Should the nationality of those arrested or their income be disclosed?

The UK has changed a law that will now make it easier for police to release information about detainees, including their country of origin. The change was prompted by last year's multiple stabbing case that left three girls dead. Rumors spread that the detainee was an asylum seeker who had arrived by boat, something the police were allegedly concealing for political reasons. This led to riots in several British towns until it was revealed that the accused was a radicalized young man born in the UK. Now, the police will have more legal tools to decide how to handle this information, although the balance will be delicate: there will always be those who question their criteria, and the tension between the right to guarantee detainees a fair trial without preconceived notions and the right to free expression is not usually easy to reconcile.

In any case, I should point out that whenever we talk about information about detainees, we are really only referring to one piece of information: their nationality of origin. It's the one used as a weapon in the necessary but all too often demagogic debate about the integration of immigration. Now, if we're going to speculate, what I'd really like to know is the income level of those arrested, rather than their origin. I wonder if it's income, and not skin color, that's the main factor explaining the crime that affects us most on the streets. Or have we perhaps forgotten how, thirty or forty years ago, we talked about petty criminals, and the vast majority of them were... Made in SpainAn economic approach to the issue would allow us to address the solutions much better, because, for now, we have set up a system that is based on the importation of cheap labor from less developed countries and we do not assume the tensions that this can entail (aggravated by the distortion of data that some are quite willing to make).