YouTube has deleted 30 music videos after U.K. police found that they were fueling gang stabbings and murders in London.
The music videos featured songs in the ‘drill’ genre — which originated on Chicago’s South Side and has since become popular across the pond, characterized by graphically violent lyrics and ominous trap beats. The Guardian notes that police have asked YouTube to remove between 50 and 60 music videos over the last two years after finding that they correlated with real-life acts of violence and included actual threats against rival gangs, per Metropolitan police commissioner Cressida Dick (pictured above). The site has complied in roughly half of these cases.
Police have also created a database of 1,400 drill videos to serve as an intelligence tool to crack down on gang violence. Pressplay Media, a video production and promotion platform in the drill space, wrote on Instagram that it was working to get its videos reinstated.
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“We have developed policies specifically to help tackle videos related to knife crime in the U.K. and are continuing to work constructively with experts on this issue,” a YouTube spokesperson told The Guardian. “We work with the Metropolitan police, the mayor’s office for policing and crime, the Home Office, and community groups to understand this issue and ensure we are able to take action on gang-related content that infringe our community guidelines or break the law.”
YouTube added that it has “a dedicated process for the police to flag videos directly to our teams because we often need specialist context from law enforcement to identify real-life threats.”
