Why British police raced to release details after car plowed into Liverpool crowd

LIVERPOOL, England — Images of a car plowing into a large crowd of soccer fans celebrating their team’s English Premier League title win had barely made it to national newscasts when notorious right-wing voices started to call the incident a “suspected terrorist attack” on social media.

The X account of Tommy Robinson, a convicted fraudster who is well known as the leader of the English far right, retweeted video of the vehicle knocking down people dressed in Liverpool Football Club’s ketchup-red strip, writing that it looked “very intentional.” (The posts were labeled “admin,” a probable reference to the fact that Robinson did not write them himself since he was in prison at the time.)

Others swiftly followed suit, opining that the driver had been motivated by Islamic extremism.

Within a couple of hours, Merseyside Police released details on a suspect detained at the scene, describing him as a 53-year-old white British male from the Liverpool area. Officials also urged the public “not to speculate on the circumstances” surrounding the incident. Within five hours, police had described the incident as “isolated” and not being investigated as terrorism-related.

The release of these details by the British police, most notably the suspect’s race, was remarkably fast.

For many, it was a sign of lessons learned after the 2024 Southport stabbing attack that saw the very same police force pilloried for not sharing enough information soon enough, and allowing rumors to run rampant. In this vacuum, speculation turned into calls for action, which soon bloomed into racist riots that rocked Britain in the aftermath of the deadly assault that killed three young girls, with more injured.

In Southport, violent riots erupted last summer after false information shared on social media claimed the suspect in the stabbings was a radical Islamist migrant. Police were accused of failing to share accurate information on the suspect quickly enough, allowing rumors to circulate unchallenged.

On Tuesday, Liverpool City Region Mayor Steve Rotheram praised Merseyside Police for having “handled the situation fantastically” in an interview with Sky News.

Dal Babu, a former Metropolitan Police chief superintendent, described the force’s swift release of information, including details on the race of the man arrested in the incident, as “unprecedented.”

“I’ve never known a case like this before where they’ve given the ethnicity and the race of the individual who was involved in it,” Babu told BBC Radio 5 Live on Tuesday.

“I think that was to dampen down some of the speculation from the far-right that sort of continues on X even as we speak,” he said, adding that it appeared to be a lesson learned as a direct result of what happened after the Southport attack.

In that case, he noted rumors swelled of the suspect being “an asylum seeker who arrived on a boat and it was a Muslim extremist — and that wasn’t the case.”

In a news conference Tuesday, Detective Chief Superintendent Karen Jaundrill said the suspect had been arrested on suspicion of attempted murder, dangerous driving and driving while unfit through drugs.

Assistant Chief Constable Jenny Sims separately said police believed the man arrested had been able to follow an ambulance responding to reports of a member of the public having a heart attack, after a road block was temporarily lifted.

More than 50 people were initially taken to or showed up at hospitals for treatment, with children among those hurt. Eleven people remained in the hospital for ongoing treatment, but all appeared to be in “stable condition” and “recovering well,” police said.

Lessons learned

Darrin Hooper, who traveled with his wife from Maidstone, Kent, just over 30 miles southeast of London, to celebrate Liverpool’s win, praised the police’s quick response on the scene as well as on social media.

“It was a good thing that they announced it straight away,” he said Tuesday as he stood among a crowd gathered on the edges of scene of Monday’s incident, which had been cordoned off.

“They’ve just got to say it. And then it stops all the speculation,” Hooper, 60, an electrical engineer, told NBC News.

Sneha Venket, who traveled to the city with her husband, a major Liverpool F.C. fan, all the way from Cologne, Germany, to join in the parade, described the events that unfolded Monday as a “very bitter end to a very, very happy day.”

Recalling the grim events of last year in the eastern German city of Magdeburg, in which a 9-year-old child and four adults were killed after a car was driven into a crowd at a Christmas market, Venket, 39, said she wasn’t surprised to see speculation swirl in the aftermath of Monday’s incident. In that case too, Europe’s far right was quick to tap into fears around the deadly attack.

Venket, who is studying screenwriting, said it was important to allow police to investigate before jumping to conclusions, but, she said, “nowadays, it looks like society is more polarized than ever, every society.”

“I think it’s just a global trend right now.”