Policing: Counting Colour, Not Crimes

Policing, Race and Dangerous Concessions: Why New Ethnicity Reporting Rules Risk Fuelling Racism

The National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC), under pressure from the Home Secretary, has issued new guidance requiring forces to disclose the ethnicity and nationality of suspects in “high profile and sensitive” cases. Ministers argue this will prevent the spread of rumours on social media and counter conspiracy theories.

But this concession is dangerous. It risks turning ethnicity into a central variable in policing and public debate, stoking racism while doing nothing to improve justice. Far from quashing rumours, it may inflame them. Far from building trust, it may undermine it. And far from tackling crime, it will obscure the reality of who actually commits it.

A Misguided Fix to a Political Problem

The government has presented this move as a matter of “transparency”. Yet what is really at stake is politics, not justice. The clamour for disclosure has come not from communities but from right-wing politicians, media outlets and far-right agitators who exploit social media storms to sow division.

This is scapegoating, not accountability. The disclosure of a suspect’s ethnicity and migration status is not relevant to the administration of justice, and in most cases adds no evidential value. It serves one purpose only: to feed the public obsession with race.

The Statistical Reality

Here lies the most glaring contradiction. The overwhelming majority of serious crimes in Britain — including violent and sexual offences — are committed by white men. That fact is confirmed by the Home Office, the Ministry of Justice and the Office for National Statistics.

Yet selective disclosure will have the opposite effect. By reporting the ethnicity of Black and minority ethnic suspects, while downplaying or ignoring the ethnicity of white suspects, the system creates a false impression that crime is disproportionately “ethnic”. This is distortion, not transparency.

The Dartboard Analogy

Selective disclosure works like shining a spotlight on one corner of a dartboard. Imagine the bottom left section is brightly lit. Every dart that lands there becomes highly visible. The rest of the board is in shadow. To the casual observer, it looks like all the darts are landing in the lit corner.

But in truth, darts are scattered across the whole board. Most of them, in fact, are elsewhere. The picture is skewed by where the light is directed, not by the true spread of throws. That is precisely how selective reporting on ethnicity manipulates perception. It directs the public gaze at minorities, while leaving the bulk of offending — committed by white men — in the dark.

Lessons from Elsewhere

International experience shows the risks. In the United States, where ethnicity is routinely published in crime reports, the effect has been to entrench racial stereotypes and fuel systemic racism. The “Black crime” narrative has been weaponised for decades, despite the reality that white offenders account for the majority of serious offences.

In France, by contrast, police are prohibited from collecting or publishing ethnic statistics in criminal justice. The French system is not without flaws, but it recognises the dangers of racialising justice data. Britain is now moving in the opposite direction, towards normalising racial profiling at the level of national policy.

The Problem of Discretion

Even within this new framework, disclosure will be left to the discretion of individual chief constables. This is a recipe for chaos and abuse. Some chiefs, like those who have admitted institutional racism in their forces, may tread cautiously. Others, like Sir Mark Rowley, who publicly denies the very concept of institutional racism, may pursue disclosure in ways that reinforce prejudice rather than reduce it.

The variability in leadership attitudes guarantees inconsistency. Worse, it opens the door for errant chiefs to use disclosure selectively, guided not by fairness but by their own lack of understanding of racism. The result will not be uniform transparency but arbitrary racialisation, varying from force to force and case to case.

A Regressive Step

The timing could not be worse. Just two years after George Floyd’s murder sparked global commitments to anti-racism, and only months after the Casey Review confirmed that the Metropolitan Police is institutionally racist, misogynist and homophobic, Britain is taking a backward step.

Instead of prioritising the Police Race Action Plan (PRAP), which was designed to rebuild trust, the NPCC has chosen to indulge the Home Office in a reactionary concession to racism. By doing so, it undermines its own commitments and jeopardises already fragile relationships with Black and minority ethnic communities.

Conclusion

Policing is supposed to be about justice, not about counting colour. The disclosure of ethnicity and nationality in criminal cases does not serve victims, does not serve communities, and does not serve justice. It serves only those who trade in fear.

If the NPCC truly wishes to build trust, it should resist political pressure and recommit to the principles of fairness, proportionality and equality before the law. That means abandoning this dangerous experiment in racialised reporting, and focusing instead on tackling crime without prejudice.

Until then, we will continue to shine a light on the real story: most crime is committed by white men. Anything else is distortion dressed up as transparency.