Metropolitan police documents say the force has been collecting “children’s personal data” from social media sites as part of a project to carry out “profiling on a large scale”.
The Met says the scheme, known as Project Alpha, helps fight serious violence, with the intelligence gathered identifying offenders and securing the removal of videos glorifying stabbings and shootings from platforms such as YouTube.
The unit, comprising more than 30 staff and launched in 2019 with Home Office funding, scours social media sites looking at drill music videos and other content.
A Met document, seen by the Guardian, says the project “will carry out profiling on a large scale”, with males aged 15 to 21 a focus of the project. After questioning, the force said both of these were a mistake.
Met blunders over an earlier anti-gangs database helped fuel concerns about Project Alpha, the privacy of children, and police focusing on young black children for signs of criminality.
Stafford Scott, a veteran community campaigner, said he feared the project was part of a continued assault on young black people. “Young people use social media to magnify their lived experience. It is a tool for projection, you can’t rely on it for detection,” he said. “It is racially motivated, racially driven and involves racial stereotypes.”
The Met says it scoured the scheme for signs of racial bias in an equalities impact assessment and found none.
Project Alpha started in June 2019 and is supported by the Home Office, which has provided almost £5m. While heavily redacted, the new document dated December 2020 provides fresh details.
It is a data protection impact assessment and comprises questions examining compliance with data protection laws and principles, and answers from those running the scheme. It was first obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request from the investigative organisation Point Source.
The document says males aged 15 to 21 will be targeted and promises not to share information about young people without a “compelling” reason.
Asked “will there be systematic monitoring or profiling on a large scale, or in a public place?”, the response is “yes” but the rest of the answer is mostly blanked out.
Asked “will the project carry out profiling on a large scale?”, the box for “yes” was ticked by the Met. The answer continues: “The meaning of large scale is not defined in the Data Protection Act 2018. But this may include activities such as using existing data to identify [an] individual for operational purposes(s) or review.”
Asked whether the project will “process children’s personal data for profiling or automated decision making … or for marketing purposes …”, the police reply “yes” and add: “The project is focused on reducing serious youth violence and many of those involving directly or indirectly are under the age of 18.” A full name and gang affiliation is to be recorded, it says.
In its first statement to the Guardian about the document, the Met said: “The inclusion of the demographic 15-21 year[s] old was an error. As we do not ‘profile on a large scale’ we cannot provide any demographic of individuals who are involved in uploading harmful content online. We do not seek to identify personal information about those posting the videos and as such we hold limited personal data (predominantly just the videos themselves).”
Asked why officers had ticked “yes” to a box asking if the project would “carry out profiling on a large scale”, the Met added: “The checking of the yes box at point 10 of this early response is incorrect.”
The force declined to give the number or ages of those Alpha looks at, or broad criteria such as whether suspicion about an individual is needed.
The document says the scheme has been designed to “combine, compare, or match data from multiple sources” and uses new technologies or the “novel use of existing technologies”.
It says gangs are responsible for four out of 10 non-domestic and terrorist killings, six out of 10 shootings and one in five non-domestic stabbings where the victim is aged 25 or under.
In the document, police justify their decision not to tell young people they are “subject to [the] interest of Project Alpha as this may impact on their behaviour and result in more offending”.
Trust in the Met was damaged after the information commissioner criticised it for its gangs matrix and issued an enforcement notice in 2018. The matrix, listing alleged gang members and their risk of committing violence or being a victim, was branded racist by Amnesty International and after pressure the Met said it had changed it.
Emmanuelle Andrews of the human rights group Liberty said: “This surveillance and monitoring of young people and children is deeply worrying, impacting their right to express themselves and to participate in friendship and community networks. It can have serious consequences for their futures, such as their ability to access housing, education and work.
“Police monitoring of the kind done by the Met under Project Alpha and the gangs matrix doesn’t tackle the causes of serious violence – it only serves to criminalise and harass young people, in particular young black men and boys.”
In an interview with the College of Policing, the head of Project Alpha, PC Michael Railton, hailed its benefits. “Having decoded the hyper-local context of the lyrics, hand gestures and symbolism of the visual content used by aspiring rappers, we have identified threats and proactively intervened to prevent escalation of violence,” he said.
The Met told the information commissioner that Alpha helped identify intelligence about violence gleaned from social media and of people committing offences as well as tracing wanted offenders: “The team collect ‘open source’ information that is information gathered from social media accounts (private and open), websites and mainstream media. They also collect post-event information, such as where gang-related incidents have occurred and relevant online commentary.
“The project to date has brought to light threats and risk that would otherwise not have been identified through other policing methods.”
