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Frank
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So it was notable that within just two hours of last night’s incident, Merseyside Police issued a statement that the suspect was a ‘53-year-old white British man from the Liverpool area’. This was later confirmed to have been the driver at a press conference giving further details at around 11 p.m., around five hours after the incident.
By the equivalent time following the Southport attack, by contrast, the public had only been allowed to know that the suspect, Axel Rudakubana, was ‘a 17-year-old male from Banks in Lancashire, who is originally from Cardiff’. His ethnicity, notably, was not made public until days later, with his picture (as a schoolboy) first featured on newspaper front pages on Friday 2 August, four days after the attack. This was after Rudakubana had been charged with murder and reporting restrictions had been lifted (even then, he was never described as a ‘black British male’ by police). In the intervening period, speculation spread online that he was a Muslim asylum seeker who had come over on a small boat.
This reticence to be upfront about the identity of the suspect is now widely viewed as a mistake. As Jonathan Hall KC, the government’s terrorism adviser, has said: ‘In the digital era, if the police do not take the lead in providing clear, accurate and sober details about an attack like Southport, others will. Social media is a source of news for many people and near-silence in the face of horrific events of major public interest is no longer an option.’
The speedy disclosure this time, then, is welcome. After awful events such as these, the public has a right to know as much as possible as soon as possible. At last night’s press conference, we were also told that ‘extensive inquiries are ongoing’ about the circumstances of the incident, that it is not currently being treated as terror related, and that it is believed to be an isolated incident.
Nevertheless, there are wider implications. For one thing, it arguably speaks to the level of general public mistrust of authority – and public concern in particular about Islamist terrorism – that the rapid disclosure of the suspect’s identity is needed in the first place.
Most importantly, though, Merseyside Police has demonstrated that when an incident such as this occurs, it is perfectly possible for police to rapidly release the age, ethnicity and nationality of any suspect. This raises yet further questions about why their disclosures were so slow last year. And it also raises the bar in future: we now know conclusively that the police can disclose a suspect’s identity within just a couple of hours. Which means that should something like this happen in future, God forbid, the public will expect to be informed of the full details no less quickly – whatever the suspect’s identity might be.
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