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Abstract

This article examines the entanglement of British criminology and undercover policing (‘Spycops’) in the UK government's response to racism in 1981. The article discusses how criminology took a strategic role within the state's ‘law and order’ information infrastructure by analysing archival materials related to a Home Office criminological study from that same year. This infrastructure involved an explicit logistical sensibility for gathering and analysing evidence, intelligence, and data about race and racism for a ‘law and order’ agenda focused on policing public order and ‘subversion’. It examines how two senior Home Office officials treated the gathering and utilisation of informational resources produced by criminologists and the Metropolitan Police Special Branch for tactical operations and perception management strategies that targeted racism and anti-racist groups as threats to public order. Reflecting on recent scholarship about security practices enabled by Big Data and machine learning, the article argues for greater attention on criminology and human sciences’ strategic and unnoticed involvement in designing and servicing contemporary ‘law and order’ informational infrastructures.

Keywords

British criminology information infrastructures logistics racism undercover policing

To some extent, a lack of understanding of the practical and legal limitations on action by the police and other authorities has helped to form the minority communities’ attitudes. They interpret the apparent inadequacies of existing laws to deal with racist activity, as indications of acceptance by authority of institutionalised racialism in society.

Home Office (1981: 36)

The ethnic communities in the UK are very vulnerable to subversive penetration and exploitation because of the disadvantaged and threatened position in which immigrants and particularly their British-born descendants perceive themselves to be and which leads them to conclude that racism is inherent in British society.

Metropolitan Police Special Branch, ‘Box 500’ report from 1981

Introduction

This article explores the involvement of criminology in the UK government's response to racism in 1981. It aims to unpick some of criminology's entanglements with undercover policing to understand how human scientists within government – in this case, criminologists – have been members of ‘law and order’ information infrastructures. Alongside criminologists, we can find security services, policy officials, and undercover police as fellow members of such infrastructures. However, to put it plainly, criminologists working outside of government are not ordinarily granted membership. As a result, criminologists within government might have more in common with the security and intelligence community than the academic criminological community. In this sense, both groups, criminologists within government and undercover police, can be seen as members of an infrastructure. This infrastructure participated in the supply of information for government action. It operated alongside a network of state officials who used criminological work and secret intelligence to respond to political and criminal events. Institutional identities bestow entitlements within these infrastructures. Professional groups, members of the public, stakeholders, and policy officials have different membership rights to information within these infrastructures, resulting in mechanisms and practices of control (Koopman, 2019; Trace, 2007).

This article uses one historical episode to think through issues of membership, categories, and the status of social science within government, focusing on how civil servants within the UK Home Office made use of criminological research to formulate a governmental and policing response to a crisis around ‘racialist attacks’ in 1981. At the same time, these same officials also commissioned secret intelligence reports produced by undercover police (so-called ‘Spycops’) to understand the dangers posed by anti-racist activists, who, in the view of these officials, were opportunistically involved in subversive activities among ethnic minority communities. As seen in the two epigraphs above, these criminological and security service reports on racial attacks overlooked the role of the ‘radical right’ by focusing on how racial minorities’ lacked understanding and were vulnerable to subversion (Farrell and Gray, 2024). Furthermore, this means engaging in debates on the necessity to decolonise criminology by identifying its post-imperial entanglements in the policing of urban space (Axster et al., 2021; Dimou, 2021; Mignolo, 2021), building on the genealogical inquiries, of Michel Foucault (2016), David Garland (1992), and others (cf. Valverde, 2009), on criminology's historical emergence as a utilitarian social scientific discourse.¹ However, rather than solely focusing on the history of racial categories, the article's analysis of this episode contributes a novel understanding of the administrative intersection between criminology and undercover policing (Evans and Lewis, 2013; Schlembach, 2024), the value of criminological research to policymaking for what Back and others (2022) have recently referred to as the ‘unfinished politics of race’. The article thus addresses how racial categories, both racism and anti-racism, were treated as an information problem within the Home Office during the early 1980s, where government officials calculated race through relative scales, absolute terms, and differentiation between racial groups.

