From the website of Merseyside Police, Monday night, after a car had ploughed into a crowd during Liverpool’s Premier League victory parade:
We would ask people not to speculate on the circumstances surrounding tonight’s incident on Water Street in Liverpool city centre.
We can confirm the man arrested is a 53-year-old white British man from the Liverpool area.
Extensive enquiries are ongoing to establish the circumstances leading up to the collision.
“White British” here departs from the long-standing police practice of announcing only a suspect’s age and sex following an arrest: further details, including their name and perhaps also a photo, are ordinarily released only if and when a positive charging decision is made, and even then only if the suspect is an adult. (1)
This unusual decision to racialise an arrest announcement can be interpreted as a pragmatic concession to the reality that the British public can no longer be expected to wait for authoritative information to emerge following due process, or not to riot if the suspected perpetrator of a public outrage is thought to be from an ethnic minority. It can be seen as something of a slow-boiled victory for those who used disinformation to whip up public anger after after last year’s Southport killings: thus Nigel Farage – who gave spurious validation to the false claim that the killer had been under monitoring by the security services – has declared that the police have “got it right this time”.
Other agitators, however, instead complain that the decision demonstrates the bias and bad faith of police forces, who will highlight the ethnicity of a white suspect but not otherwise. A useful round-up collected by The Bear comes with pertinent commentary:
They accused the police of “protecting the narrative” and essentially moved from demanding answers to demanding silence the moment those answers didn’t fit the script… The point of this all is that the far-right agitators don’t want transparency, they want control – control of the story, the outrage, the emotional temperature of the nation. And when reality refuses to cooperate, they rewrite the script.
Note
1. This does not mean that an adult suspect cannot be named by the media, based on their own sources or observations: in 2017, for instance, Darren Osborne was named by “family and neighbours” as the suspected Finsbury Park mosque attacker ahead of charging, and this was widely reported without controversy. However, accusatory headlines implying guilt based on an arrest have led to led to payouts, and civil privacy law now means that a media outlet may be sued if it reveals without a public interest defence that someone is the subject of a police investigation. Of course, police forces may also release extra identifying information about a suspect if it is someone whom they want to arrest but whose whereabouts are unknown.
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