Fears over police plan to ‘profile’ schoolchildren
Force may use analytics to identify violent young offenders
WEST Midlands Police is considering using crime data to ‘profile’ pupils and their schools – sparking concerns from a leading children’s privacy campaign group.
The force is looking at using its own analytics to identify ‘‘violent young offenders’’ in specific catchment areas in Birmingham and across the region.
Officers from its Violence Reduction Unit (VRU) would then work with individual schools to educate wayward pupils about the life-damaging consequences of offending.
The controversial plans have been outlined in a report to West Midlands Police’s Ethics Committee, titled ‘Analysis of School Catchment Areas and Violence’.
But Jen Persson, from campaign group Defend Digital Me, said: “Labelling children with X behavioural profile at a point in time which may no longer be valid tomorrow, and acting on it, can have lasting and damaging effects on young people still developing into adulthood.”
The Ethics Committee has now asked for more information after members said the proposals raised ‘‘some very significant issues’’ about the profiling of children and ‘‘stigmatising’’ of schools.
The report said: “The purpose of this project is to undertake exploratory analysis of data held within West Midlands Police systems relating to school-aged violent offenders and the offences they commit in order to inform the geographical focus of the VRU’s prevention activity in schools.
“The analysis has been requested to provide an evidence base to aid strategic decisions about the prioritisation of investment from the Home Office and the Office of Police and Crime Commissioner in order to reduce violence in the West Midlands.
“Currently, the VRU uses open
source and some education data to prioritise which schools to focus its activities in. This exploratory analysis of police data is intended to complement this work by identifying the key locations for violent offending involving school-aged children and to understand where violent young offenders live and attend school.”
It added: “Violence of all types is high compared to other parts of the country and some kinds, such as knife crime, are showing worryingly steep increases in recent years.
“In 2019, the West Midlands experienced the biggest annual increase in knife crime of any area in England – up 17 per cent on 2018.”
Birmingham has seen outbreaks of violence by school-aged youths in recent years.
In March last year police released CCTV footage in a bid to trace youths involved in the knifing of a teen in Birmingham.
Officers were called to Newhall
Street outside the Central Academy school where a 15-year-old boy had been stabbed with a machete.
The school was put in lockdown as the victim was taken to hospital but his injuries were not serious. The incident took place at around 3.10pm on Wednesday, March 11.
Three teenage boys were arrested on suspicion of assault and later released without charge.
The school catchment report noted “the prevalence of violence involving or affecting children is situated within schools. Whilst violent hotspots may occur in other locations, the intervention activity needs to be located where they attend school. Therefore this analysis aims to complement the projects forecasting long-term violence and knife crime by helping the VRU to identify the schools which educate more children who are known to come from locations which suffer higher than average levels of violence.”