Every report of a machete attack in Victoria makes people assume ‘African’ and every shooting in Western Sydney screams ‘Middle Eastern’, even when that’s unfair

You might wonder why useful tools freely sold for centuries are suddenly so dangerous that we can’t have them. Have machetes changed – or has Australia?

Police in Britain did something after the Liverpool car attack I’ve never seen before from them – or our frightened own.

Just two hours after a driver rammed his car into soccer fans, Merseyside Police told the world his race.

Relax! He was white!

“We can confirm the man arrested is a 53-year-old white British man.”

A car rammed into soccer fans in Liverpool. Picture: X

That surprised Dal Babu, former chief superintendent of London’s Metropolitan Police: “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.”

But what a welcome precedent, provided police there and here now identify the race not just of white offenders.

Sure, in this case, police obviously thought they should risk an exception, to stop people jumping to an understandable but false conclusion that the Liverpool mayhem was yet another Islamist attack by car or truck, like those in Berlin, Stockholm, Munich, London, Magdeburg and Nice.

They were desperate to head off more race riots by Britons sick of how mass immigration has turned them into targets in their own country.

Police wanted to stop people jumping to an understandable but false conclusion that the Liverpool mayhem was yet another Islamist attack. Picture: AP

But the genie is now out of the bottle.

No one believes police would have revealed the race of the driver had he been black or brown.

After this precedent, many will believe even more strongly that any suspect is not white unless police say differently.

Actually, I bet many people assume that already.

Check the record to see why.

When a teenager last year stabbed girls at a Southport dance school, killing three, police said only that he was “a 17-year-old male”.

Rabblerousers on social media again jumped to an understandable but false conclusion there was a cover-up, and attacked Muslims.

The killer wasn’t Muslim, yet the truth, when it emerged, confirmed suspicions that police still played race politics.

The killer, described in some reports as a Welsh choir boy, turned out to be the black son of immigrants from Rwanda.

The same games have been played for years right here.

On Monday, for instance, Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan announced a ban on the sale of machetes – the first in any state.

You might wonder why useful tools freely sold for centuries are suddenly so dangerous that we can’t have them.

Have machetes changed – or has Australia?

Well, check the two machete attacks last Sunday that rushed Allan into this ban.

Not mentioned by her or police were that some youths filmed fighting with machetes at Northland shopping centre looked African; as did the youths filmed on CCTV after stabbing a boy in Wyndham Vale.

Is it machetes that should be banned, or immigration from some tribal and war-torn countries?

Facts improve understanding and our response.

The full facts.

Instead, this censorship has been going on for years.

Sunday’s Northland shopping centre brawl was one of two attacks that rushed Allan into the machete ban.

Example: reports of “youth crime” in the Northern Territory and Queensland, when the real issue is often crime by Indigenous youth, demanding a very different response.

Predictably, the worst censorship has been in uber-woke Victoria.

It’s been a menace for decades.

Take this Herald Sun report in 2010 on attacks on Indian cabbies: “Police will not officially acknowledge any particular ethnic group is a target, or that any other group is carrying out the crimes. But in every case the victims told police their attackers were African.”

Police also wouldn’t admit that a rash of attacks on Indian students were mostly by people of Lebanese, Maori and Pacific Islander appearance.

Only when Indian newspapers raged at this latest example of “white Australian” racism did the police commissioner set the record straight

Four years ago, forensic psychologist and academic Stephane Shepherd was monstered for breaking this silence in a study, noting that “African (predominantly South Sudanese) youth comprise at least 19 per cent of young people in custody despite being less than 0.5 per cent of Victoria’s youth population”.

He suggested considering this when importing refugees from poor, agricultural countries where they lived in “smaller communities with collective parenting and strict gender roles and low levels of formal education”.

The Left hit the roof.

“Totally bizarre,” spluttered the Guardian.

“Racist trollop (sic),” sneered a Melbourne Law School academic who assumed Shepherd, a black man, was actually a white woman.

Enough.

Follow the lead of Merseyside Police.

Censoring the race of offenders does no one favours, when already every report of a machete attack in Victoria makes people assume “African”, and every shooting in Western Sydney screams “Middle Eastern”, even when that’s unfair.

Be frank.

Let facts be our guide.

Originally published as Every report of a machete attack in Victoria makes people assume ‘African’ and every shooting in Western Sydney screams ‘Middle Eastern’, even when that’s unfair