Criminologists within government and other human sciences have long been administratively linked to political and policy priorities, with the first social science research unit set up in the Home Office during the late 1950s (Molina, 2023). Elsewhere, scholars have focused on the history of criminology within government as a distinct sub-discipline of the social sciences: official or administrative criminology (Ágoas, 2021; Hope, 2011; Hough, 2014; Mayhew, 2016). As practised within the UK Home Office, ‘administrative criminology’ has been characterised as ‘a-theoretical empiricism’, naively focused on understanding statistical patterns of criminal behaviour for crime control purposes (for a fuller discussion of debates related to ‘administrative criminology’, see Molina, 2023, 2024). However, in this article, I propose that the history of human sciences might be reframed by inquiring into the manner in which criminology and other human sciences have also been a constituent part of state-coordinated information infrastructures. These infrastructures run on routine practices to manage the logistical requirements of circulating documents and other units of information, along with a sensibility for how to convene meetings, rehearse strategies, and consult other members on the contents of these documents and dissemination strategies. This is an infrastructure running of codes to produce poetical, political, secretive, and logistical qualities (Cole Young, 2021; Larkin, 2013; Verdery, 2018).

This article theorises this infrastructure as part of a ‘law and order’ agenda, characterised by penal populism, authoritarianism, and political efforts to ‘talk tough’ about crime (Hall, 2017). This article approaches how the history of the human sciences can be found in criminologists’ involvement in providing resources for, among other tasks, managing public order and responding to the ‘Inner City Riots’ of the 1970s and 1980s (Brewer et al., 1996; Channing, 2015; Peplow, 2019). In this article, I use law and order as a place-holder term to describe a political agenda centring around right-wing authoritarianism, which holds that liberals, left-wing groups, ethnic minorities, and ‘inner cities’ should be tackled with strong policing and law enforcement responses.² This political agenda is anxiously preoccupied with the circulation of information through media networks (Hall et al., 2017). In a broad sense, the two Home Office officials focused on in this article perceived the policy problem as concerning how to ‘tackle the inner cities’ (MacGregor and Pimlott, 1990; Saumarez Smith, 2016, 2020). In developing the notion of information infrastructures to understand the history of the human sciences, this article argues that criminology has long been a strategically important provider of resources for state agencies when undertaking logistical operations and administering post-imperial criminal justice (Go, 2023).

Tinker, Tailor, Statistician, Spycop: Membership within infrastructures

Before turning to this episode, it should be pointed out that the human sciences have been intimately involved with producing racial knowledge (Steinmetz, 2013, 2022).³ Elsewhere, scholars have examined ethnoracial categories and the history of racial knowledge production within the state, social sciences, and statistics (Backhouse and Fontaine, 2010; Goldberg, 1993; Mullaney, 2011; Rodríguez-Muñiz, 2019). In the British context, the meaningfulness and relevance of racial categories were a matter of intense debate within statistical communities during the 1970s and early 1980s, partly in response to plans initiated by the Office of Population Statistics and Surveys to introduce the first census question about ethnicity in 1981 (Bulmer, 1986; Thatcher, 1984). During the same year, popular movements, race equality activists, and civil society actors involved in public campaigns drew government attention to the impacts of racism and the lack of a policing response to right-wing violence (Bowling, 1999; Waters, 2018). In response to this crisis, the home secretary announced an internal inquiry into the scale of racist attacks to be undertaken by criminologists within the Home Office Research Unit (HORU). This decision marked the first of many subsequent public investigations and research exercises undertaken by the Home Office on crime and racism before The Inquiry Into the Matters Arising From the Death of Stephen Lawrence (the ‘Macpherson Inquiry’) in 1997 (Molina, 2024). From 1981, survey researchers and criminologists within the Home Office became closely involved with designing research projects and policing strategies for rethinking the role of race and racism within the criminal justice system (Back et al., 2022; Downes and Newburn, 2023; Rock, 2019; Smith and Marmo, 2014).

