‘They’re doing this by stealth’: how the Met police continues to target Black music | Rap

Last October, days before what would have been his biggest home town show yet, the chart-topping drill rapper Digga D posted a statement online. “I’m gutted to announce that my Brixton Academy show next week has been rescheduled for reasons beyond my control,” he wrote. “Without going into too much detail, you can probably guess why this might have happened.”

The detail that Digga omitted was that the Metropolitan police had spent the preceding weeks putting pressure on the venue – sponsored by O2 and operated by the Academy Music Group (AMG) – to pull the plug on the show.

The Met’s interest in Digga D, AKA Rhys Herbert, is well documented: in 2020, the Bafta-winning documentary Defending Digga D depicted his efforts to pursue a music career under the terms of a uniquely restrictive criminal behaviour order (CBO), which he is still under. His scheduled Brixton appearance followed five UK dates in support of his No 1 album Noughty By Nature. A year earlier, he had performed to acclaim (and without incident) at the O2 Forum Kentish Town, another AMG venue.

Emails released under the Freedom of Information Act (FoI) show how Met officers used veiled threats to obstruct the Brixton gig. Conversations with other artists, promoters, venue owners and managers reveal that Digga D’s Brixton experience is far from an isolated incident.

The Met – which was found last month by an independent investigation, once again, to be institutionally racist – has an established history of interfering with Black music events in London. In 2005, the force introduced a risk assessment form titled Form 696 that promoters and licensees in 21 boroughs were required to complete and submit 14 days before planned events. The form was aimed at shows featuring DJs and MCs and included clauses for the style of music being played and the ethnicity of attenders, leading to accusations of racial profiling.

Grime shows bore the brunt, with acts including JME, Wiley, and Tinchy Stryder all having dates pulled at short notice; garage, rap, reggae and R&B events were also targeted. The genre and ethnicity clauses were removed in 2009, but the form was not officially scrapped until 2017 – after the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, called for a review of its use and the Met reported “a reduction in serious incidents at music events”. In its review, the Met denied that Form 696 had been used to target particular genres but admitted that specific groups had been “disproportionately affected”.

The Met then announced a new “voluntary partnership approach” covering London, which it said was designed “to share information at a local level and work to identify any enhanced risk to ensure the safety of the public”. In reality, operators and promoters are expected to file their own risk assessments instead of being asked to complete a specific document, leading them to question how “voluntary” this approach is – particularly since some premises’ licences mandate the use of risk assessments.

“You’re still required to fill in the form,” said one artist manager and promoter, speaking anonymously for fear of reprisals from the Met. “They’ve just taken 696 off the top of it.” They also provided evidence of 696-style requirements for shows outside London (in 2017, the same year that Form 696 was discontinued, it was revealed that 16 other England police forces had adopted a similar form; it’s unclear whether they were scrapped).

“They’ve taken away the ethnicity question, because that’s the thing they were really getting hammered for,” the manager added. “But they’re doing it by stealth now: they know that these are Black shows.”

A central London nightclub owner who also asked to remain anonymous corroborated this experience. “It’s 696 by another name. It’s not a predesigned form, it’s a risk assessment that I have to provide to them. But both parties know exactly what I have to include, which is to state what style of music is playing. And both parties know that if that style of music is one that is preferred by people of colour, then the police will immediately say something like ‘whilst we would never tell you what events to put on, we regard this as high-risk and if anything should happen we will review your licence.’ Which is essentially them saying ‘we will close you down’.” The venue owner said these conversations typically happened informally – “over the phone or on a personal visit” – and that officers had previously told them that risk assessments should include the style of music being played.

The Met said “the risk of any music event is one for the licence holder/operator to decide” and that the force “does not require risk assessments to be provided, but if an organiser identifies a significant risk to public safety they may wish to discuss with police or other appropriate authority who can assist”. It says licence reviews are “based on a number of factors and will be part of a stepped approach. A licence review would take place if there is a possible failure by the premises to uphold one or more the licensing objectives or from a failure to comply with conditions imposed on the licence.”

The Met said this approach “applies to all styles and genres of music”. Venue owners, meanwhile, argue that licence conditions have become so complex that it is practically impossible always to be in full compliance.

Newly released emails from the run-up to Digga D’s cancelled Brixton show reveal how the Met police approaches these negotiations. The backstory to Digga’s CBO starts in 2018, when he received a one-year prison sentence after he and members of his drill group 1011 (now CGM) were convicted of conspiracy to commit violent disorder after threatening another drill group, 12World.

Speaking for the Met after the sentencing, DCS Kevin Southworth called 1011 “a gang who blatantly glorified violence”, but free speech groups criticised the way the behaviour order hamstrung 1011’s creativity: Digga is forbidden from rapping about certain topics and has to submit lyrics to the Met before releasing new tracks and videos. He was recalled to prison in 2019 for a breach of his CBO – inside, a stabbing left him partially sighted – and again in 2020 after pleading guilty to his role in a central London brawl where machetes were wielded.

