Liverpool response shows police have learnt from Southport

While the focus today is rightly on the lives changed by Monday's horrific scenes in Liverpool, there are also signs that Merseyside Police is itself transformed since the last time it dealt with an incident on this scale.
Three words indicate a step change in the force's communications: 'white British man'.
It took them less than two hours to inform us of the suspect's profile last night.
Contrast that with the vacuum of information following the Southport murders last July, and it's clear the police have learnt from the past.
I was in Southport a few hours after three little girls - Elsie, Alice and Bebe - were killed and saw for myself how disinformation filled the void left by police communications.
Online, outright lies spread about the attacker. Mainly that he was a Muslim asylum seeker who had arrived via a small boat. He wasn't and he hadn't.
So determined were the advocates of that disinformation that still to this day some people believe and perpetuate those conspiracies.
By the time Merseyside Police released the full information about Axel Rudakubana - including that he was from Britain - it was too late to put the falsehoods back in the box.
This is something the inspectorate HMICFRS subsequently criticised police for, recently concluding that 'the police service needs to better appreciate that fast-moving events require it to respond with an accurate counter-narrative".
So this time, Merseyside Police acted quickly.
I noticed that within minutes last night theories were once again circulating on social media, where irresponsible accounts deliberately stoked a particular narrative.
This time, before it could take hold, the Merseyside Police statement landed shortly before 8pm, stating that the suspect was male, white and British.
But quickly criticism turned to whether or not the police were too quick to outline the man's profile.
In future, will police always be expected to state the ethnicity and nationality of a suspect?
What if that information inflames rather than eases tensions, or feeds a false narrative rather than dispelling it?
And if police don't routinely release this information, in future cases people will ask why not.
There has been great praise today of the police officers - and other emergency services - who responded at the scene of the incident.
But the back office staff who decide what information to release must feel they cannot win.

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