This article zooms into one focused set of events to explore the infrastructural and routine work practices through which this criminological work was accomplished (Fine, 2021; Lynch, 2022; Macbeth, 2014; Mair, 2021). In my reading of this history, this infrastructure comprised bureaucratic routines, physical files, lines of seniority, secrecy, budgets, and methods for decision making and distributing requests for information (Kaufmann, 2023). The following account is based on records in the National Archives (TNA) and released through the ongoing Undercover Policing Inquiry (UCPI).⁴ It traces the work of two Home Office officials on racial attacks. Both these officials, referred to throughout the article as ‘Mr A.’ (head of the F4 Police Department within the Home Office from 1979 to 1983) and ‘Mr B.’ (assistant undersecretary of state and the secretary for the Official Committee on Subversion at Home in 1980), coordinated governmental action with commissioning and using information from Home Office statisticians and undercover police officers within the Special Demonstration Squad.⁵ Subsequent sections unpick some of the conceptual issues associated with criminological studies of race and racism in the context of recent scholarship on criminological knowledge production and the intelligence services within the British state. The article begins by narrating the origins of a criminological exercise with police forces and ethnic minority community leaders into the policing response to racist attacks, then by examining the origins of a request for a security service assessment of the activities of anti-racist groups. The last section reflects on practices to reinforce external boundaries to this infrastructure before concluding with reflections on this episode for understanding emergent ‘law and order’ informational infrastructures and the involvement of human sciences within government.

An infrastructural exercise

To examine how this information infrastructure treated racist attacks as an informational problem, I turn to the activities of Home Office officials and their response to campaigns by the Joint Committee Against Racialism (JCAR), a cross-party pressure group made up of Labour, Conservative, and Liberal Party members formed in 1978 in opposition to the National Front, as well as minority ethnic and religious organisations.⁶ This section begins to describe how Home Office officials set out to prepare for an investigation into racist attacks, resulting in the publication of its report, Racist Attacks: A Home Office Study (Home Office, 1981). These activities were initially prompted by JCAR presenting a dossier of 1000 racist attacks to the Home Office in February 1981. The dossier contained details about the involvement of fascist groups in these attacks, supported by evidence that Home Office officials were minded to assess. For the purpose of this article, we may reflect that this exercise was ‘justified’ and that such claims’ accuracy and reliability needed to be assessed.⁷ However, following Ben Bowling (1996, 1999), this episode, and officials’ work on addressing it, should be seen in the broader context of an extended history in the politics of racism. These events reflect broader trends of an increasingly confident victims’ movement and the new politics of race and policing (Elliott-Cooper, 2021). To give one example: two years prior, the death of Blair Peach, an anti-racist activist at a National Front meeting, led the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, to express concerns to her home secretary and request that she be kept informed on developments (UCPI Document 105). And, by 1981, officials continued to exchange letters that emphasised the potential reputational damage caused to the government and the police by JCAR's claims about the growing number of racist attacks. These officials had concerns about its impacts on community relations, police recruitment, and ethnic minority groups’ perceptions of policing.

And, when the Home Office received the JCAR dossier, they were not minded to take the contents of this dossier at face value. Home Office officials, namely the deputy undersecretary of state, advised that the appropriate course of action would be to verify these accounts by obtaining ‘precise detail about the alleged incidents so that they can accurately and readily be identified’ (TNA, HO 324/441). This was, it was noted, out of a concern with not ‘rushing’ into action. As this deputy wrote,
I would repeat my comment to you that if we rush into things to try and get any confirmation or otherwise in the provinces about the content of the JCAR submission to the Home Secretary, we shall probably get a number of negative responses which if proved not to be accurate will provoke considerable later criticism. (TNA, HO 324/441)

Shortly after, the home secretary publicly announced that the government would commission a research study investigating racist attacks. At a meeting later in February, Home Office officials, including Mr A., and representatives from the police and security services, discussed their preferred course of action. No HORU researchers were present at the meeting. The meeting notes reflect that an agreement had been reached to undertake a ‘study’. The minutes go on to describe the meeting's principal point of focus:
The scope of the study as originally envisaged had been limited to an examination of the activities of extreme right-wing groups in encouraging or organising racialist attacks. However, it had soon become apparent that a wider exercise was necessary to establish the relative scale of the problem, and to view it in the context of all criminal behaviour involving differing racial groups. (TNA, HO 324/441)

While focusing on issues of relative scale, all criminal behaviour, and differing racial groups, and shifting attention from extreme right-wing groups, Home Office officials also identified additional lines of inquiry that should be added to the study's scope, including the impact on Jewish communities, right-wing activities at football grounds, pop concerts, and schools (TNA, HO 325/441).⁸ Taking these starting points for the Home Office's interest in racist attacks, the following sections examine the actions of two officials taken to gather, coordinate, and disseminate information, all while coordinating between criminologists and the Metropolitan Police Special Branch (MPSB).

