YouTube has deleted dozens of music videos after complaints by the Metropolitan police that their lyrics were allegedly inciting real-world violence.

The force has linked a rise in gang-related stabbings and murders across the capital to a form of rap music known as drill, which often features violent imagery and lyrics.



Scotland Yard said it had asked the Google-owned site to take down between 50 and 60 music videos in the last two years. Of these, around 30 have been removed, according to figures obtained by the Press Association.

It is not clear whether all of the videos removed from YouTube involved drill. The Met has been strongly critical of the genre, which began in Chicago and was later adopted by young Londoners who had encountered it online.

The force say it has built up a database of more than 1,400 videos to use as an intelligence tool in an attempt to reduce violent crime.

“Drill music is associated with lyrics which are about glamourising serious violence: murder, stabbings,” the Met police commissioner, Cressida Dick, told LBC radio this month. “They describe the stabbings in great detail, joy and excitement. Extreme violence against women is often talked about.



“Most particularly, in London we have gangs who make drill videos and in those videos, they taunt each other. They say what they’re going to do to each other and specifically what they are going to do to who.”

Pressplay, a music company that promotes drill videos, used a post on its Instagram page to apologise to fans and said it had been holding meetings with the YouTube after the issue hit the headlines. It said: “The police and the main police commissioner has forced YouTube to take down some videos.” They would “probably be back up in the next few weeks”, it said.

Dan Hancox, the author of a recent history of the UK grime scene, said it was tempting to make the defence that the music was “just art”, but he said the relationship between drill and violence was more complicated than with previous forms of rap such as grime.

Dan Hancox. Photograph: Verso Books

“With drill there are groups of young people making music, some of whom are involved in violence and describing this really specifically,” he explained. “It’s not so much the acts of violence themselves as the beefs between particular groups of individuals. Some of the tensions between young people who make drill music do correlate to real-life tensions.”

While not all drill artists espoused violence, Hancox said, and “untreated social problems” were often the root cause of violence, in a few cases “you can see connections between real-life trouble and music world battles – that’s a case that judges have made and that’s what the police believe is the case.”

He added: “YouTube and social media such as Instagram and Snapchat can elevate those tensions to the point where there’s a need to save face and stand by your words. Some well-meaning people have maybe overlooked some of those specific connections.”

A YouTube spokesman said: “We have developed policies specifically to help tackle videos related to knife crime in the UK and are continuing to work constructively with experts on this issue.



“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.

“We have 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. Along with others in the UK, we share the deep concern about this issue and do not want our platform used to incite violence.”