YouTube deleting ‘gang’ drill videos after police request

News has broken that YouTube has been deleting violent rap music videos at the request of the London Met because they promote violence.

The police force asked for 60 videos to be pulled, but YouTube has so far only deleted half of those, and only because they contravene its own policies.

The Met apparently has a database of 1400 such videos which it says it uses in its fight against gang crime.

Its music focus is on drill, the rap sub-text which has a strong militaristic and violent take on street life which is centred in the London suburb of Brixton.

Drill originated six years ago from Chicago’s south side, taking its name from the slang for automatic weapons.

Some videos depict hooded and masked gang members threatening each other with paybacks and violence.

“The gangs try to outrival each other with the filming and content – what looks like a music video can actually contain explicit language with gangs threatening each other,” Mike West from Metropolitan Police said.

“There are gestures of violence, with hand signals suggesting they are firing weapons and graphic descriptions of what they would do to each other.”

London Met blames such videos for knife crimes in the English capital, centred around a postcode turf war.

Over 60 murder investigations began in London in 2018 alone.

A missive from YouTube stated: “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 infringes our community guidelines or breaks 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.”