Should the police disclose the ethnicity and background of suspects in high-profile crimes, and how soon should they reveal this information? In the year since the Southport unrest – in which migrant hotels were attacked after online claims the attacker had been an asylum seeker – the British state has had to ask itself this question.
While the ethnicity and nationality of criminal suspects were routinely talked about in the 1980s, since the 1999 MacPherson report into ‘institutional racism’ in the Met, with its concerns racial stereotyping, the police have become far more reluctant to do so. When it came to Southport, for days we were only allowed to know that the suspect was ‘a 17-year-old male from Banks in Lancashire, who is originally from Cardiff’. In the end, this unspeakable atrocity was carried out by someone who clearly did not view himself as part of British society. The sense that officialdom hadn’t been quite straight with the public about the perpetrator – a second generation Rwandan refugee – only fostered public anger and mistrust.
Why, when terrible events happen, don’t they want officialdom to dispel any rumour or speculation by swiftly and calmly setting out the facts?
Jonathan Hall KC, the government’s advisor on terrorism, is among those to have since said this was a mistake and to call for reform: ‘In the digital era, if the police do not take the lead in providing clear, accurate and sober details about an attack like Southport, others will. Social media is a source of news for many people and near-silence in the face of horrific events of major public interest is no longer an option.’ In April, the Home Affairs Committee report on the Southport disorder, without citing Hall, reached a similar conclusion, arguing that an information ‘vacuum’ had undermined public confidence.
When a car was driven into a parade of Liverpool supporters in May, it initially seemed to many like an Islamist terror incident, with Tommy Robinson swiftly calling the ramming a ‘suspected terror attack’ on X. This was an opportunity for Merseyside Police, the same force that had been so slow with the details about Rudakubana, to adopt a more transparent approach. Within two hours of the incident, the police disclosed that the suspect was a ‘53-year-old white British man from the Liverpool area’, before giving a full press conference later that evening. Despite the shock at what had happened, no riots followed.
In August, the National Police Chiefs’ Council has issued new guidance pushing forces to be more upfront, and now these changes have gone out for consultation. The NPCC recommends that in ‘high profile or sensitive’ crimes, police forces ‘should confirm the nationality and/or ethnicity of the suspect or defendant… where there is:
A policing purpose in doing so.
A related risk or impact on public safety such as rising community tension.
Mis- or disinformation leading to community tension.
A significant level of media or social media interest.’
At a time when concerns about immigration, crime and terror are higher than ever, it is only right that officials are upfront with the public when such incidents occur.
But now, elements of the left-wing Blob are fighting a rearguard action against the truth. Led by the Runnymede Trust, 63 activist organisations have sent an open letter to Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood and chief constable Gavin Stephens, the NPPC chair, urging the ‘divisive guidance to be revoked with immediate effect’. Signatories include migrant advocate organisations, race charities, feminist campaign groups and the likes of the Muslim Council of Britain (which the last Labour government cut ties with). Over at LinkedIn, campaigners are encouraging each other respond to the consultation to derail the changes (readers can have their own say here).
There is a certain irony about this campaign against transparency. After all, it is precisely these kinds of left-wing organisations who usually complain loudest about the threat of so-called ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ and their supposed power to whip people up into a frenzy. This is the narrative we have heard about the Southport disorder ever since it began, which is very often used to justify internet censorship, despite online rumours playing only a minor role, if any, in that unrest. These are the types who will dismiss any and every right-wing talking point online as a ‘dangerous’ populist falsehood or the deliberate propaganda of ‘Russian bots’. So why, when terrible events happen, don’t they want officialdom to dispel any rumour or speculation by swiftly and calmly setting out the facts?
Perhaps it’s because the facts often have the unfortunate habit of telling the wrong story. For the signatories, the problem is that such disclosures risk ‘fostering a dangerous and misleading conflation between race, migration, and criminality’. They complain that while the guidance was billed as an ‘attempt to dispel misinformation’, it will have the effect of ‘reviving a focus on race and migration status’. The letter cites a Runnymede Trust ‘snapshot analysis’ of media articles from mid-August to mid-November 2023 versus the same period since the NPCC change this year, which ‘shows an increase in the use of descriptors such as foreign nationality, asylum status and ethnicity in crime reporting’. The term ‘asylum seeker’ is now being used in articles about serious crime five times more frequently, it says. The ‘extremely dangerous’ result is to ‘encourage the public to perceive ethnicity and migration status as significant factors in the commission of crime.’
But the public are drawing these links because of real events, not just how they are reported. If asylum seekers are being linked with serious crime more frequently, that’s because of the innocent victims asylum seekers have murdered in cold blood in just the past year, like Rhiannon Whyteand Gurvinder Johal. Indeed, while the signatories insist there is ‘no credible academic evidence’ of high migrant crime rates (as if such research would ever be commissioned), Police National Computer data suggests that 26 per cent of sexual assault on women last year were committed by foreign nationals, with another 8 per cent committed by offenders of ‘unknown’ nationality.
The signatories complain that the new disclosure regime ‘contravenes longstanding norms’. In this at least they are correct. On migration, multiculturalism and crime, the previous system of official euphemism, omerta and polite fiction is today collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. But that can only be a good thing. After decades of being betrayed, the public rightly no longer trust the powers that be. In our fractious age, they will accept nothing of short of the truth.
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