| Abstract: |
Abstract This article examines the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) pilot
deployment of Palantir analytics for internal workforce monitoring, announced
in April 2026 as part of the force’s post-Panorama standards programme. The
force defends the deployment as lawful, since it brings together data it
already holds; this article argues that defence repeats a known mistake in
policing legitimacy research, treating legal compliance as the ceiling of
consent rather than its floor. Drawing on procedural justice theory (Tyler
2006), the dialogic and twin-track models of legitimacy (Bottoms and Tankebe
2012; Tankebe 2013; Bradford and Tankebe 2014), Beetham’s (1991) account of
institutional legitimacy, and the author’s earlier work (Ford 2021, 2026), it
audits the deployment against the four pillars of procedural justice and finds
it deficient on voice, neutrality, respect, and trustworthy motives. It argues
that the pilot inverts Sherman’s (2007) power-few hypothesis, fails the
targeting—testing—tracking discipline of evidence-based policing (Sherman
2013), substitutes a technical fix for what Heifetz (1994) calls an adaptive
challenge, and entangles culture reform with surveillance in ways that risk
delegitimising Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) work and, through a
mirroring effect, damaging public-facing encounters. A subsequent disclosure
under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, including the pilot’s Data
Protection Impact Assessment and Equality Impact Assessment obtained in
redacted form, tests these claims against primary evidence: it confirms an
algorithmic yield of 2.6 million flags with a further-action rate of 0.075 per
cent, corroborates self-acknowledged risks to trust and equity in the MPS’s
own equalities analysis, and shows the force cannot establish what became of
the cases its own system flagged. The article closes with implications for
chief officers, police and crime commissioners, and professional standards
leads. Keywords: algorithmic management, workforce surveillance, police
legitimacy, officer self-legitimacy, procedural justice, psychological safety,
organisational culture, EDI, Palantir, Metropolitan Police Service. |