‘The objective is to show the Government's concern.…’

In formulating a plan for how to respond to high-profile campaigns about racist attacks, Home Office officials devised a strategy that aimed to use information resources to influence critical groups, including the police, ethnic minority groups, and the press. The preparation of ‘tactical resources’ by criminologists, as Peplow (2018) has described elsewhere, echoes the Home Office's usual refrain about gathering ‘precise detail’ about the nature and scale of public order disturbances and public controversies.⁹ Home Office officials were initially concerned with examining the accuracy of the claims made by JCAR about the scale of racial attacks. Along with initial preoccupation with questions of quantitative scale, Home Office officials were also preoccupied with identifying the likely cause of both racist attacks and the campaigns about these attacks. In the archival records, it seems that Home Office officials shifted their attention away from solely focusing on racism perpetrated by right-wing groups towards subversion led by left-wing groups.¹⁰ As a result, these officials became preoccupied with the activities of anti-racist activists, identifying these groups as subversive influences.

The two officials discussed in this article, ‘Mr A.’ and ‘Mr B.’ were central figures within the Home Office for coordinating these efforts. Both officials held important roles within the Home Office in 1981 and were instrumental in shaping the two areas of work. Mr A. was head of the Home Office F4 Division, later undersecretary of the Home Office Police Department; Mr B. was then assistant undersecretary of state and the secretary for Official Committee on Subversion at Home. For Mr A. and Mr B., the Home Office response should not be concerned solely with racist attacks but should develop a strategy for improving both police-community relations and targeting subversive activities. Seemingly, both officials saw the investigation into racist attacks as an opportunity for strategic interventions and perception management tactics. These officials were concerned with whether the Home Office were seen to have taken action against racism. And, at the same time, both officials expressed concern that the investigation would be too focused on the involvement of far-right extremist groups, instead of a necessary focus on anti-racist activists (TNA, HO 325/441).

As a result of these exchanges, Home Office officials commissioned three sources of information for external and internal dissemination. By the end of February, Home Office officials had commissioned a report from the HORU on racial attacks in a few police areas. This would be a ‘2–3 month study of cases as they arose, again in select areas’. Initially, Home Office officials suggested they should gather intelligence on extreme right-wing groups to understand what was causing the surge in racist attacks. However, representatives from the police and security services noted that this information was not necessary, as it ‘was already in the process of being updated’ and ‘information about the involvement of racist organisations in particular crimes would probably not surface in intelligence information’ (TNA, HO 325/441).

Subsequently, between February and July 1981, Home Office officials seem to have reached a decision to commission an alternate report from the security services. Exchanges about the rationale or justification of this new interest in subversive groups do not appear in the archives. This second report would focus on left-wing groups, so-called ‘subversive aspects of racialist activities’, and gather information on anti-racist activities.¹¹ Considering the available, albeit limited, archival materials, Home Office officials identified several objectives for this study. The information-gathering exercises should proactively involve retaining the confidence of victims of racist attacks and the police and demonstrating the government's general concern about racial attacks. As the note of one meeting states,
As well as being a part of the information-gathering process, the visits would be directed to establishing and sustaining the support for the study from the various parties involved and the credibility of it. For this reason, the programme of visits and the information sought had to be seen to be properly balanced. (TNA, HO 325/441)

Furthermore, as Mr B. noted, the actions should counter impressions:
We must try and counter the deliberate impression that the extreme left is constantly giving to ethnic minority leaders, that the police are ultra right wing and unsympathetic to black and Asian people. (TNA, HO 325/441)

For Mr B., the ‘important thing’ was to ‘express to the police our concern in terms of crime and violence, and not in terms of right wing extremism or of the protection of ethnic minorities’ (TNA, HO 325/441). Following earlier efforts by the British state to spread anti-communist propaganda, this investigation was seen as a continuation of efforts to shape public opinion through disseminating alternative information and careful perception management strategies (Defty, 2004). Mr A. noted, ‘The objective is to show the Government's concern for the problems of ethnic minorities and to offer reassurance.’ He also commented that ‘there may be an opportunity to edge the police into a more sympathetic view of minority group problems, and the groups into a wider appreciation of police objectives and difficulties’ (TNA, HO 325/441). The following section turns to the completion of this research study and the management of criminologists during the process.

