So we have had drill music in the UK from around about 2011. within London, gangs favoured this type of music. They favour the drill music because of the inherent crossover between the violent themes that are in there. What we have seen is that some of this material is evidential, and when we say it's evidential, we can review a lyric or set of lyrics after the fact that are directly related to an incident that's taken place, And it's my job and my team's job to look at that and make sure the lyrics are not just conventional, not just what we would normally expect to see within the genre. We're looking for specific references, things that are outside of public knowledge. And we're also looking at the time frame and when which that might have been mentioned as well. We see a lot of material appearing, maybe in the days after a violent incident has taken place, and we can say that that hasn't come to their knowledge or the person who wrote it’s knowledge. Any other way other than being potentially involved in that crime. We also see this material, this music being used as a storyboard tactic. What I refer to as storyboarding, there are a number of investigations that we have where we will look through maybe the phones of young people. this is a material that's never been posted online but is in their notes pages, say if their mobile phone where there's lots of lyrics written down and we'll see maybe across the course of 4 to 5 days before an incident where lyrics have said, I'm going to go and do this to that person, or I'm going to go and do this one act on this group that I know around the corner. We recently investigated the death of Leonardo Reed. So his name is Leonardo. but he liked to be called Leo. High achiever in school, he was doing economics, Business, Obviously he didn't get to do GCSEs Unfortunately. He wasn’t a boy that was in the streets. He wasn't involved in any form of gang affiliation at all whatsoever. The suspects had gone on what's known as a rideout - that's a pre-planned attack aiming for rivals in a particular area. they arrived to the location of the rideout, but they weren't able to identify anyone in particular that they knew was a rival. Leo was unfortunately caught up and stabbed along with two other people. Medical professionals tried to get to him and tried to give life saving care. Unfortunately, they were not able to save his life. There was a second party. He was there who was also injured and was taken hospital by members of the public He also was unable to survive the injuries that he had sustained during that period. Unfortunately, we see quite often in terms of gang violence due to things like paranoia, misidentification, young people with absolutely no connection to any gang are regularly being caught up in knife crime and also in gun violence in London. One of the defendants in that case, Xavier Poponne, had written essentially lyrics detailing exactly what had taken place the day before. one of the first lines in there, mentioned Leo by name, it was a reference to billing up Leo, which is a slang term for essentially rolling someone into a cannabis cigarette and smoking them, which is something we see quite often a derogatory term celebrating in the death of another person. This is what people don't understand. You writing about someone dying or someone who they killed is the most horrifying thing for a member of the family or a loved one to see that. If it's okay for you to write about a dead person, then it should be okay for us to use them in court to help bring justice? So a lot of people ask me, why would anyone reveal true or criminal information within music? And what we see with a lot of young people in particular, especially young people connected to gangs, is that status is a massive driver for them. They care more about status than almost lots of other factors. It's become in London in particular, almost important than getting money or wealth They're all means to an end to obtain status. So when it comes to releasing music, there's what's known as the authenticity trap, where if you want to be seen as a realistic rapper in this genre, you will reveal some information which is verifiable by somebody else, your community group. And that information is where the risk of revealing true criminality comes in, because they'll say something that is true and that we can verify as much as anybody else. recently we dealt with the investigation in relation to the death of Keanu Harker. Keanu was only 18 years old. He was shot and killed in a rival gang attack. And unfortunately, it was all bound up in tit for tat ongoing gang violence, some of which had been pointed to through the use of music material that was released before his death, and some which released afterwards, which celebrated and goaded in his death. what we saw was the online music space being used to express that conflict between the two groups. There was things like scoreboarding where a track would feature the number of people that one gang had killed over another, gangs. The sort of celebrating. We've got more than you. We've got more than you feeding into that cycle of violence. And some of the tracks beforehand, the defendants and the defendants group were saying: And green was the colour of Keanu Harker's gang that he was linked to. So it was talking about how anyone from that group can be murdered and can be killed, which is evidently and eventually what they went on to do by riding out on a electric moped with a firearm to find Keanu Harker and shoot him dead. After that incident took place. That wasn't the end of the landscape. We then had music releases by this other gang celebrating in the death of Keanu Harker cheering on and goading and updating that scoreboard to show that there had been one more added to the scoreboard for that gang the material that we supplied was reviewed by both the prosecution barristers, the defence barristers and the judges, all different safeguards about whether or not this material would or would not be heard before the jury. And eventually it was all agreed in terms of the material that was put forward We also recently had the death of Rene Graham, who was 15 years old and was sadly shot and killed in London. What we saw with that is that the gunman on CCTV was seen to try to shoot someone else during the incident, the gun failed to fire and jammed. So when police were investigating that and they'd identified the suspect in the case, one of the inquiries was to look through the phone, have a look at what material existed on there to see whether anything had been recorded that might be confessional of that case, or whether there was any other evidence that we could use. And the suspect in this case had recorded a video of himself delivering a few lines to camera, saying, Don't you hear it when the team jumps? I was prepared to take a soul, don't you hate it when the ting jams? Ting being a slang word for a firearm? the status that he was seeking to gain from releasing that video or sharing it with other people, was more important than the fact that it was relevant to what he'd done very recently, in terms of firing a gun and it jamming. There's a debate around artistic expression. And first of all, we should say that we don't want to demonise any particular genre of music, The debate is largely looking around the misuse or the overuse of this material. And to that end, we agree with a lot of the comments that are out there. We need to make sure that this material isn't overused, isn't misused, We have quite a strict review process, and on occasions we will go back to the investigator and say, actually, this is not an appropriate use of drill music. In this case, We've looked at it compared to the evidence, and there's nothing specific in the lyrics. They're just generic and they're just in the genre of drill. It's really important that we can continue to use this material. There are people out there who, unfortunately, have committed horrendous and atrocious acts of violence We want to be able to use that material to secure convictions, Ultimately, the message is, if you choose to reveal true criminal information within your music, then we will use it.