Routinely disclosing the asylum status of suspects is a very dangerous step to take

The Guardian

a day ago

The 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 rumours travel faster than facts, this new approach will have profound consequences for justice – and for the people who will live with the consequences.
The new national 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 this, the home secretary, Yvette Cooper, had expressed her view that guidance should change to allow 'more transparency'. She was joined in this opinion by the chief inspector of constabulary, who warned that withholding such details could feed 'two-tier policing' claims (the allegation that the state polices majorities more harshly than minorities, contrary to the overwhelming body of evidence that shows otherwise).
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 national professional guidance designed to prevent pre-trial publicity from straying into prejudice, including the longstanding 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' (there is not even a public interest override to that clause).
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 is now different. The impact of the online falsehoods about the Southport killings in late July and early August 2024 – that the attacker was an asylum seeker who had recently arrived by boat – ricocheted through social media and spilled into street violence. In this instance, the police could not initially name the suspect because he was under 18.
Subsequently, parliamentary committees, researchers and reporters have traced how rumour and identity claims fuelled 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 this 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 incentivise 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 judgment shrinks. The history of policing and ethnic minorities in this country 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 documents how such groups are persistently paired with words about illegality. That pattern helps normalise 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's 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. National standards on ethnicity are also under review because the categories are contested and context-dependent. Now add the fact that 'ethnicity', 'nationality' and 'immigration status' are different things. Nationality may 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 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; 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, however, is not whether the public should be trusted with information. It is whether the state should normalise ethnicity and immigration status as the organising facts of crime reporting – and burden already marginalised communities with more suspicion.
Nasar Meer is a professor of social and political sciences at the University of Glasgow