This proposal builds upon an existing collaboration between UNJUST CIC, The 4Front Project, and Tottenham Rights (‘Erase the Database’). Established in 2022, this project foregrounds racially marginalised groups and communities to surface the harms of data-driven and automated policing, informing community-led strategies and solutions.
Community-led consultations and conversations: Our research discussions and conversations will be led by the communities and groups we are working with. This approach is essential to ensure that the ‘reimagining’ of justice that we are proposing comes directly from within the communities and groups impacted, and that they themselves have complete agency on this.
We will conduct an initial mapping exercise of relevant databases and data-based systems used by police and other law enforcement and criminal justice authorities in relation to racist ‘gangs’ policing, surveillance and profiling.
There will be interviews, workshops and discussion groups with young people and communities impacted by these AI, automated and data-based systems, as well as frontline practitioners and relevant local officials, such as local councillors.
A key framing of our community engagement will be around what justice could look like outside of the criminal legal system.
Because this project will be co-created with those at the sharpest end of police tech harms, the way in which our findings are shared will be decided in collaboration with participants. A key aim is to galvanise public support and mobilise change in the systems that are disproportionately harmful to racialised communities. We will facilitate space for creative thinking about how the findings can be shared in a way that reaches beyond academia and in a way that speaks to young people directly affected by police tech. Ultimately, this will be decided with young people, communities and within the framework of the project itself.
