"NOT being treated as terror-related” is an odd phrase, when you think about it. We only hear it when something objectively terrifying has occurred. “Isolated incident” is another one. Such statements from the police should go some way to reassuring the public that while a horrendous incident has occurred, it has been a senseless one-off.

The problem with human beings is that we are wired to try to make sense of apparently senseless things, especially when they have happened in our immediate vicinity. When, following the July stabbings in Southport and the arrest of a suspect, the police said they were not treating the incident as terror-related, many simply refused to accept it as true.

Why would anyone, other than a terrorist, stab little girls attending an activity club in the summer holidays? It just didn’t make sense. It still doesn’t. Which is why the latest intervention from the UK’s Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation is a little puzzling. The Times reports that Jonathan Hall KC has called for more information to be made public in the event of mass-casualty attacks.

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He says the “information vacuum” after the Southport attack was exploited to incite unrest, and this is undoubtedly true, but we must ask a difficult question: had full details about the suspect’s identity been made public at the earliest possible opportunity, would the riots have been averted? Going forward, will more sharing of information make unrest more or less likely?

Reporting restrictions were lifted on August 1, three days after the Southport attack, and rioting continued for several days after that. It seems reasonable to assume that many of those joining anti-immigration protests will have seen a picture of the 17-year-old suspect and responded: “I knew it”.

Did it matter that the suspect was not, as had been claimed, a Muslim? Did it matter that he was not, as had been claimed, fresh off a small boat?

The early police statement that he had been born in Cardiff had only served to fan the flames, because those spoiling for a confrontation did not care where he had been born, indeed they regarded that statement as obfuscation. They wanted to know what he looked like. They wanted to know, in the way racists so often enquire, “where he was really from”.

Court sketch of Axel Rudakubana, who is accused of the Southport stabbings

“I think we are at a point in time where trust in public institutions should not be taken for granted,” says Hall, “and when matters of high importance in the public mind happen … as far as is possible, the police, the government and the media, should level with them.”

The police might argue that they did “level with people” by providing background information on the Southport suspect. But for as long as they did not reveal his ethnicity, racists were not satisfied and those looking to stoke anti-immigration sentiment kept suggesting the public were being lied to.

In their minds, any crime of violence by anyone they deem an immigrant is by definition an act of terror, an attack not just on the victim or victims but by extension on the “British way of life”, however such a concept is defined. If the police opt to level with them about the ethnicity of suspects, why should we assume the outcome won’t be even more appalling scenes?

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The stiff prison sentences being handed out this summer might act as a deterrent to some, but let’s not pretend rioters are prone to carrying out risk assessments before they pick up bricks or charge at police officers.

The Times article states that “one of the problems highlighted by the attack was the consequence of giving out so little information about what motivated the killings of three young girls”. To date, we have received no more information about that. Those seeking a rational or logical explanation will be waiting forever.

Those investigating any attack specifically targeting women and girls should consider if extreme misogyny was a motivating factor, and the Labour Government is planning to treat this as a form of extremism as part of a review into how best to tackle ideological threats. Might this mean that in future, police will declare some isolated incidents of men attacking women to be “terror-related”? Women are at far greater risk of intimate terrorism than any other form of violence, but naming it as such during an investigation would be a major change.

Hall believes more information about suspects can be disclosed without the risk of prejudicing trials, saying that in the social media age it is “unrealistic to expect people not to speculate” after any future attacks. He says: “The brutal reality is that at some stage in the future, there will be an attack by someone who is an asylum seeker or who came on a small boat.”

It would indeed create mistrust if the authorities were seen to be concealing such facts, but what might be the price of full disclosure in the heat of the moment? This was not the case in Southport, and it won’t be the case when other crimes are committed by people with brown skin. How will the police be able to stop racists from exploiting future tragedies for their own ends?