Police are aiding and abetting far-right, racist thugs by publicising ethnicity of suspects

What is your ethnicity and how much does it matter to you? Do you think it makes you behave in a certain way? Do you make judgments about other people based on their ethnicity?

As I’m asking these questions, I suppose I should provide my own answer: I’m a white, Anglo-Scottish, British person (I was born in England, where I’ve lived and worked, to Scottish parents and I’ve spent most of my life in Scotland).

This could prove to be useful information to the police in the event I am accused of a crime, as they may decide it is important to let the public know. I imagine, in these fractious times, that the ethnicity with which I ‘self-identify’ may help inform their decisions. I find this simultaneously comical and sinister, but if I happened to be a black Muslim, I’m guessing I’d probably not see the funny side quite so much.

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Violent riots at asylum hotels, mosques and other places broke out after the fatal stabbings of three young girls in Southport were falsely attributed to an asylum seeker (Picture: Christopher Furlong) | Getty Images

‘Consistent, fair and transparent’?

The reasons why the police have recently started issuing formal statements containing details about the ethnicity or, to put it a different way, ‘race’ of suspects are understandable.

The violent riots after the Southport stabbings last year – following false reports on social media that the attacker was a Muslim asylum seeker – showed what can happen when disinformation is allowed to spread unchecked, or so the police’s argument goes.

In August, the National Police Chiefs’ Council said that forces were being “encouraged to disclose ethnicity and nationality when suspects are charged in certain cases” in order to “ensure policing is more consistent, fair and transparent with this information, as well as addressing potential mis and disinformation”. The change in guidance “recognises public concerns and ensures police processes are fit for purpose in an age of rapid information spread”, it added.

The police have also been coming under pressure from Reform UK and Conservative politicians to swiftly release “identity details”, to use a euphemism deployed by one of them recently.

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Lighting fires of unrest

This can be beneficial. For example, when a car hit crowds of celebrating Liverpool FC fans in May, Merseyside Police quickly revealed that the person they had arrested was white and British, contrary to rumours he was an Asian man. We will never know whether this prevented the sort of riots seen after the Southport attack, but this is essentially the justification for the policy.

However, what happens when the next person arrested for a particularly appalling crime also turns out to be a Muslim or an asylum seeker. By so quickly revealing their ‘identity’, police may find they have lit a match amid tinderbox conditions and sparked, rather than dampened down, the chances of widespread riots.

And if the suspect turns out to be innocent, what then? What will the chief constable responsible say to the innocent people who were violently attacked by a mob motivated by information released officially by the police?

Appeasing the mob

The police’s stance of only revealing suspects’ ethnicity in certain cases may also come under scrutiny. At the moment, it feels like they are doing this when it is demanded by the mob (be they politicians or far-right thugs).

It’s not hard to imagine that ethnicity could start to be routinely disclosed. If there is a spate of particularly unpleasant crimes in London by Scots, might their Scottishness be highlighted in police press releases? Can we expect to see headlines like “English grooming gang arrested for rapes in Glasgow” on Police Scotland’s website?

Extreme nationalists could start to agitate for just such a policy, much like those obsessed with criminals’ ethnicity are doing at the moment. I don’t imagine this would happen as there is no reason to do it. A rapist is defined by their criminality, not their nationality. The same is true of ethnicity.

By saying a suspect is a Muslim or an asylum seeker or whatever, the police are committing a ‘categorisation error’ by emphasising their membership of a larger group as if this is a serious factor in their alleged crime. This is what the far-right wants people to think – that people of certain ethnicities, particularly migrants, are more likely to commit crimes.

The myth of ‘migrant crime’

According to Oxford University’s Migration Observatory, the number of non-UK citizens in prison in England and Wales is roughly proportional to their overall population. However, as young people are more likely to commit crimes and migrants are more likely to be young adults, it makes sense to control for age and this shows non-citizens are actually “under-represented in the prison population”.

There is some variation, however. “Non-citizens are over-represented among convicted or incarcerated offenders for drug offences, for example, while under-represented among those convicted or incarcerated for robbery or violence against the person,” the Observatory says.

I accept that the police are trying to do their best in a difficult situation and also that it can sometimes make short-term, operational sense, as demonstrated in Liverpool. However, the long-term impact will be to entrench the idea that ethnicity or race are factors in someone’s propensity to commit crimes.

Bleak chapters of human history

It should be remembered that there is no such thing as a human ‘race’. It is an idea we have invented, full of fictional stereotypes that increasing numbers of people seem ready to believe. There are biological ‘phenotypes’ but those are very different things.

There will also be times when someone’s ethnicity is mixed, unclear or contested. Past examples of attempts to formally define a person’s race include two of the bleakest chapters in human history, slavery and the Holocaust.

I am an individual and so are you. We should always be defined and judged by “the content of our character”, to quote Martin Luther King, and not the colour of our skin.