British police forces have been told that they should disclose the ethnic background and nationality of suspects in at least high-profile cases to rebuild trust with the public amid accusations of politically correct cover-ups.
The National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) and the College of Policing have issued interim guidance to forces across England and Wales, advising them to disclose more information about suspects in high-profile cases, rather than merely disclosing their age and location of arrest, London’s Daily Telegraph reports.
The guidance comes in the wake of controversy surrounding the alleged gang rape of a 12-year-old girl in Nuneaton last month. Police faced accusations that they tried to prevent the public from being informed that the two suspects in the case, Ahmad Mulakhil and Mohammad Kabir, were asylum seekers from Afghanistan out of concern that it would inflame “community tensions”.
Warwickshire Police Chief Constable Alex Franklin-Smith denied that there was a “cover-up” but said that the decision to not publicly reveal the immigration status of the suspects was a result of “national guidance”.
A similar excuse was reportedly used to keep the Liberal Democrat-run Portsmouth Council in June from disclosing that a rape suspect in the area was being housed in a government-funded migrant hotel, leading to accusations of an intentional cover-up amid growing public anger and safety concerns over often young male illegal migrants being housed in communities across the country at the taxpayer’s expense.
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