Open letter calling on the Home Secretary and Chair of the National Police Chiefs’ Council to withdraw police guidance on naming suspects’ ethnicity and nationality

The Rt Hon Shabana Mahmood MP

Secretary of State for the Home Department 

and 

Chief Constable Gavin Stephens QPM

Chair of the National Police Chiefs’ Council

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21st November 2025

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Dear Secretary of State and Chief Constable,

We are writing as a coalition of racial justice, migrants’ rights, and civil society organisations, who have watched with increasing concern the damage being caused by the interim guidance issued by the National Police Chiefs’ Council on 13th August 2025, following consultation with the Home Office and Crown Prosecution Service. This guidance, which encourages police forces to disclose the ethnicity and nationality of suspects charged in high profile cases, is having a devastating impact on our country, harming our communities, and once again fostering the conditions of a hostile environment. We are calling for this divisive guidance to be revoked with immediate effect. 

The guidance was offered as an attempt to dispel misinformation, prevent social media misinformation, and to offer transparency in high-profile cases. However, in practice it has had the opposite effect, becoming a catalyst for crime reporting reminiscent of the 1970s and 1980s - reviving a focus on race and migration status. Increasingly, a suspect’s ethnicity or country of origin appears to be treated as more important than the crime itself, or the experiences of victims, fostering a dangerous and misleading conflation between race, migration, and criminality.

Our snapshot analysis of media articles taken over the same date range, mid-August to mid-November 2023 and 2025, shows an increase in the use of descriptors such as certain foreign nationality, asylum status and ethnicity in crime reporting. For example, the term ‘asylum seeker’ in articles on serious crime increased by five times between these timeframes.

These findings indicate a pattern in which the ethnicity and migration status of people charged - or more broadly accused of unlawful behaviour - is increasingly communicated in ways that represent people of colour as inherently criminal. This is extremely dangerous and may be seen to encourage the public to perceive ethnicity and migration status as significant factors in the commission of crime. There is, however, no credible academic evidence to support this perception. As a result, the public is being presented with a false and harmful impression that links ethnicity or migration status with criminality. 

There is also no evidence that releasing a suspect’s ethnic identity, nationality, or immigration status would prevent civil unrest. On the contrary, the guidance normalises ethnicity and migration status as relevant factors in crime reporting, increasing suspicion towards communities of colour who already bear an unjust burden of suspicion. 

The guidance enables reporting that contravenes longstanding norms and the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) code of practice (Clause 12), which recognises that routine reporting of race and ethnicity encourages discrimination. While this guidance may have intended to diffuse tension, in practice it achieves the opposite - stigmatising communities of colour and placing them at increased risk of racism and harm. 

We urge the government to adhere to its own civil society covenant principles and ensure that policy decisions are informed by open and transparent consultation with civil society organisations and equality experts, grounded in evidence, respectful of human rights, rather than being made in political haste.

We therefore ask that you reconsider and withdraw the guidance as a matter of urgency.

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Yours sincerely,

‍BME National