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Between 2020 and 2023, drill and rap lyrics were used as evidence against 252 defendants in England and Wales, according to a new report by the BBC. The Metropolitan Police has now defended that practice, arguing that some musicians disclose real information about violent crimes and that, where they do, prosecutors should be entitled to use it.
To some degree, this sounds sensible.
A lyric containing a detail known only to a murderer might have weight in court. A threat followed by an attack may too. But there must be a difference between using a song to establish a fact – a motive, a piece of evidence, an admission of guilt – and using it to establish what sort of person is standing in the dock.
Drill music is deliberately threatening. It details territorial claims and what will happen to rivals. Sometimes it describes genuine violence. Sometimes the threat is real; sometimes it is exaggeration, borrowed reputation or performance.
In musical culture, the lines between reality and bravado are thin indeed.
So the difficulty comes when prosecutors and juries are invited to treat drill music as autobiography.
The campaign group Art Not Evidence is now lobbying the Government to change the law so that there is a presumption against admitting ‘creative expression’ as evidence.
On balance, it is the right call to make.
Last November, Action On Armed Violence (AOAV) – the charity of which I am the executive director – published a report, ‘Does music fuel gun violence? A comparative analysis across five genres and settings’. In it, we examined a number of musical cultures that had repeatedly been accused – by the media, police, and politicians – of driving violence. We considered Chicago drill, Punjabi hip-hop, Rio de Janeiro’s funk proibidão, Lesotho’s famo, and Mexico’s narcocorridos.
Our comparison covered homicide trends, policing, gun availability, criminal markets, and economic conditions. We found, across all five, no evidence that the arrival or popularity of certain types of music preceded measurable increases in gun homicide.
Violence was far better explained by poverty, by access to weapons, by the presence of organised-crime gangs, by political instability, and by weak justice systems.
When it comes to drill music, Chicago is the obvious comparison.
Drill emerged there in the early 2010s. Yet, the city’s homicide rate had peaked in the early 1990s, long before Chief Keef, an American rapper and record producer, ever uploaded a song. Yes, killings surged again in 2016, but they then fell between 2017 and 2019. Drill remained popular throughout.
Researchers instead point to changes in policing, violence-prevention funding, gun seizures, and wider American trends to explain the rise and fall of gun violence there. Music was a constant in a landscape of shifting social spending, police priorities, and gun laws.
Still, when Keef sings in his song ‘Blew My High’, “’cause I’mma shoot when I see my opponent”, it’s like a red rag to a police officer, or a conservative commentator, or a preacher standing on the family values podium.
The urge to blame culture is powerful because it offers a simple explanation. It’s a clear narrative. It assumes that violence and music are interlinked, and that violent music causes violence.
This has led to real-world interventions. In 2015, Chicago authorities even stopped a hologram of Chief Keef appearing at a ‘Stop the Killing’ benefit concert because officials argued that even his virtual appearance posed a public safety risk.
Governments elsewhere have responded similarly. Punjab restricted displays of firearms in songs and videos. Mexican states have restricted narcocorridos. Brazil has arrested funk performers. Lesotho banned famo groups and their songs. And in all of these instances, AOAV found no convincing evidence that such restrictions reduced lethal violence.
That does not prove that music is irrelevant. Yes, songs can intensify rivalries, they can glorify killers, and they can be adverts for a form of gang allegiance. And, yes, they can even contain evidence of crimes. But depicting violence is not the same as causing it, and describing a violent world is not proof that the performer committed the violence described.
It is the second of those assumptions that should concern British courts.
Violent music is vivid. An online video of a masked teenager waving a knife can easily be shown to a jury. But this does not amount to proof of intent.
This points to a less comfortable fact. Lyrics may assume greater evidential importance precisely in cases where conventional evidence is thin.
Some of the crimes most closely associated with drill culture are also among the hardest for police to solve, and the burden of that failure falls disproportionately on young black men.
AOAV’s analysis of London homicides found that black people accounted for approximately 40% of homicide victims between 2019 and 2023, but 73% of victims in unsolved cases. The disparity was even sharper for particular methods of killing: 83.7% of victims in unsolved shootings and 73.5% of victims in unsolved stabbings were black. The average victim in an unsolved case was just 28.
That creates an obvious evidential problem. Shootings accounted for 38% of unsolved murders despite making up only 8.7% of homicides overall, and AOAV found that 59.1% of the unsolved cases it examined had no apparent viable lead.
These are often difficult investigations, involving masked attackers, limited forensic evidence, and witnesses who may be unwilling or unable to come forward. In precisely such cases, where conventional evidence is weakest and the victim is disproportionately likely to be a young black man, lyrics, videos and assertions of gang affiliation may begin to carry more evidential weight than they otherwise would.
As the Art Not Evidence group told the BBC, drill lyrics were being used in court to show “gang aesthetics... taken at face value and misinterpreted” by those with “a lack of knowledge of the culture of the genre”.
For centuries, art has turned violence into spectacle. Freddie Mercury singing in Bohemian Rhapsody that he had just killed a man was not an admission of guilt. Johnny Cash did not really shoot a man in Reno just to watch him die. David Byrne was not really a Psycho Killer.
Nobody ever mistook these for witness statements.
Drill should not acquire a different evidential status simply because its performers are young, its imagery is disturbing, and the street violence surrounding it is sometimes real.
And, in the end, courts should be wary of allowing creative performance to become something approaching proof.
Iain Overton is the executive director of the Action On Armed Violence charity