Why police released the ethnicity of Liverpool parade crash suspect

Within hours of a driver ramming into a crowd at Liverpool’s Premier League victory parade, injuring 65 people, Merseyside Police shared in a press release that they had arrested a suspect. Unusually, the announcement included the race and nationality of the person arrested – a 53-year-old white British man.

This was a stark contrast to the previous summer, when speculation about the ethnicity of a 17-year-old arrested for the murder of three young girls in Southport led to public disorder and riots around the country.