Should the police disclose the ethnicity and background of suspects in high-profile crimes, and how soon should they reveal this information? In the year since the Southport unrest – in which migrant hotels were attacked after online claims the attacker had been an asylum seeker – the British state has had to ask itself this question.

While the ethnicity and nationality of criminal suspects were routinely talked about in the 1980s, since the 1999 MacPherson report into ‘institutional racism’ in the Met, with its concerns racial stereotyping, the police have become far more reluctant to do so. When it came to Southport, for days we were only allowed to know that the suspect was ‘a 17-year-old male from Banks in Lancashire, who is originally from Cardiff’. In the end, this unspeakable atroc

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