Racial Attacks: Report of a Home Office study

Following the home secretary's announcement about the study, Home Office officials noted that the decision ‘had been welcomed by many as a positive step towards allaying the very real fears of large sections of the ethnic minorities’ (TNA, HO 325/441). Several researchers in the HORU undertook the Racial Attacks study. This unit comprised social researchers undertaking qualitative and quantitative research studies, occasionally published in the Home Office Research Series (Croft, 1980). Mostly, these researchers seemed to have worked with professional autonomy from Home Office policy officials in 1981. However, senior members worked closely with Home Office policy officials on research projects and policy formulation, maintaining a close working relationship throughout the completion of research studies. For example, later, in 1981, Carole Willis, involved in the Racial Attacks study, undertook a quantitative analysis of Metropolitan Police data and handed this analysis over to inspectors from the Metropolitan Police (TNA, HO 522/14).¹² And while the Racial Attacks study involved the intensive allocation of researchers’ time, working with policy officials and police forces to prepare the study, this primarily took the form of field visits and meetings with representatives from police forces and ethnic minority community organisations. Throughout the study, policy officials expressed considerable nervousness about this data collection exercise, mainly out of fear of the press during their visits to 13 police forces and community organisations in three areas of England (the North, Midlands, and South-East; TNA, HO 325/412).¹³

For Home Office policy officials, such as Mr A. and Mr B., what seemed of paramount importance was maintaining good relations between the Home Office and individual police forces. After the home secretary permitted the research to go ahead, officials wrote to police chiefs to request their cooperation. Home Office officials made continual efforts to cooperate with individual police forces and inform senior leaders about developments in the investigation. This extended to ensuring that the final report was not overly critical of the police. As Mr A. noted, ‘If we write up their failures too much, then our chances of persuading them to move readily along with us on this, and other fronts, may go down’ (TNA, HO 325/412). Once the authors had completed drafting the report, policy officials shared their conclusions and recommendations with the police for comment. This led Mr A. to receive several responses that expressed individual police forces’ views on the report and its recommendations (TNA, HO 325/412). Police force letters expressed ‘delight’, ‘initial reactions’, ‘great interest’, gratefulness, and appreciation for ‘your kind comments’. As the chief constable of Thames Valley Police wrote to the Home Office assistant secretary, Neville Nagler, ‘Your remarks about the good working relationships which have been established between forces and the Home Office during the visits were appreciated’ (TNA, HO 325/412).

Before the Home Office released its report, officials ensured that a broad readership of interested parties within the government and the police had seen draft copies of the report. Representatives from the Department of Education and Science, the Inner London Education Authority, teachers’ representatives, and the Board of Deputies of British Jews were given advanced notice of its contents (TNA, HO 325/412). Furthermore, as part of their preparations for the report's publication, Mr A. recommended to the official who took over Mr B.'s role that
the Home Secretary's original undertaking was to look at the activities of racialist organisations. Certainly many MPs (including Mr Roy Hattersley) will expect the report to deal more frankly with right-wing recruitment in schools and at football matches; allegations of military training, gun-running and arms caches; ‘hate lists’ of active anti-racialists and attacks on left-wing premises; and the exaggerated claims about international links and ‘safe’ houses. These are touched upon in the report and I would prefer not to go further. However, there may be a case for a passage in chapter 1 indicating that we have investigated these thoroughly, and a recommendation that the Home Office should monitor the activities of extremist groups closely (which we do already). (TNA, HO 325/412)

For Mr A. and Mr B., this report would be a tactical tool at a time of other public inquiries and high-profile investigations into policing and public order. During the final stages of completing the report, officials were concerned that some aspects of the study would be dealt with by the Scarman Inquiry into the Brixton Disorders of 10–12 April 1981. In a discussion of these overlaps and the need to coordinate its findings with the upcoming Public Order Bill, Mr A. wrote, ‘And we have to see this report as a tactical tool as well as substantive document in our relations with the police service, and others, over the next formative year’ (TNA, HO 325/412).¹⁴ And while the study presented the public face of the Home Office's concern about improving the policing response to racist attacks, internal discussions also reflected concern with monitoring and acting on its inquiries into left-wing groups and their subversive activities.

