The gangs matrix has trapped Britain’s young black men in a feedback loop of bad policing – and that’s bad for everyone

“The violence we have seen over the last five days is the symptom of something very deeply wrong with our society,” said the then home secretary Theresa May in the wake of the 2011 London riots. In the speech to the House of Commons, she promised that the government would do more to tackle gang culture. Eight million would be spent in London, Greater Manchester and the West Midlands to address the problems that led to the worst disturbances the UK had seen since Brixton in 1995. Over 3,000 arrests were subsequently made, in a highly publicised, highly politicised response.

What failed to make the final cut of her speech was that police forces in these areas would also begin developing an extensive database of individuals suspected of involvement in gang activity. The database, known as the “gangs matrix”, contains thousands of profiles of predominantly young black men and boys – and I say boys, since children as young as 12 are known to have been “matrixed” – who are given an automated green, amber or red violence ranking based on various input data.

Its existence is shrouded in secrecy: how the gangs matrix works hasn’t ever been properly explained, but what’s clear is that you do not have to have ever actually been involved with violent crime in order to end up on it.

On Friday, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) concluded a year-long investigation into the London gangs matrix and issued an enforcement notice to Cressida Dick, commissioner of the Metropolitan Police service. For those not wishing to put themselves through the ordeal of reading it, I’ll provide the abridged version: the police are doing a lot of dodgy stuff with data. Feel like you’ve heard this one before?

Through the use of the gangs matrix in its current form, the Met have been committing a vast array of privacy law violations. Transgressions include failing to remove people from the list who are no longer deemed a risk, failing to encrypt the data contained on it, and unlawful sharing of the information with third parties.

The enforcement notice reads like a How Not to Police in the Digital Age Dummies Guide. Some of these issues are so rudimentary that it beggars belief. This, by the police force that was described by its head this week as being founded on the notion of policing by consent and protecting people’s rights.

A report published by campaign group StopWatch made clear the profound damage that “being matrixed” can have on individuals. Young, predominantly black men, are being turned away from job interviews, excluded from schools, barred from libraries. Many of them have never been arrested, but are guilty of being born on the wrong estate or being friends with the wrong people.

The stakes are so high, yet the errors are so rookie: Not preventing localised copies of the database. Not revoking access to the database after staff reassignment. These are bread-and-butter concepts for anybody with even the slightest awareness of how to build robust information systems, which means that the Met are either knowingly making these mistakes, or outright incompetent.

But this kind of cavalier approach to privacy is nothing we haven’t heard before when it comes to policing, particularly in the context of data-driven forms of intelligence gathering. And it isn’t just bad for the individuals, it’s also bad for the police.

Not only does unsecured information about possible gang members risk fuelling violence in the event of a data breach, in a broader sense it does absolutely nothing to repair the already-fractious ties between the police and the communities they are supposed to protect. Commissioner Dick bemoans the failure of the law to keep pace with technology, but that does not explain the total technological ineptitude they have exhibited.

There is not one single factor to blame for the ham-fistedness that has characterised approaches to policing in this area – it’s a confluence of issues. But there is certainly a problematic feedback loop that lives at the heart of it. It begins with narratives about liberty and security, and the need to compromise on the former in order to obtain the latter – a false dichotomy for the most part, but one which has nonetheless garnered a degree of acceptance in public discourse. Successive home secretaries have done a good job of bludgeoning us with incessant sound bites to this effect so as to dull the senses to the expansion of unchecked and unbalanced police powers.

You get the feeling this may have given rise to an apathy, a defeatism. Lots of people actively accept the erroneous liberty-security trade off, but even those who don’t, are beginning to begrudgingly tolerate it. “I’d rather they didn’t do this but...that ship has sailed.” A similar phenomenon has long been observed in the context of online privacy – the so-called Privacy Paradox – and recent research has highlighted the contribution of “privacy cynicism” to this attitudinal shift.

It is a “resigned neglect”, which acts as a cognitive coping mechanism in the face of threats to rights. And that is what we are seeing here.

Acquiescence to this creeping abridgement of rights is likely to be self-perpetuating. There is a fine line between resigned neglect and implied consent – a fine line that, no doubt, the government and the police choose to interpret in the way which best serves them. “I’d rather you didn’t but I know you will anyway” soon becomes “this is exactly what the public expects us to do be doing!” The linguistic jump between these two propositions is ostensibly small but ethically important. Yet, as we become increasingly numb to it, it only worsens.

The more we are policed, the less we feel able to object, the more we are policed.

Popular perceptions of policing are so pessimistic that nothing is particularly surprising to us anymore. But this cannot be taken as carte blanche. The gangs matrix may not directly affect all of us – but for those listed on it, it further entrenches historical patterns of social and institutional estrangement. This is a profoundly bad thing for everyone. There is a collective duty to engage and demand transparency from those tasked with keeping us safe – it is the only way to break out of the feedback loop in which we are currently trapped.