Earlier this year, the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) and College of Policing announced new interim guidance to police forces on publishing ethnicity in high profile cases. Action for Race Equality hosted a Policy Action Forum and heard from experts about the risks this decision poses.
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The guidance, which kicked in to force in August 2025, states that police should disclose the ethnicity and nationality of suspects when there is policing purpose, a risk to public safety, misinformation, and significant social media unrest. Under the interim guidance, police will not disclose the immigration status of suspects.
It is believed that the guidance will seek to prevent the rise of misinformation in high profile cases, such as the tragic murders which took place in Southport last year, when disinformation about the attackers migration status led to several racist riots across the country.
While the new guidance is posed as a decision which will prevent a repeat of the riots, there is a concern held by those working in racial justice about how the guidance will be deployed without entrenching a link between race and nationality with criminality.
Policy Action Forum
At our Policy Action Forum on the guidance, we were joined by Professor Michael Shiner, Emeritus Associate Professor at the London School of Economics, whose academic interests include reforming police powers and the over-policing of minority communities.
Critically, he emphasised that the key element of policing is maintaining order and public tranquillity rather than law enforcement; an idea endorsed by the 1981 Scarman Report into the Brixton riots. For this reason, he deemed the guidance was regressive and damaging in multiple ways.
The NPCC has said
not reporting these details risks policing being perceived as withholding information from the public – a narrative that has potential to stoke the fire of unrest and disorder.’
However, Dr Shiner countered this rationale by pointing to the inflammatory nature of the guidance.
He raised critical questions on what happens to public order if the police decline to release information and what happens if a crime is committed by someone from an ethnic minority background. He concluded the guidance risks having the opposite effect by acting as “a stimulus to public disorder.”
The context
Dr Ben Whitham, a Research Associate at SOAS University of London, was due to speak at the Policy Action Forum but could not attend.
He told ARE that he was deeply concerned about the guidance, which whilst it will not disclose immigration status, comes amidst a “fixation on small-boat crossings of the English Channel, on hotel-based asylum contingency accommodation, and on people seeking asylum as representing a securitised, criminalised, and increasingly sexualised threat to the UK itself.”
He added:
“This current demonisation of people seeking asylum that associates them with violent crime and sexual predation, is rooted in other and earlier narratives of race and migration in the UK. The narratives that informed last year’s racist riots, for instance, and that continue to animate so-called hotel “protests” this year, portray asylum seekers – irrespective of their actual cultural or faith backgrounds – as Muslim, precisely because perceived Muslimness is widely interpreted as intrinsically threatening in the UK as a consequence of structural, and often-state led, institutionalised, Islamophobia.”
What’s next?
The interim guidance has been rolled out without consultation, and is now in effect.
Meanwhile, other programmes of work seeking to improve practice around race and ethnicity and tackle racial disparities in policing, and the broader criminal justice system are soon coming to an end, including the NPCC’s Police Race Action Programme which will formally complete in March 2026 and transition into existing NPCC work streams.
As structures like PRAP dissolve, Dr Shiner suggested that civil society should then seek to monitor how this information is released to ensure the guidance is used in its strictest sense. In cases where the police disclose information outside this scope, civil society should challenge them, he explained.
Author
Bowale Fadare
Policy and Research Officer