‘Subversive aspects of racialist activity’: A Box 500 report

Before the Racial Attacks study commenced, Mr A. and Mr B. exchanged views about the approach to take. Then, they commissioned a Box 500 report, compiled by Mi5 with MPSB intelligence, about the role of subversive influences around the issue of racial attacks. For these officials, subversive influences could be found in press articles, community groups, and activists. Within Home Office files during this period, we can find a ‘restricted’ report of a ‘hostile’ newspaper article circulated between the Home Office and officials in Los Angeles, Islamabad, Dacca, and Copenhagen. The article was published in the Guardian and written by Gareth Pierce. Pierce described in this report as a ‘woman solicitor who defended six of the Bradford 12’, ‘known to be very critical of the police, whom she claims to be institutionally racialist, and of current police methods’ (TNA, HO 325/505).¹⁵ Amid such concerns with subversive influences in the press, Home Office officials wanted to gather information for more widespread monitoring of organisations and individuals within the community. This role fell to the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS). As the assistant commissioner for the Metropolitan Police wrote to the then deputy undersecretary of state at the Home Office, the SDS provided ‘high quality information against which demonstrations may be policed effectively’.¹⁶ These were the obvious units for this task.

And so, while Home Office officials formulated a plan to respond to JCAR's representations by initiating a research study, it also requested another package of information to be gathered by undercover officers. In response to a letter from Mr B. to Mr A., the archives contain a handwritten note. It is not clear who the author of this note is, though it is likely to be Mr A. Next to Mr B.'s proposal to ‘evoke the right response from the police’, the note reads,
All this, highlighted when there are racialist attacks could lead to future generations picking up anti-police ideas even more than they are likely to do anyway. Bad for police [ethnic minority] recruitment and everything else [sic].

The note discusses its investigation of ‘extreme left wing groups’:
Is there an argument for making the investigation of extremist groups a really thorough job (for HO eyes only perhaps) i.e., by investigating the effect that extreme left wing groups, e.g., ELWAR may be having on [ethnic minority] opinion, thoughts of vigilante groups [sic]? Would probably endear itself to the police as well as being a potentially part of the jigsaw puzzle. (TNA, HO 325/441)¹⁷

So, during the period in which the Racial Attacks study was undertaken, Home Office officials continued coordinating a separate track of information gathering about ‘racialist activity’. With this information gathering carried out by the police, namely the MPSB, Mr A. and Mr B. prepared the ground for its eventual report (a so-called Box 500 report) during the summer of 1981.¹⁸ Such assessment reports were, according to Mr A., used as a basis for policy decisions and relied upon undercover intelligence reports.¹⁹ Quite infamously, one undercover agent named Barry Tompkins, HN106, was deployed to gather intelligence on ‘race related campaigning’.²⁰ Recently reflecting on these activities, Mr A. noted that he had ‘very little interactions with [Special Branch] officers or managers’, but he ‘usually interacted with the head of [Special Branch] or his senior colleagues’ (UCPI, 0000035282). Upon request of the Home Office, MPSB prepared an assessment in the wake of the Brixton riots. Mr A. noted, ‘In my experience assessments from [Special Branch] were only sought infrequently by the Home Office when there had been a particularly bad year (for example, the relevant assessment is from 1980, which started with the Brixton riots)’ (UCPI, 0000035282).

In July 1981, the completed Box 500 report was sent to Home Office officials. It assessed the ‘threat posed by West Indian and Asian organisations and individuals having subversive objectives, and by white left-wing subversive organisations which exploit racial problems to further their own political purpose’ (UCPI, 0000035300). The report reflected on the influence of Black Power ideology, Pan-Africanism, Rastafarianism, revolutionary socialism, the Indian Workers’ Association of Great Britain, Vishnu Sharma, the Indian Southall Youth Movement, and ‘race work’ undertaken by the Trotskyist International Marxist Group. ‘It is here’, the report reflected, in cases where black organisations and individuals have ‘adopted’ a form of revolutionary socialism, ‘that the greatest subversive potential lies’ (UCPI, 0000035300). Along with the report, Mr A. received a set of appendices that included additional details about these groups. ‘As these appendices were prepared essentially for our own internal purposes’, the unnamed author wrote, ‘I would be grateful if you would use them for your own information only and not give them further dissemination without prior reference to us’ (UCPI, 0000035299). The appendices were separated into sections on West Indian Organisations, Asian Organisations, Black- and Asian-Dominated Umbrella Organisations, Race Work Carried Out by White Ultra-Left Organisations, White Dominated Umbrella Organisations, Extracts, and Abbreviations.²¹ Sixty organisations are listed in the abbreviations section.

