Police Quickly Gave Details on Liverpool Car Ramming, Aiming to Prevent Rumors

Europe|Police Quickly Gave Details on Liverpool Car Ramming, Aiming to Prevent Rumors

The English city of Liverpool awoke on Tuesday to a blizzard of questions about a vehicle that rammed a crowd of people in a sports parade the previous evening, injuring dozens, two seriously. But amid all of the horror and confusion, one fact emerged: The car’s driver was a 53-year-old white British man, and he had been arrested at the scene.

The local Merseyside Police released that information less than two hours after the episode occurred, as posts on social media were already erupting with alternative theories about what might have happened, and why.

The decision to disclose the driver’s race and nationality so quickly appeared calculated to defuse the rumors and misinformation that have spread after other recent violent episodes in Britain.

Last summer, after a British-born man with parents from Rwanda fatally stabbed three young girls at a dance studio in Southport, a town north of Liverpool, false reports that the assailant was an undocumented Muslim migrant spread rapidly online. The next day, a riot broke out in Southport, the first of several in cities and towns across England.

By the time the police announced that the assailant, Axel Rudakubana, had been born in Britain, the erroneous reports had reached millions of people. A false name, “Ali Al-Shakati,” circulated online for a day before the clarification from the authorities.

In that case, the police were legally barred from disclosing the suspect’s identity and received “inconsistent advice” from prosecutors about whether they could confirm that he was not Muslim. Afterward, a parliamentary committee report into the riots, which far-right figures had fomented online, concluded that restrictions on what the police can say in criminal cases were “not fit for the social media age.”