Beginning my project, I had some preliminary thoughts and plans for where I expected the project to go. Arriving in London to meet with local musicians, I realized that the project I had identified was one small snapshot in a far broader movement occurring in the city. With recommendations to look into recent programs like Form 696 and older ones like the Sus Law, the blatant attempts by the British criminal systems to target Black Londoners under proxy initiatives became quite clear. From this, I began to shift the focus of my research towards the usage of gang-justification across a suite of targeted police programs. 

One challenge I faced was a data barrier. Crime, and the definitions of crime, are controlled by the state and specifically recorded by the police. I was pretty sure that the police were engaging in discriminatory and targeted policy, but the only data I had to validate was from the police themselves. To a certain extent, I had to work within those structures and with what the police label crime. I decided, however, to work through it not by accepting the label of crime, but by trying to understand how crime is systematically attributed to people. I then combined that data with demographic and wealth information from national and local statistics, trying to match up some of the claims that were being put forward by the police. The claims didn't stand.

On the whole, my goal for the first two weeks was simply to get a view into the social situation of policing in London. That work led me to areas I hadn't before considered, but proved equally rich and disheartening. With this preliminary base, I turned my attention towards more hard data analysis and trying to incorporate some visual representation of the experiences that the data seemed to point to.