The Gang’s Matrix. Have you ever heard of it?
You don’t have to have actually committed a crime to find yourself on The Matrix.
We all know that knife crime in London is continuing to escalate. The Met claim they are striving for a real solution. But their secret gang database, The Matrix, which Amnesty International calls “racially discriminatory” and a breach of human rights, is in fact making the situation worse and is failing to deal in any way with knife crime.
- You might have just been convicted of a low-level offence.
- You will not be told if you have been added to the list.
- You won’t even be able to find out if you are listed until the next time you apply to the housing association, to a new school or to the local Jobcentre and your application is rejected because you’re on a police watch list for suspected gang members.
- There is no system of reviewing The Matrix, correcting it or deleting outdated information.
- There is no process by which you can challenge your status or have your name removed.
In 2012, as part of the highly politicised response to the 2011 Riots, the Met and Boris Johnson launched Gangs Violence Matrix to “reduce gang-related violence and prevent young lives being lost” [1]. This decision was made in spite of the fact that the government had just been forced to accept research revealing that most of the people involved in the Riots weren’t actually part of a gang. In fact, the research showed that it was neither gang-led nor gang-organised.
Most people have never heard of this database, including many of those involved in criminal justice work. However, research has finally been published which has exposed The Matrix for what it is. Amnesty International published their report in May 2018: ‘Trapped in the Matrix: Secrecy, Stigma, and Bias in the Met’s Gang Database’.
How do you find yourself on The Matrix?
The report explains that there is a very low threshold for putting a person on the list.
Only two pieces of so-called “verifiable intelligence” are required to add someone to the list – against their wishes and without their knowledge.
Not only is there no clear guidance or criteria as to what exactly counts as “verifiable intelligence”, it differs in each borough, based on interpretation by individual officers and Gang Units.
Amnesty reports that the police drew on a “wide range of corroborated and uncorroborated intelligence” [2], stating that past offences were taken into account, alongside “intelligence” about a person’s friends/associations and where they lived. Questions that raised suspicions for the police included:
- Was the person stopped and searched with someone else on The Matrix?
- Did vehicle number plate records show him traveling with other so-called ‘gang nominals’?
- Who was in the person’s peer group?
- What were their family relationships?
The police are even going as far as monitoring young people’s behaviour on social media to determine gang affiliations.
The simple act of sharing a YouTube video can be used to add someone to the list: with grime music videos, featuring gang names and signs, being considered particular indicators for likely gang activity. Amnesty’s research has revealed that the police are even setting up fake social media profiles to monitor people they view as possible gang members. That practice may in some instances have been in breach of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA). Researchers were told that at least on one occasion, no RIPA warrant was obtained before undercover operations were carried out. One official even stated that they thought no such warrant was required because the fake profile created was linked to a council modem.
Who is on The Matrix?
The Amnesty report sets out that The Matrix lists people who are suspected of being in a gang as “gang nominals” and ranks them according to how likely they are to commit “violence”, with rankings: ‘red’ – the highest, amber and ‘green’ -indicating a ‘threat’ level of zero. In October 2017, the Met reported that 3,806 people were on The Matrix. Less than 5% were in the ‘red’ category, with a huge majority- 64% – listed as ‘green’.
The Amnesty report reveals that in July 2016, of the people listed on The Matrix:
- 99% were male
- 80% were between the ages of 12 and 24
- 15% were minors (the youngest just 12)
- 87% were from Black, Asian, minority ethnic (BAME) backgrounds
- 78% were black
The research also shows that:
- 75% of people listed had been victims of violence themselves
- 35% had never committed any serious offences
What happens to you once you are on The Matrix?
The police can share this information about you with other agencies such as the Home Office, the DWP, councils/housing associations, schools/colleges, and of course, the criminal justice system. A ‘red flag’ next to your name follows you as you move house, change school, apply to go to college, or try to find work.
Just a couple of examples give you an idea of how this operates:
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A 17 year old young man recently applied to go to a NE London college and was told he could not, as his name was on The Matrix.
- A South-London man in his mid-20s found out his name was on The Matrix due to his ‘association’ with others from his area known for serious crime, despite the fact he did not have any significant convictions, nor had he been involved in any alleged ‘gang-related crime’.
What, in fact, is all this about?
The Matrix basically serves to gather personal information on you, particularly if you are a young black man. The Amnesty report indicates that the concept of a ‘gang’ is “vague, ill-defined and based on racialised notions” [3].
It conflates the notion of ‘gang’ membership with serious youth violence and in particular, violence allegedly perpetuated by young black men.
But the figures do not add up and the huge disparity between them underlines the fundamentally racist basis of The Matrix:
- 78% of people on The Matrix are black
- 72% of those identified as responsible for ‘gang-flagged violence’ are black
But these numbers are completely disproportionate to the percentage of young black people identified in the Met’s own data as responsible for serious youth violence in London – only 27%.
The Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime (MOPAC) also found that in London more than 80% of all knife-crime incidents, in which a victim under the age of 25 was injured, were deemed not to be gang-related.
The Matrix is fundamentally just another means of disproportionately profiling black men and boys as gang members.
It reflects the historic and current pattern of over-policing of the black community.
Can anything be done about The Matrix?
Amnesty made a series of recommendations to the Met, MOPAC, the Home Office Select Committee(HO) and others to, among other things, review and publicly investigate The Matrix fully and dismantle it unless it could be brought into line with human rights law.
MOPAC has been reviewing The Matrix for months but their report with conclusions/recommendations is still not out and it’s not clear when this will be released.
There is serious concern that the sharing of information from The Matrix to other agencies is in breach of privacy/data laws.
This problem is currently being looked at by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO); the outcome of this review will be made public soon.
Stopwatch – a coalition which works to research and to promote fair, effective and accountable policing – published a report recently ‘Being Matrixed: The (Over) Policing of Gang Suspects in London’. Stopwatch’s report calls for the immediate abolition of The Matrix and makes demands of the Met, MOPAC, the HO, the ICO and the Police Chief’s National Council to act.
Several lawyers are looking into legal challenges for those of you who have found out you are on The Matrix.
But so much more has yet to be done. People have to know about The Matrix. They have to understand what’s going on behind their backs and organise to put a stop to it.
[1] http://news.met.police.uk/news/mps-response-to-amnesty-report-into-gang-matrix-305755
[2]https://www.amnesty.org.uk/files/reports/Trapped%20in%20the%20Matrix%20Amnesty%20report.pdf
[3] https://www.amnesty.org.uk/press-releases/met-police-using-racially-discriminatory-gangs-matrix-database
Jude Lanchin is a Senior Solicitor at Bindmans, with nearly 25 years experience in criminal defence.
She particularly specialises in so-called ‘street crime’ involving allegations of serious violence, guns, drugs and so on, and in working with young people. She has also presented training courses on youth justice, speaks at conferences, has run sessions in schools and exclusion projects and provides advice to various media projects.
(Photograph: Met Police)