Mr A. wrote to officials in July to alert the permanent undersecretary for state at the Home Office about the draft Box 500 report. He wrote, ‘It is intended to form part of the racist attacks work and is sent to me in draft to see whether it meets our needs. It was, of course, written before the most recent disturbances, but after Brixton’ (UCPI, 0000035297). Mr A. clarified that the police and MPSB would hold responsibility for gathering intelligence, rather than the security services, in ‘collecting or assessing advance information’. The following year, another Box 500 report was commissioned on extremist activity at football grounds to be prepared by MPSB (TNA, HO 325/505). A confidential letter from an unnamed author from the MPSB to a Home Office official downplayed the significance of extreme right-wing groups with racism and anti-communist activities. For this author, these racist groups were concerned primarily with ‘paper sales’. The letter reflected there were considerations, other than racism, behind the escalating violence at football matches:
In addition to questions of symbolism, ritual or fashion on which you touch, there are also I believe other, potent and complex factors that need to be taken into account. For example, earlier this year, the Greater Manchester Police is reported to have forestalled a pitched battle (for which petrol bombs had been prepared) that was to have taken place between the black supporters of City (Moss Side) and the black supporters of United (Stratford) [original emphasis]!

Outside the infrastructure

The following year, after the publication of the Racist Attacks had been coordinated between the Home Office and news outlets, academic criminologists and police forces wrote to the Home Office. These letters include compliments to the authors and queries about the presentation of statistics. Essentially, these written exchanges concerned the report's qualities, the sensibleness of the racial categories, and techniques for statistical comparison between racial groups. One letter included a request to reanalyse the Home Office data set. Its author, a researcher from the Centre for Criminological and Socio-legal Studies at the University of Sheffield, was met with the following response by the Home Office:
We have considered your request very carefully but I am afraid that we have decided that it would not be right to release the raw data on which Chapter II of the report was based. There are two reasons for this. First, the forms from which the statistics are derived contain information about individual cases which is, and must remain, confidential. Second, as you will readily understand, the analysis and explanation of statistics in this sensitive area are fraught with difficulties. In particular, we are most anxious not to stimulate what might be damagingly misleading comparisons of the level of attacks in dissimilar areas.

I hasten to add that our decision should not in any sense be taken to imply any lack of confidence in your professional competence. It is simply that having once released the data we should have difficulty, without appearing partial, in refusing it to others who might seek to use it in a less scrupulous and objective fashion. (TNA, HO 522/14/1)

In setting out the Home Office's reasons related to confidentiality and sensitivity, we are drawn to see one practice for establishing boundaries around this information infrastructure. Elsewhere, attempts by officials in the Department of the Environment to find out information about the study were met with a similar line of refusal. ‘The DoE request raises an important point of principle’, this official wrote,
If we are to accede to it, it would be difficult to resist the case for allowing, say, the [Commission for Racial Equality] to obtain information about the views of the individual [Community Relations Council]'s which we visited or perhaps police forces to see what we said about them. (TNA, HO 325/412)

In essence, the act of setting and maintaining boundaries between professional and organisation groups – between criminologists within government or outside, between officials across government departments – are ordinary features of information infrastructures. Such practices enable control and infrastructural integrity, determining who can access data, who can deploy tools and techniques for analysing information, and who is granted reputational standing and membership to access, interpret, and use information (Johns, 2021; Ruppert and Scheel, 2021).

Concluding remarks

In developing the notion of ‘law and order’ information infrastructures, this article turned to the work of Home Office officials and the entanglement between British criminology and undercover policing in 1981. It has shown the coordinated involvement of criminologists and undercover police within an infrastructure of crime and ‘security expertise’ in and around the Home Office (Eyal and Pok, 2015). The article has described some strategic considerations of policy officials when coordinating these two groups and the use of information resources (Downes and Newburn, 2023; Rock, 2019). For two Home Office officials discussed in this article, Mr A. and Mr B., these informational resources were commissioned, read, interpreted, and used to undertake action on racist attacks as a category of event (Kaufmann, 2023). Criminological work, as seen in Mr A. and Mr B.'s eyes, was a resource for counterinsurgent tactics to police public order, manage public perception, and monitor ‘subversion’. This criminology was not overly interested in developing a coherent framework to understand race or race relations (Knowles, 2010; Smith, 2016) but as a tactical resource.

