It would be insane to use data to prevent crime, luckily these outdated behaviours are being eradicated
That sounds to me like what they are doing is illegal, and they know it is illegal. Now they got found out, so they have to find a new way to continue their illegal activities.
Makes you wonder how the police can protect “law and order” if they are breaking the law systematically.
But of course none of this is surprising. It is the Met after all.
I don’t see why it’s controversial to try to keep track of who is a member of which gang.
It’s something that local communities and police officers always know anyway, and the matrix was a way to record that so that the information was shared amongst officers with a specific reason to need to know if a specific person was a gang member as part of an investigation.
It’s just more attempts by the Met to appease people who don’t look beyond headlines.
I posted something similar about this on another sub, but I’ll put it here too.
There’s a mix of things I agree with and disagree with from this article.
Firstly, I don’t agree with this being disclosed to people whose job isn’t to prevent crime or gang activity. Unless someone has a criminal conviction, this should stay within the police. It shouldn’t be used to influence housing and school acceptance decisions, as this article suggests it is.
But, this is an intelligence database. Adding people who associate with gang members is a perfectly valid use of the tools. “This person is known to be friends with 4 others we know are part of a gang. He may be related” is a perfectly valid assumption to make. It also mentions that victims may be added. Sure, if I and a friend were stabbed and it was heavily suspected to be gang-on-gang violence, I should be added to that database.
The most controversial issue, however, is that of potential individual racism from the officers submitting these intelligence reports. Hear me out here, but I don’t think that’s the case much at all.
Arrest statistics, search statistics, and clearly this gang matrix all show a disproportionate number of people from Black and Minority Ethnic backrounds. This doesn’t mean people from BAME communities are inherently criminals, absolutely not. It’s more the situation they’re forced to live in. A history of denied opportunities and oppression due to racism has forced families to stay in more undesirable locations, with income and opportunities for a good life remaining comparably scarce for some. This isn’t due to their race, it’s due to past (and possible current) racism having a significant effect on their lives.
This leads to many using crime as a way to more comfortably survive, resulting in police focussing more on areas where BAME communities live, resulting in more arrests, searches, and intelligence reports on people from those backgrounds.
A very similar thing is clear in the US. Housing loans were denied to families from BAME backgrounds, forcing them to live in more run-down areas, concentrating the BAME population into specific areas. Combined with the lack of opportunities based on racism throughout the last century, a culture of crime slowly formed in those areas, focussing police on those areas and skewing the statistics.
So, in the opinion of someone who’s done a fair bit of independent research on this whole topic, historic/past racism and discrimination in every branch of the economy is far more to blame than current institutional or individual racism.
Neil and Jane accourt and luke knight removed from a gsng off the computer as suspected murderers in south London 29 years ago
To summarise. Most London gang members are verifiably black, recording that in a database = racist.
6 comments
It would be insane to use data to prevent crime, luckily these outdated behaviours are being eradicated
That sounds to me like what they are doing is illegal, and they know it is illegal. Now they got found out, so they have to find a new way to continue their illegal activities.
Makes you wonder how the police can protect “law and order” if they are breaking the law systematically.
But of course none of this is surprising. It is the Met after all.
I don’t see why it’s controversial to try to keep track of who is a member of which gang.
It’s something that local communities and police officers always know anyway, and the matrix was a way to record that so that the information was shared amongst officers with a specific reason to need to know if a specific person was a gang member as part of an investigation.
It’s just more attempts by the Met to appease people who don’t look beyond headlines.
I posted something similar about this on another sub, but I’ll put it here too.
There’s a mix of things I agree with and disagree with from this article.
Firstly, I don’t agree with this being disclosed to people whose job isn’t to prevent crime or gang activity. Unless someone has a criminal conviction, this should stay within the police. It shouldn’t be used to influence housing and school acceptance decisions, as this article suggests it is.
But, this is an intelligence database. Adding people who associate with gang members is a perfectly valid use of the tools. “This person is known to be friends with 4 others we know are part of a gang. He may be related” is a perfectly valid assumption to make. It also mentions that victims may be added. Sure, if I and a friend were stabbed and it was heavily suspected to be gang-on-gang violence, I should be added to that database.
The most controversial issue, however, is that of potential individual racism from the officers submitting these intelligence reports. Hear me out here, but I don’t think that’s the case much at all.
Arrest statistics, search statistics, and clearly this gang matrix all show a disproportionate number of people from Black and Minority Ethnic backrounds. This doesn’t mean people from BAME communities are inherently criminals, absolutely not. It’s more the situation they’re forced to live in. A history of denied opportunities and oppression due to racism has forced families to stay in more undesirable locations, with income and opportunities for a good life remaining comparably scarce for some. This isn’t due to their race, it’s due to past (and possible current) racism having a significant effect on their lives.
This leads to many using crime as a way to more comfortably survive, resulting in police focussing more on areas where BAME communities live, resulting in more arrests, searches, and intelligence reports on people from those backgrounds.
A very similar thing is clear in the US. Housing loans were denied to families from BAME backgrounds, forcing them to live in more run-down areas, concentrating the BAME population into specific areas. Combined with the lack of opportunities based on racism throughout the last century, a culture of crime slowly formed in those areas, focussing police on those areas and skewing the statistics.
So, in the opinion of someone who’s done a fair bit of independent research on this whole topic, historic/past racism and discrimination in every branch of the economy is far more to blame than current institutional or individual racism.
Neil and Jane accourt and luke knight removed from a gsng off the computer as suspected murderers in south London 29 years ago
To summarise. Most London gang members are verifiably black, recording that in a database = racist.