After completing the initial roundup in May of last year, YouTube once complied with requests from London Metropolitan Police, to eradicate 129 UK Drill music videos deemed "criminally indulgent," of which 102 ended up in the censorship bin. As the Associated Press has indicated, the songs deemed offensive were categorically listed as "videos for tracks from the rap sub-genre."
Police officials in London argue that UK Drill videos are directly responsible for a crime wave in England's principal city. The Drill scenes origins are unmistakenly connected to the hip-hop movement that reigned sovereign in Chicago, Illinois in the early 2010s.
Mike West, the person responsible for flagging over 1,900 Drill videos on behalf of the London Metropolitan Police, believes the videos often carry subliminal messages that in turn incites "a violent retaliatory response" on the listener or those subjected to the encoded messages. The 100 deletions come in the wake of a huge injunction in which two of the scene's biggest names, Skengdo and AM, plead guilty to a "breach of gang injunction" that forbade them from playing their song “Attempted 1.0″ live in concert.
Reps for YouTube informed the Associated Press that all 102 songs were deleted as part of an initiative put in place "to help tackle videos related to knife crime in the UK." In response, Drill rappers and promoters have taken to social media to criticize what they believe is an unlawful, and unfounded smear campaign, which ignores the social conditions from which these Drill videos are inspired.