By seeing these two groups within the same infrastructure, the article has described state practices for coordinating criminology and undercover policing (Mair, 2021). Alongside such historical interests, there is a need for concerted attention to existing and emergent ‘law and order’ information infrastructures, whether this involves tracing the origins of ethnoracial classifications by human sciences within the state, the deployment of concepts and methods in predictive policing experiments (Sherman, 2013), or criminology's involvement in ‘risk focused penality, neo-conservatism, and neoliberal logics’ manifested in machine learning algorithms (Ugwudike, 2021: 487). As a result, there is a critical need to explore the history of the human sciences and its relation to techniques for surveillance, data analysis, and control strategies to understand contemporary criminal justice policy (Brayne, 2021; Harcourt, 2013).

British criminology, as practised within government, whether in-house, through public commissions, or through partnerships with university-based or commercial researchers, has long been linked with the need for logistical and tactical information to target crime and disorder (Hope, 2011, Tan et al., 2023). One Home Office official succinctly wrote that they hoped the Racial Attacks study would be a ‘tactical tool’. Throughout this episode, we can note that this infrastructure supplied concepts (by defining events and incidents, socio-demographic identities, or sociocultural concepts), tools (in the form of publishable reports, evidence, and statistics used for perception management and to contribute to public debates), methodological resources (with techniques for interpreting, calculating, cross-tabulating, baselining, and estimating), and justifications for crime prevention strategies. In light of recent debates about the history of criminology, its liberatory and critical potential, and ongoing programmes to decolonise criminology (Agozino, 2004; Georgoulas, 2021), historians of science should further explore how the criminological enterprise has been a resource for logistical operations by criminal justice administrators. This requires acknowledging how the criminological enterprise cannot be detached from this history of embedded researchers within government, think tanks, and research centres operating as specialist information suppliers for crime prevention and social control (Capano and Malandrino, 2022).

By focusing on the category of racial attacks, this article suggested what can be done with such a category as it circulates, packaged as an informational object within the state. There is therefore a need for further genealogical work on criminological tools within contemporary informational infrastructures. As the proliferation of digital tools and data utilisation for research and intelligence-gathering purposes gathers pace, the links between criminology and security services have been reconstituted within contemporary ‘knowledge machines’ (Meyer and Schroeder, 2023). In an era of Big Data, where the manual handling of intelligence resources has shifted to more or less automated terms, albeit with some hesitancy (Beer et al., 2023), government officials are still required to develop practices for handling informational resources within contemporary information infrastructures. These officials draw upon a repertoire of practices for using information about categories of persons, actions, and events (Borgman, 2015). There is therefore a need to interrogate the contemporary constitution of information infrastructures in light of debates about the qualitative shift in how the sciences and humanities are producing knowledge brought forth by computational, machine learning, and cybernetic applications of Big Data (Amaro, 2022; Wyly, 2019). Such critical scholarship would need to understand the involvement of criminologists as informational suppliers and technical specialists in an era of Big Data and predictive analytics. In a context of continued reflection on the legacies of imperial social science and the prospects of anti-colonial thought reanimating empirical social science (Go, 2023), this article invites criminology and empirical social sciences to critically reflect on their historical and current membership of contemporary ‘law and order’ information infrastructures.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Julian Molina

Notes

Author biography

Julian Molina is a lecturer in public policy in the School for Policy Studies at the University of Bristol. He works at the edges of social studies of social science, administrative criminologies, data infrastructures, crime, justice, and spatial policy. He is currently working on research related to predictive analytics, systems thinking, and computerisation in criminal justice policy since the 1960s, along with histories of computational social science and criminology in the UK and US.

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British criminology,undercover policing,and racist attacks: Notes on the ‘law and order’ information infrastructure

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Tinker, Tailor, Statistician, Spycop: Membership within infrastructures

An infrastructural exercise

‘The objective is to show the Government's concern.…’

Racial Attacks: Report of a Home Office study

‘Subversive aspects of racialist activity’: A Box 500 report

Outside the infrastructure

Concluding remarks