Metropolitan Police apply for court order to stop gang members making drill music, in unprecedented move
'Banning drill is not just and it’s not going to be useful,' youth worker says
For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails
Sign up to our free breaking news emails
Sign up to our free breaking news emails
Gang members who rapped about stabbing rivals before going out armed with machetes could be banned from making “inflammatory” music that police blame for driving rising knife crime.
The Metropolitan Police has applied for an unprecedented criminal behaviour order (CBO) that would prohibit five west London youths, aged between 17 and 21, from making drill, a genre of rap that detectives say often glamourises violence.
All five are part of 1011, a Ladbroke Grove gang which records drill videos that have been viewed more than 10 million times on YouTube.
Earlier this year more than 30 drill videos were deleted from the video-streaming website following a request from Scotland Yard, which has launched a dedicated operation against genre.
Drill often features lyrics about gang disputes, guns, drugs and stabbings, as well as lines mocking rivals personally.
Detectives say the videos often explicitly threaten and incite violence, but fans argue they reflect the experiences of a disenfranchised inner-city youth.
The CBO application marks an escalation of the Met’s controversial crackdown on the genre, which originated in Chicago before growing popular in London earlier this decade.
Micah Bedeau, 18, Yonas Girma, 21, Isaac Marshall, 18, and two 17-year-old boys, who cannot be named because of their age, made videos that police claim were “clearly and only designed to incite violence”.
In November last year, they armed themselves with machetes, knives and baseball bats as they planned a suspected revenge attack on a rival gang from Shepherd’s Bush who had threatened and harassed Bedeau’s grandmother for being in the “wrong” postcode.
After being stopped by police, the five youths initially claimed the weapons were props for a drill music video.
But all five pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit violent disorder at Kingston Crown Court last month and will be sentenced on Friday.
On top of the sentences, the Met want the gang to be banned from making drill music that “references violence” for three or five years.
“It is the explicit nature and the aggressive nature of the lyrics that make these videos of concern to us,” detective chief superintendent Kevin Southworth, who heads the Met’s Trident gang crime command, told The Independent.
“There were a number of different drill videos and social media postings that were clearly and only designed to incite violence and provoke each other.”
Prosecutors will present seven videos made by 1011 to the court as evidence in support of the order, including “No Hook”, which has lyrics about shooting rivals and leaving them “splattered”.
Some versions of the track have been removed from YouTube, but others remain online and have been viewed thousands of times.
Most drill artists do not rely on record labels and producers to distribute their music, instead reaching increasingly large audiences through social media.
Last month 1011 launched a petition – since signed by more than 5,000 people – protesting the removal of their videos from YouTube.
Kingston Crown Court heard that one of the 17-year-old gang members’ drill videos had been so successful on YouTube that he had received an award from the site for surpassing five million hits.
Another received a payment in excess of £12,000 from streaming service Spotify for access to his music on their site.
The group’s tracks are among 1,400 indexed by Scotland Yard on a database of videos it claims “raise the risk of violence”.
People identified in the videos can be targeted action prevent them from associating with certain people, entering designated areas, wearing hoods, making gang signs, or using social media and unregistered mobile phones.
However, the CBO application is believed to be first time police have requested an order preventing offenders from making a particular genre of music.
Youth worker and writer Ciaran Thapar suggested banning the gang from making drill would be ineffective, impractical and unjust.
“Those boys are still going to be finding ways of communicating their disaffection; they’ll just find ways that are less detectable,” he told The Independent. ”Drill music hasn’t been detectable to the mainstream audience because no one’s been bothering to look at it for three or four years. All that ignoring what it’s saying and suppressing it is going to do is push it further down and it will pop up in more extreme places.”
He acknowledged drill music was uniquely problematic in that “most musical genres don’t rely inherently on threats being sent on social media”, but added: “I would say policing social media rather than a type of music is a way more of objective, legal-based solution that doesn’t discriminate against the music.
“There’s a lot of music being made by, most of the time, young people that have no other investment or way out of poverty. [Banning drill] is not just and it’s not going to be useful.”
Det Ch Supt Southworth said police were “not here to demonise drill music” and that videos flagged as a concern would be assessed on a “case-by-case basis”.
He added: “This is not about regulation or censorship, this is about making sure that we look specifically at the behaviours that have occurred and do what we can to prevent them from occurring again in the future in a way that is likely to result in violence.
“We are here to make sure that, where somebody is clearly and solely trying to provoke an act of violence into being committed, we as inspectors do as the public expect us to do and step in to stop that happening.”
He said Scotland Yard were likely to target other gangs who make drill videos that “glamourise violence” with similar orders.
Jo Deakin, a senior lecturer in criminology at the University of Manchester, said was not aware of a CBO previously being used to restrict offenders from making a particular genre of music, although she noted ASBOs – the predecessor to CBOs – “notoriously imposed bizarre restrictions that were sometimes impossible to stick to.”
She stressed young offenders’ routes to violent crime were “extremely complex often involving significant marginalisation and trauma, so any CBO would need to look at the bigger picture”.
Drill has come under increasing scrutiny in recent months after it was blamed for the rising wave of gun and knife crime in London.
Scotland Yard’s crackdown forms part of Operation Domain, which launched in September 2015 with the aim of taking action against gang-related videos encouraging violence.
Last month the government’s first ever Serious Violence Strategy said social media had created “an almost unlimited opportunity for rivals to antagonise each other” in ways viewed by a huge audience.
The strategy said videos and posts “glamorise weapons and gang life”, but it was heavily criticised for omitting a leaked report by the Home Office warning that police budget cuts had “likely contributed” to rising violence and “encouraged” offenders.
It comes against a backdrop of rising violent crime in London, where police have launched more than 66 murder investigations this year.
Metropolitan Police commissioner Cressida Dick has cited drill music as one of many reasons being the recent uptick in attacks, alongside an evolving drugs markets, austerity and a “reduction in police finances”.