A month before the 2022 Brixton show, a phone call between the venue and Lambeth police took place. The details have not been disclosed, but it was followed by emails from the venue twice requesting further information about issues the police had raised on the call about the show going ahead. Days later, on 16 September 2022, the venue received a letter signed by a Met detective sergeant who argued that “hosting this event will attract serious crime and disorder and put the public at risk of harm” and that “there are no measures that can be put in place to safely manage this event”. The FoI copy has been heavily redacted, but it references gangs and firearm and knife crime. “I ask that you reconsider hosting this event,” the sergeant said.

Another call was scheduled and on 23 September a final email arrived from another Lambeth officer. “Serious consideration should be given to the suitability of this particular event taking place,” they wrote, adding that if the event was to take place “all options of enforcement would be considered” including “a closure notice or a review of the premises licence” if any “issues” should occur on the night. The nature of these “issues” appears to have been left intentionally vague.

“As responsible operators,” the email concluded, “I would hope that you take all these potential implications into account when making your decision.” The show did not go ahead.

This correspondence reflects a pattern of Met officers conflating rap and drill with gang activity. “It’s extraordinary what they bring up,” said the central London venue owner. “Even a relatively minor incident will get blown up into a huge thing, and all the same words immediately come out: it’s ‘gang affiliation’; they’ll use the lyrics to prove that these songs will encourage violence, as if playing Grand Theft Auto was why someone committed a bank robbery.”

The Met says “there is no direct link between drill music and gang activity”, that “investigators always target threats of violence and other potentially criminal activity”, and that “this isn’t linked to any form or genre of music”. The force’s aim is “to prevent threats and intimidation in the virtual world which may lead to real harm in our communities”.

But legal arguments from a separate licensing review held for a different London venue, shared with the Guardian, show police officers equating drill performances with gang membership. Music videos on YouTube are argued to promote “gang culture”, and the review heard that a Google search would have revealed “red flags about the artist and music genre”. This line of argument has in recent years increasingly penetrated UK courtrooms, where rap lyrics are used as evidence in criminal trials.

Less than a year before Digga D was forced to cancel his Brixton show, Fumez the Engineer, host of the popular Plugged In freestyle series on YouTube and another prominent figure in the UK drill scene, found himself in a similar position – with even less warning.

After a packed season of UK club shows and festival dates, including Glastonbury, Parklife and the Reading and Leeds festivals, he was gearing up to headline Islington’s O2 Academy. But just 20 minutes before curtains, and with a line of people already snaking out of the venue, staff told Fumez – AKA Jahrell Bryan – that the show was off. When he tried to find out what was going on, police officers stationed outside the venue thought the gig was still going ahead. It wasn’t until Bryan opened Twitter that he saw Islington police saying that the venue had been closed for the evening. Ticketmaster texted ticket holders advising them not to travel. “The officers outside thought I was pulling a prank on them, trying to get them to go home early,” said Fumez.

A section 60 order had been authorised, granting police extended powers to stop and search people with no grounds for suspicion, and a closure notice was served on the venue, stating that its use would be likely to lead to “disorder” or “nuisance to members of the public”. When Fumez followed up, he was told that the officer responsible for having the venue closed was on holiday. When the officer returned, Fumez was told that the police “had intel that there were serious crimes going to be committed”. He said he had heard nothing prior to the event, from the venue or the police, to indicate any potential danger.

“All I know is I was booked to perform, I was putting on a show, and I [was] told 20 minutes before that it [was] cancelled. And they haven’t given me a reason,” said Fumez. “It’s like having the rug pulled from underneath your feet. All the money that we’d spent making sure that the set was sick and everyone was there – we had people fly in from Ireland, Sweden – it was crazy. So when they just cancelled it on the spot, it was devastating.”

The event had been billed as a headline show with surprise special guests. “[The police] must have been thinking ‘who’s he going to bring out? We don’t know. It could be this guy, it could be that one? Fuck it, let’s just cancel it’,” said Fumez. He suspects that his Plugged In series, which features the cream of the UK drill scene and is seen by many artists as a rite of passage, is among the output monitored by the Met’s controversial Project Alpha unit, which is responsible for referring rap videos to be taken down by YouTube and has been shown to carry out large-scale profiling of children online.

The Met has previously refused to divulge specifics of which channels are monitored by Project Alpha, but says it “works closely with social media platforms to identify content we believe could provoke or cause violence”, and says decisions on whether content is removed are left to the platforms. In November, after a lengthy investigation, Meta’s oversight board ordered Instagram to reinstate content that had been removed at the request of the Met and said the force’s “intensive focus” on drill music raised “serious concerns of potential over-policing of certain communities”.

Fumez said he had tried to open lines of communication with the police in the past, even offering to send them music in advance so they could advise on what they do or don’t like, in search of some kind of compromise or mutual understanding. But he said he had received no cooperation. The Met did not respond to a request for comment on this, or on the specifics of Fumez’s cancelled headline show. Despite the experience, he remains stoic. “You’ve gotta just keep pushing,” he said. “When my show got cancelled, I took the positives: it sold out and there were people here. I didn’t get to put on the show that I wanted this time, but with the grace of God I will next time.”

But promoters, venue owners and artists alike are growing tired of relying on God’s grace in the face of an opaque policing approach they see as overly punitive. High-profile shows being shut down sends a wider message, they say. “It’s dog whistling for the rest of London,” said the central London venue owner. “It’s the Met saying: ‘This is what we do.’”