Baffled revulsion was the natural and universal response to the car-ramming horror in Liverpool yesterday. But there was another surprise: the swift police revelation that the suspect they arrested is a “white British male”.
It is pretty well unprecedented in recent years to release information so quickly about a suspect’s ethnicity, but it seems the new transparency is a bid by police to quash internet speculation before it even starts.
Dal Babu, former Chief Superintendent at the Metropolitan Police, told BBC 5 Live it is "unprecedented” for Merseyside Police to have released the ethnicity and race of a suspect so quickly. ““I think [releasing the suspect's ethnicity in this case] was to dampen down some of the speculation from the far right that this was a Muslim extremist”.
What was probably in their minds were the Southport attacks in July last year, when three little girls were murdered by Axel Rudakubana, prompting wrong rumours that he was an asylum seeker which in turn, fuelled the subsequent riots.
It seems rather a good thing that the police are opening up about these very plain facts which, I would have thought, do not in themselves prejudice the fairness of a trial. Certainly, this case doesn’t, because the suspect is white and British.
But what if it were someone like the Manchester arena bomber, an Islamist, Salman Abedi? In that case the religion and ethnicity of the young man was patently relevant.
When we’re told a crime is or isn’t a terrorist related incident, I think we’re being left to work out whether or not the perpetrator was Islamist. In that case religion and ethnicity – or if it’s a convert, just the religion – is valid.
When it was the IRA doing the bombing, no one really hesitated about identifying the Irishness of the perpetrators and there too you could tell it anyway from the names.
Police are, it seems, only gradually learning the lesson that transparency is the way to go when it comes to offences directed against the public
I can recall quite vividly listening to the BBC read the names of men found guilty the mass rape of white girls in Rotherham a few years ago when some of the perpetrators there finally were brought to justice, and it didn’t take a genius to work out the background…except about that, the BBC said nothing at all. It would, given the nature of the offence, have been absolutely relevant to say that the suspects were of Pakistani background or family, but that’s exactly what we didn’t get.
It was the same with Axel Rudakubana, the Southport killer. The BBC, in a recent report, said austerely that he was not an asylum seeker, but was born in Cardiff and lived in Southport. Perfectly true. But it was also true that his parents were from Rwanda, and the young man was, apparently, obsessed by the details of the genocide in which his parents were caught up – as well as by online violence of an exceptionally disturbing kind.
It would, then, have been right to have said that he was the son of Rwandans who came here during the genocide. People aren’t stupid; his classmates and neighbours talked about his background. Trying to hide it only aggravates rumour and the suspicion that the police aren’t telling the truth, in case the truth causes trouble.
In the case of car ramming – an attack which is terrifying, like a knife rampage, because it involves an instrument that half the population use – it is not unreasonable to suspect an Islamist motivation.
By no means all these attacks are by Muslim extremists – last year a lethal car ramming in China was carried out by a man who was upset about his divorce – but the most recent European attack, in Munich in February, was carried out by an Afghan asylum seeker; in Britain, the 2017 attacks at London Bridge and Westminster Bridge were by Islamists.
So, it was quite reasonable for the police to say yesterday that the suspect wasn’t Muslim or ethnic minority, but we should also now expect them to say if that is the case, because it’s relevant.
Police are, it seems, only gradually learning the lesson that transparency is the way to go when it comes to offences directed against the public. The Dublin riots of 2023 happened when an Algerian who had been granted asylum in Ireland, Riad Bouchaker, attacked a school assistant and three children. Instead of the police confirming what many already knew – because word gets round, no? – they attempted to pass over the identity of the perpetrator, which simply led to people assuming that they were being lied to, which aggravated precisely the passions politicians were trying to dampen.
Pass along here; nothing to see, is never a good formula when there are well justified fears that attacks on the public are ideologically or racially motivated. Making clear that the Liverpool suspect is white and British is a good start, but let’s see if it becomes standard practice.
Melanie McDonagh is a London Standard columnist
