An open secret, the London Metropolitan Police target Black Londoners at an incredibly disproportionate rate, far beyond even other ethnic minorities who experience similar levels of pay and income disparities. Within this vein of targeting, the Met has recently launched a campaign of "extensive profiling" of the digital activities of youths, including children as young as 13. The official justification is countering "gang-related" crime. Gang-justification, in fact, has become increasingly powerful in the British criminal system, used in everything from securing convictions to restricting predominately-Black musical genres. Within media representations and legal definition, the 'gang' is the instrument of mass restrictions on civil liberties and basic rights. Gangism, however, seems to be little more than a reverse-euphemism for Blackness. Over the past decade, the composition of the Met's Gang Violence Matrix (GVM) has remained remarkably consistent: 80% of the people on the list are Black men, compared to only 12% who are white. Scaled for population, the ratio is 25-1. When we integrate that back into the above-mentioned profiling program, named Project Alpha, in practice, it acts as a mass surveillance campaign of young Black boys. The effects of these programs are both banal and spectacular, but constitute a formation of social death. Identification on the GVM can lead to exclusion from benefits, eviction, employment restrictions, increased searches, and even immigration action. In 2018 it was revealed that for years the GVM had been incorrectly identifying victims as perpetrators. Proximity, even in victimization, is criminalized. Association with Blackness is a sweeping attestation of guilt, proxied perfunctorily behind gangism.
The outwardly disembodied face of technology, coupled with the scalability of new systems, backed by legal and social institutions of control, perpetuate a faceless intra-state imperialism, segregating and controlling across perceived ethnic lines. I think it's notable that until the end of 2020, the GVM used a list of ethnic categories found in no other department and determined solely by the assumptions of the police. The categories were White European, Dark European, African Caribbean, Asian, Oriental, and Arabian / Egyptian. They are not really ethnic categories, they are colonial categories. The colonies have been instituted in the Isle.
Hi, I’m Camden, a rising sophomore at Georgetown, studying Government and Computer Science. This summer I’ll be looking at digital circulations of race and culture. The project will investigate the ways that the power to express is conditionalized, tangled, and performed across communities and identities. From this, I'll work through two main questions: How does surveillance reproduce colonial relationships? What does it mean to be seen?
On a personal level, I’m really excited to work on my own individual research for the first time. Getting to build whole networks on my own in the US and the UK has been and will continue to be a really engaging challenge. I’m grateful for all the support I’ve received so far, and I’m looking forward to meeting new people across the Laidlaw community. Please feel free to reach out and connect!
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Thank you for this Camden! I know this is more of an "end of summer" recap than a "mid-summer check-in" since you started your project a few weeks earlier than the rest of the cohort. The data visualizations are particularly fascinating and I look forward to reviewing your summer outputs.