Yesterday should have been a day of celebration in Liverpool. The city was awash with fans kitted out in red to celebrate Liverpool FC’s Premier League victory. The City Council estimated that around half a million people had lined the 10-mile route to watch the trophy parade.

Around 6pm, however, celebration turned to tragedy in the city centre as a car ploughed through crowds of supporters. Footage widely circulated online shows the vehicle colliding with numerous onlookers, before fans descend on the car as it comes to a stop. Four people were trapped under the car and had to be rescued by the fire service, while 47 people were injured and 27 required hospital treatment. Mercifully, nobody has been reported dead.

Merseyside Police say the incident is not being treated as a terrorist attack, and as always in these cases officials are warning against speculation about the motives of the perpetrator. The police force quickly made public the fact that they had arrested a 53-year-old white British man, who is believed to be the driver.

This decision to release demographic information early is significant, because it was only last July that Merseyside Police had to reckon with the Southport stabbings, when 17-year-old Axel Rudakubana murdered three children at a dance class. The police were heavily criticised for initially failing to release information about the suspect, refusing to identify a motive, and saying they were not treating the incident as terror-related. Rudakubana was later charged under the Terrorism Act 2000 for possession of an al-Qaeda training manual.

Most controversially, however, Merseyside Police and the Government failed to provide information about the demographic background of the perpetrator. Thanks to this vacuum of information, rumours began to swirl online which inflamed tensions and contributed to the riots that began in Southport and then spread across the country. Prime Minister Keir Starmer argued that information about Rudakubana could not be released lest it jeopardise the trial. In turn, the Tories accused the Labour leader of creating a vacuum, leading to the misinformation which fuelled the subsequent riots.

Merseyside Police, then, seem to have learnt their lesson when it comes to communication. Yet their statement labelling the event as a simple RTC (road traffic collision) shows the dangers of posting about events too quickly, while the decision to make the suspect’s race public within hours has raised questions as to whether the same would have happened had the perpetrator been non-white.

This is not an unreasonable line of inquiry. In an era of two-tier policing, where violent criminals, paedophiles and drug dealers are released from jail — or aren’t even sent there in the first place — while Lucy Connolly remains incarcerated for a tweet, or where the police have turned a blind eye to antisemitism among pro-Palestine protestors while arresting and charging a Jewish man holding a placard satirising the now-deceased leader of Hezbollah, the fact that this demographic information was quickly released when it was a white perpetrator is notable.

Given the numerous failures of the police in recent years, and this government’s poor relationship with truth, the public is right to be suspicious of the motives of law enforcement and the double standards of the police force. To build a fuller picture, we will have to see how they deal with the next incident of this kind. Sadly, in modern Britain, that is likely to come sooner rather than later.

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David Jeffery is a lecturer in British Politics at the University of Liverpool.

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