Sat, Aug 16, 2025 page7

• Disclosing suspects’ ethnicity a very dangerous step

  Releasing identity characteristics of suspects in the UK would invite the public to see them as examples of a group rather than as individuals in a case

  • By Nasar Meer / The Guardian
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  The British National Police Chiefs’ Council and the College of Policing have backed plans to offer greater “transparency” on the ethnicity, and potentially the immigration status, of police suspects, but in a world where rumors travel faster than facts, the new approach will have profound consequences for justice — and for the people who will live with the consequences.

  The new guidance says that “police forces should consider disclosing the ethnicity and nationality of suspects when they are charged in high-profile and sensitive investigations and operations.”

  It comes after Reform UK accused police of a “cover-up” over two men who have been charged in connection with the alleged rape of a child in Nuneaton. Prior to that, British Secretary of State for the Home Department Yvette Cooper had expressed her view that guidance should change to allow “more transparency.” She was joined in that opinion by the chief inspector of constabulary, who warned that withholding such details could feed “two-tier policing” claims — allegations that the state polices majorities more harshly than minorities.

  The idea that identity characteristics should feature, after arrest, in what information is publicly released during police investigations has been circling for years. Until very recently, officials and criminal justice practitioners had mostly resisted. Their concern was simple: routine publication of these details would invite the public to see suspects as examples of a group rather than as individuals in a case.

  The current approach is embedded in force policies that explicitly root decisions over what to share with the media in “policing purpose” — releasing only what is necessary to protect life, prevent and detect crime, bring offenders to justice and maintain public confidence, rather than what satisfies curiosity or advances a political argument. It is reinforced by professional guidance designed to prevent pretrial publicity from straying into prejudice, including the long-standing norm that suspects should not be identified before they have been charged, except in clearly justified circumstances. This sits alongside the press regulator’s rule, established after histories of press stereotyping playing a role in public incitement, that race or ethnicity should not be mentioned in reporting unless it is “genuinely relevant to the story.”

  Together, these norms made early disclosure of ethnicity and immigration status the exception rather than the default. Now the explicit decision has been made to alter this in standard police disclosures and reporting. So, what has changed?

  The answer, simply put, is that there is a perception that the politics and the information environment in the UK has changed. The impact of the online falsehoods about the Southport killings in late July and early August last year — that the attacker was an asylum seeker who had recently arrived by boat — ricocheted through social media and spilled into street violence. In that instance, the police could not initially name the suspect because he was under 18.

  Subsequently, parliamentary committees, researchers and reporters have traced how rumor and identity claims fueled disorder, while newsrooms and police forces were left firefighting conspiracy theories at speed.

  That crisis has bolstered the argument that withholding details such as nationality or asylum status can create a vacuum in which malign actors thrive and that more routine disclosure will puncture misinformation.

  The problems with that argument are profound.

  First, conspiracies thrive on distortion, not on the careful absorption of official communications. A parliamentary committee concluded that social media’s business models incentivize the spread of misinformation, which helped trigger last summer’s violent disorder. In this climate, baking identity into the first telling of crime stories — before a suspect has been charged — is not transparency, it is kindling.

  Second, once an identity is put at the front of an update, the search for evidence gives way to the hunt for a “type” ahead of the facts. It steers attention from what happened and what can be proved to who the person is said to be and what that is taken to mean. In that climate, each new detail is read through the label and the space for careful judgement shrinks. The history of policing and ethnic minorities in the UK has illustrated this in numerous moral panics.

  Third, the new disclosure regime lands in a political and media environment that routinely associates migrants, and black and ethnic minorities with illegality. The Runnymede Trust’s recent analyses of millions of words in news articles and parliamentary debates document how such groups are persistently paired with words about illegality. That pattern helps normalize hostility.

  These are not abstract academic points — they are the context in which the criminal justice system is brought into perpetual, manufactured culture wars that harm minorities and leave everyone less safe.

  Fourth, there is a very basic problem of data quality. Police forces are famously bad at this. Ethnicity can be recorded as self-defined by the person involved or as “officer observed” using broad visual codes. Completion rates for self-defined data vary sharply between forces, and missing or mismatched records are common. UK-wide standards on ethnicity are also under review because the categories are contested and context-dependent.

  Add the fact that “ethnicity,” “nationality” and “immigration status” are different things. Nationality might be known at the point of charging a suspect if documents are checked. Immigration status often is not — indeed, the police guidance confirms that “it is not the role or responsibility of the police to verify a suspect’s immigration status” and that, “It is for the Home Office to decide if it is appropriate in all the circumstances to confirm immigration status.”

  Turning any such labels into front-of-house communications is an open invitation to error, before a correction that is too late to catch up with the narrative.

  The truth is that the demand for default disclosure of ethnicity or immigration status is not about transparency, but about advancing a political narrative. This is why the script scarcely needs facts to run. If police hold back, it is proof of concealment; if they disclose the information and those details fit the stereotype, this is used to indict the wider group. If the details do not fit, attention moves elsewhere.

  The new guidance might reconcile pressure for “transparency” with established privacy and contempt protections, and the ability to explain reasons for restraint — for instance, to safeguard a fair trial; to protect victims and witnesses; and to avoid inflaming tensions.

  These, too, are a service to transparency, as they tell the public that the police understand the rights of suspects and the realities of community safety.

  The real question is not whether the public should be trusted with information. It is whether the state should normalize ethnicity and immigration status as the organizing facts of crime reporting — and burden already marginalized communities with more suspicion.

  Nasar Meer is a professor of social and political sciences at the University of Glasgow.
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