YouTube, Urged By Scotland Yard, Removes Rap Videos Blamed For Violence

Law enforcement points to drill rappers' work as contributing, or even inciting, violence in London, but opinions are split on its root causes.

A title card is the first thing you see in the video for "They Ain't 100," a song by the British rapper Fredo — which reads: Disclaimer: The content in this video is an expression of art and should not be taken literally. K-Trap's "David Blaine" opens with a similar prologue: All characters in this visual are entirely fictional. The events that occur are purley [sic] symbolic and should not be taken literal. The video follows up with an audio repetition of the warning.

The warnings are these rappers' insurance against claims by law enforcement in Britain that their genre of rap, called drill — the popularization of which is largely attributed to the rapper Chief Keef and which was seized on by British youth, driving an explosion in that country — has been a contributing factor in a metastasizing,upward trend of violence there.

"Sadly, I have had to look at quite a lot of drill music," Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick, London's highest-ranking police official, said in an interview on May 18. "You can access it, sadly, very easily ... Very quickly you will see that these are associated with lyrics that are about glamorizing violence — serious violence, murder, stabbings, they describe the stabbings in great detail, with great joy ... But most particularly, it is often — we have gangs who make drill videos and in those videos they taunt each other and say what they're going to do with each other." A "gangs database" established by the Metropolitan Police, which lists among other things the music taste of those in it, was called "deeply flawed" by Amnesty International last month.

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