with the response being credited for fueling speculation on social media about the attacker potentially being a Muslim illegal migrant.
The government’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, Jonathan Hall KC, said in February: “People got the sense that something was being withheld or fudged in some way, and that led the social media types who wanted to spread disinformation to spread disinformation.”
In the hours following the attack, police only revealed that the suspect was “a 17-year-old male from Banks in Lancashire, who is originally from Cardiff”. Due to his age, the force initially refused to release his name, Axel Rudakubana, and did not reveal that while he was born in Wales, his parents had migrated to the country from Rwanda.
Commenting on the decision to release the ethnicity of the suspect in Liverpool former chief superintendent of the Metropolitan Police Dal Babu said: “It’s remarkably striking because police will not release that kind of information because they’ll be worried about prejudicing any future trial, but I think they have to balance that against the potential of public disorder and we had massive public disorder after the far-right extremists had spread these rumours.
“So I think what the police have done very very quickly, and I’ve never known a case like this before where they’ve given the ethnicity and the race of the individual who was involved in it… I think that was to dampen down some of the speculation from the far-Right that sort of continues on X even as we speak that this was a Muslim extremist and there’s a conspiracy theory.”
However, commenters on social media questioned whether police will hold to the same standard of releasing information should an attacker be from a minority, migrant or Muslim background.
Barrister and political commentator Rupert Myers noted: “This is a policy that doesn’t survive first contact with basic logic. Every time an awful crime happens and the police don’t release the ethnicity, the internet will simply assume… unworkable.”
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