Metro, Friday 28 August 2026
Using drill rap lyrics as evidence in criminal cases is "really important," the Metropolitan Police has insisted, as campaigners call for a change in the law restricting the practice. Drill rap videos and lyrics have been used as evidence in murder trials, with police alleging some of the music showed rappers boasting about real-life violent behaviour. A report by the Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity said drill rap lyrics were used as evidence against 252 defendants between 2020 and 2023. Campaign group Art Not Evidence, which includes lawyers and academics, wants the government to create an assumption that "creative expression" is not admissible evidence, arguing drill lyrics are being used in cases to show "gang aesthetics" that are "taken at face value and misinterpreted" by those with "a lack of knowledge of the culture of the genre." Det Sgt Matt Corbin, who gives evidence in court as a police drill music expert, said it was "really important" that this material continue to be used, adding: "There are people out there who have committed horrendous acts of violence and we want to be able to use that material to secure convictions." Valentina Locci, whose 15-year-old son Leonardo Reid was fatally stabbed in Islington by gang members in 2023, said it was right that drill lyrics had been used to bring the killers to justice, describing lyrics about someone's death as "the most horrifying thing" for a family to hear.
A police officer describing his own job as "really important" is not, on its own, evidence of anything except that the person doing the job believes in it. What is missing from the Met's defence of drill lyrics as evidence is any account of why this particular category of creative expression, out of everything a defendant might have written, said, filmed or posted, has become the one prosecutors reach for.
The manuscript's account of how enforcement systems choose where to direct their effort applies directly here:
Enforcement is intensified, expanded, or rebranded. New units are created. New powers are granted. New metrics are introduced.
A police drill music expert is a new role, created because a category of evidence proved useful. That is not itself sinister. But it is a choice about where institutional attention goes, and choices about where attention goes are never neutral, even when the underlying legal principle, that a defendant's own words can be used against them, applies formally to everyone.
Art Not Evidence's objection is precisely that the principle is not applied to everyone in practice. Nobody is proposing a police country music expert, or a police indie rock expert, to interpret murder ballads or songs about violence written by artists working in genres associated with different audiences. The 252 defendants identified in the report were prosecuted within a system that has built specific expertise, specific personnel, and specific institutional muscle memory around one genre. That is not a coincidence of where violent content happens to appear. It is a record of where enforcement decided to look.
Low-risk, high-visibility actions are prioritised. Complex or resource-intensive work is avoided. Enforcement gravitates toward what is manageable rather than meaningful.
Lyrics are, in this sense, a low-cost form of evidence. They exist already, in the defendant's own voice, requiring no further investigation to produce, only interpretation to deploy. Det Sgt Corbin's role is that interpretive function, made institutional and permanent.
None of this requires that every prosecution using drill lyrics is wrong, or that Leonardo Reid's killers should not have been convicted using every legitimate tool available. Valentina Locci's account of what it means to hear a dead child's murder discussed as material for a song is not a position this entry disputes. But the manuscript's distinction between what a system claims about itself and what it actually does is not about individual cases. It is about pattern, and the pattern here is that one genre has produced a specialist evidential apparatus that other genres, whatever violence they describe, have not.
Criticism is absorbed defensively. Failures are attributed to resourcing, public behaviour, or legal constraints, rarely to the design of the laws being enforced. Accountability is deflected horizontally or downward, never upward.
Det Sgt Corbin's defence of the practice does exactly this. The message, in his words, is that "if you chose to reveal true criminal information within your music, then we will use it." That frames the entire question as one of individual choice by the defendant, never as a question of institutional design, of why this genre and not another has warranted a dedicated expert witness role. The choice being defended is not only the defendant's decision to write the lyrics. It is the Met's decision, made once and repeated at scale, about which creative output gets treated as confession and which gets treated as art.
This entry treats the Met's defence of drill lyrics as courtroom evidence, contested by campaigners as a genre-specific practice rather than a neutral rule, as an illustration of the manuscript's account of how enforcement systems present a discretionary choice about which evidence to pursue as though it were a fixed, universal standard.