by Fraser Myers, spiked
These double standards are inflaming tensions and fuelling mistrust.
When should police reveal the ethnicity of a suspected criminal? Much more than they currently are, according to No10 Downing Street. ‘From the police up to central government, we should always be as transparent as possible when it comes to cases’, says Keir Starmer’s official spokesman in today’s Telegraph.
The PM’s vague intervention comes after two Afghan men were charged last week in connection with the alleged kidnapping and rape of a 12-year-old girl in Nuneaton, Warwickshire. Despite the huge public interest and local concern over the case, Warwickshire Police are said to have urged local councillors and officials to keep crucial details out of the public eye – including the fact that the two suspects, Ahmad Mulakhil and Mohammad Kabir, are asylum seekers. According to the Daily Mail, police feared, in those now dreaded words, that exposing this information could ‘inflame community tensions’.
It won’t have escaped most people’s notice that the details the police are willing to release about a suspect tend to be based on that suspect’s ethnic background. Contrast the caginess of Warwickshire Police in revealing Mulakhil and Kabir’s immigration status with Merseyside Police’s response to the Liverpool parade crush back in May. Within just two hours of a motorist driving into a crowd of people in central Liverpool, injuring 50 people, the police were eager to let it be known that they had arrested a ‘53-year-old white British man from the Liverpool area’.