We don’t need to tell you that Black Lives Matter and #DefundThePolice had their moment in 2020. Now more than ever, we as activists are in the hot seat. The heat is on to hold our nation’s justice systems accountable. This moment calls upon us and challenges us; we must work tooth-and-nail to nip harmful and unjust police policies in the bud and demand more collective, community-centered approaches to crime.
This requires us to investigate the currently-existing systems in our cities, counties and states that perpetuate racial injustice, many of which have flown under the radar, undetected and unchallenged, for years. At The Activated People, we take this challenge seriously.
The Northern Virginia Regional Gask Task Force is one such case. In The Activated People’s (TAP) home state, the Task Force was formed in 2003 as a coalition of city and county governments to intervene with local gangs and gather data (read: surveil and incarcerate more young men of color). Carrying out such a broadly-defined task, described vaguely on their website as “impact gang activity in North Virginia”, necessitates an expanded surveillance machine. The insidious tactic of merging public data with police surveillance technology to expand the carceral state is nothing new.
Police surveillance gangnetThe database in question, GangNet has been operating for 17 years. Since 2003, GangNet has partnered with dozens of police agencies in cities across the country to share information on potential crime suspects, ostensibly to help cops solve crimes. But the database is woefully inaccurate and allows for gross discretionary powers on the part of law enforcement. Police officers can enter individuals into the system based on tenuous and arbitrary criteria; wearing “cheap or expensive” jewelry or “loose shirts” are considered acceptable criteria to be listed as a gang member. This gives officers the discretion to choose who to send down the prison pipeline, further reinforcing racial biases in the criminal justice system.
This means that many individuals, mostly young Brown and Black men, are being surveilled, targeted, charged for crimes, and incarcerated because an officer who lurked in their neighborhood decided they looked suspicious, for living in the “wrong” neighborhood, associating with the “wrong” people, or even wearing the “wrong” clothes. Children as young as 11 or 12 years old are thus shuffled on a fast track into the prison pipeline. The GangNet database, and the heavy-handed surveillance required to uphold it, also trigger deportation proceedings since ICE agents have access to the database.
In response to these injustices in TAP’s home base, Founder and President Kofi Annan sent a letter to the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors urging them to withdraw their participation from the Regional Gang Task Force unless more stringent criteria are adopted.
