Riot police are often scared for their lives

To the rioters, it doesn’t matter that the suspect in the murder of three girls at a holiday dance camp in Southport came from a practicing Christian family, or that he was born in Cardiff and is a British citizen. It meant nothing that his hardworking parents had fled the aftermath of a genocide in Rwanda that led to an estimated 800,000 deaths. That the police had decided there was no political, religious, racial or ideological motive to the killings also meant nothing.

As soon as his name was released by the courts, Twitter was full of racist comments. The backlash on the streets was also swift.

The police have been confronted by ready-made networks, many of which were established to oppose lockdown. They did so in the belief that the covid response was a government conspiracy and have gone from there to share racist views that vary from a desire to control illegal immigration to outright support for Nazi theories of racial supremacy.