Bartholomew's Notes

From BBC News:

A three-year-old boy critically injured in a zoo enclosure was attacked by a crocodile, the BBC understands.

Cambridgeshire Police said a 30-year-old man arrested on suspicion of attempted murder had been bailed and was “unfit for interview”. He reportedly has learning disabilities and had been on a trip to Johnsons of Old Hurst, near Huntingdon, with carers.

…Cambridgeshire Police confirmed the suspect was white British after misinformation shared on social media.

It is thought that the boy was thrown into the enclosure – a shocking and dramatic incident that naturally has provoked not just public interest but also concern and anger. There is no law against the media naming the suspect, if they have it, but they are unlikely to do so unless he is charged – and his being “unfit for interview” means that the matter could be left hanging indefinitely.

The police decision to confirm the suspect’s “white British” background shows that the practice is becoming, or has become, normalised. The break with long-established police practice of providing only gender and age of those under arrest but not charged began after Southport, when police confirmed that the suspect – not yet named as Axel Rudakubana – had been born in Cardiff. This decision countered disinformation about the suspect being an asylum seeker, but has subsequently been portrayed unfairly as an attempt to mislead as regards ethnicity (1).

I noted another case last year, after a man named in due course after charging as Paul Doyle ran his car into a crowd in Liverpool. It turned out that Doyle was in the grip of some sort of “road rage”, although at the time it was reasonable to suspect terrorism, and Merseyside Police’s decision to confirm his “white British” ethnicity before charging was a practical concession to public disquiet. The bar was lowered from potential terrorist contexts in March this year, when police referred to a “white British 15-year-old boy” in relation to the stabbing of a schoolgirl at a school in Norwich.

The Johnsons of Old Hurst zoo incident presents as an act of random violence inflicted by a stranger. There have been cases where a mentally ill migrant has killed – most notoriously in recent years, Eltiona Skana and Valdo Calocane – but the context of a man with “learning disabilities” who was “with carers” were strong indicators against speculation that the suspect in this instance is someone who has arrived in the UK from abroad. Ethnicity here is not a relevant detail – but police know that false claims about a Black or Asian-heritage suspect may lead to disorder and to misidentifications. The strategy has diminishing returns, though, with populists now asserting that when ethnicity information is not provided this means we can infer that a suspect is not white (for example, Ian Miles Cheong made this argument in March in relation to an arrest following an alleged rape of a boy in Sheffield). And it tends towards giving an impression that we should draw conclusions about criminal profiles from arrests rather than from convictions.

As regards the misinformation that Cambridgeshire Police is reacting against, one prominent example, predictably, was provided by Tommy Robinson’s US ally Valentina Gomez, whose crudely peformative anti-Muslim monomania would be comical if it weren’t so ghoulish: just as she recently falsely asserted that three sisters who had been drowned in a tragic accident in Brighton “were raped & thrown overboard by rapists muslims”, she now claims to millions that “a muslim threw a 3 year-old boy to be eaten alive by crocodiles”. Ant Middleton, who agreed with Gomez about Brighton, similarily asserted that “our children are being fed to crocodiles by immigrants” – yet more evidence that Reform UK’s embrace of Middleton at the recent Makerfield by-election ought to be a source of shame and disgust.

Note

1. This portrayal owes a great deal to a detail that appeared in the  Liverpool Echo two days after the Southport attack, in which a neighbour described Rudakubana as a “quiet choir boy”. Although this had nothing to with the police statement, populists assert that “the authorities” sought to present the killer as a “Welsh choirboy”.

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