Following the 2011 London uprisings in response to the police killing of Mark Duggan, the Met introduced the GVM. Presented as a sophisticated database of intelligence on ‘gangs’ and those involved in gang-related violence, in reality it was nothing more than a spreadsheet of names, often collated randomly on the basis of unreliable information.

Although the Met always claimed that the GVM was a tool aimed at preventing ‘serious youth violence’, it was used as a weapon to criminalise young people, particularly Black boys and men. At any given time, around 79 per cent of people on it were Black and around 87 per cent were from racialised communities.1Gangs Matrix figures – headlines 2021/2022 Q2, Metropolitan Police. The GVM deemed people guilty by association and young people were labelled as gang members based on their friendships and connections, often leading to heightened negative police attention.

The criteria for inclusion on the GVM were vague – it apparently required two pieces of ‘verifiable intelligence’, with no clear guidelines on what this evidence should be.2Supplementary written evidence submitted by the Metropolitan Police Service (MPR0064): Gangs Violence Matrix (GVM) session 9 July 2019, Home Affairs Committee, 4 September 2019, para 6.14. Various government departments and local agencies (including the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), local authorities and housing associations) were consequently labelling people as gang members – some even created their own databases. As a result, people who had never been involved in crime found themselves placed on the GVM. Even being a victim of a crime that the police perceived to be ‘gang-related’ could lead to inclusion on the database.

In January 2021, Awate Suleiman and UNJUST brought a legal challenge against the Met over the discriminatory use of the GVM, with the help of the human rights organisation Liberty. In November 2022, just days before the case was due to be heard in court, the Met settled the claim. Though it still refused to admit that the GVM was racially discriminatory, it conceded that it breached article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which protects individuals’ right to respect for their private and family life, their home and correspondence.

The legal challenge has had a significant and positive impact. As a direct result of this legal action – which built on the 2018 report by Amnesty International exposing the workings of the GVM,3Trapped in the Matrix: secrecy, stigma, and bias in the Met’s gangs database, Amnesty International, May 2018. as well as long-running campaigns and other legal challenges – thousands of people were removed from the database. The Met was also required to notify all third parties and partner agencies that those people had been removed.

As part of the settlement terms, in response to a subject access request from someone who had been removed from the GVM, the police are now obliged to confirm whether someone’s name had been on it, unless one of the statutory exemptions under the Data Protection Act (DPA) 2018 applies. The schedule to the consent order settling the claim stated: ‘It is only likely to be strictly necessary to withhold that information, in order to protect an intelligence source and/or to avoid a revelatory effect which potentially could confirm the source of the intelligence.’

For those not removed from the GVM, the police were still required to notify anyone who made a subject access request whether they were on it, unless one of the statutory exemptions applied. Anyone told they were on the GVM could also find out what data about them had been shared and what action had been taken as a result, unless one of the statutory exemptions applied. This still applies if someone makes a subject access request now, even though the GVM has been dismantled.

In cases where the Met refuses to say whether someone was on the GVM, individuals must be notified of their right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) and the police are required to provide the ICO with their reasons for non-disclosure for consideration on a case-by-case basis, rather than relying on the general exemption relating to law enforcement.

These parts of the settlement terms, hard fought for by the claimants, were important because of the way the GVM was operating: thousands of people were on it and were never notified, and they could not get past the first hurdle of finding out if they were on it because, when they asked, the Met had a blanket policy of replying ‘neither confirm nor deny’. The Met relied on the law enforcement general exemption under the DPA 2018 to block any attempt to challenge that in individual cases. Without knowing whether they were on the GVM, individuals had no way of knowing whether their data had been shared with partner agencies or what action had been taken against them as a result.

The GVM has effectively been replaced with a Violence Harm Assessment tool (VHA), which is beyond the scope and focus of this article but more information is available on the Met’s website. While the VHA adopts a more systematic and time-limited approach to inclusion (based on scoring of various offences), and information on it is not shared with any partner agencies, it remains racially discriminatory – 67 per cent of people on the VHA are Black4Violence Harm Assessment figures – headlines 13/05/2024, Metropolitan Police. – and the Met has been unable to explain why this is, nor has it proposed any way in which it intends to address the problem.

Initially, the Met proposed to delete all the information held on the GVM within three months of it being dismantled, so by 13 May 2024. This meant that anyone trying to find out whether they had ever been on the GVM, and whether their data was shared, had a very limited time in which to do so. UNJUST and Liberty pushed back on this, and the Met agreed to keep the data for a year: it will now be destroyed on 13 February 2025.

It is therefore crucial that legal representatives of anyone who thinks they may have been on the GVM encourage their clients to make a subject access request in good time: first, to find out if they were on it; and, second, to find out how their data was used and what action was taken as a result.

This is not limited to criminal practitioners, as we are aware of people being affected in other ways, including in terms of their housing, their education, their benefits, immigration matters and even their driving licence:

It is impossible to work out what happened to individuals and how their data was used without first finding out if they were on the GVM. At the same time, a subject access request (see below) should include questions about how the person’s data was shared, with whom, and what action was taken against them.

Additionally, anyone included on the GVM is likely to have a claim for a breach of the Human Rights Act 1998. The Met conceded in the judicial review proceedings that:

More information on the ongoing campaign can be found at Erase the Database, including resources and details of how to make a subject access request. More information on subject access requests is also available on the Liberty website.