For years the Metropolitan police used form 696 to suppress black music, in this episode of Freestyling I look back at why it was scrapped, and it’s legacy of discrimination that continues to this day.
"Banning drill, you're making the situation worse
Might as well give them life, or put them in a hearse
Guy could've been rapping but now he's still packing
A big gun for when his oppositions come clapping"
Krept & Konan - 'Ban Drill'
Chapter 1: Risk Assessment
On the surface, a risk assessment form doesn’t seem particularly dangerous. And for all intents and purposes, that’s what form 696 was - risk assessment. Before shows, promoters would have to fill out a 696 so that the venue and local authorities could gauge any potential risk to public safety. The form forced promoters to disclose details about the performer as well as the type of show, and audience. This doesn’t sound all that sinister, but to understand the problem with form 696, you need to look at how it was used and the impact it would have on UK rap culture during the decade which followed.
You may already be aware of UK hip hop’s turbulent relationship with the police. A decade of cancelled shows, arrests, high profile deaths and court orders have surrounded the culture, saddling it with a host of negative stigma and an addled public perception. In 2016, a media frenzy over knife crime and gang violence peaked at the same time as a new culture of black British music started to make waves across the country - drill. An offspring of the Chicago trap movement and UK grime scene, drill’s darker tone and grittier content became synonymous with youth violence in London. The violent lyrics, dark aesthetic and masked MCs made it an easy media scapegoat for a sudden rise in stabbings and gang crime, mostly unrelated to the music. This blame game isn’t anything new; a decade earlier, grime and garage were seeing the same level of scrutiny. The media ran with their usual angle - that this new, black, urban music was influencing teenagers to commit crimes, a sentiment that has plagued the British press since the early days of UK hip hop. When you break this down it seems ridiculous, music can glamourise crime but it can’t actually make you a violent person. Still, to be seen to be doing something, in the face of a growing distrust in their capability, the Metropolitan police began to target hip hop shows as a result of this ‘moral panic’. First it was grime shows in the early 2010s, then drill artists in the latter half of the decade.
Form 696 was one of the tools used to police these genres.
From 2005 to 2017, a 696 was a legal requirement for shows, with promoters being forced to disclose information about the acts as well as the audience to help the venue and local authorities judge the potential risks to public safety. This form included the artists full name and address, the type of show (whether it was a band, MC and DJ, etc.) and an estimated breakdown of ethnic groups in attendance. This went about as well as you’d expect. Using form 696, the Metropolitan police were able to target whichever genre the tabloids were gunning for that month. Road rap, drill, grime, whatever. If it was black music and a tabloid editor thought it caused knife crime, it became a target.
A quick background check and a phone call to the venue, and a show was over before it had even begun.
In order to cancel live events, the Metropolitan police are legally required to be acting upon intelligence that the show could lead to a serious crime or risk to public safety. With form 696, they didn’t have to disclose what this may be, just that there was a credible danger. Pressure was then put on venues to drop certain events or performers with the police threatening to revoke their licenses if they didn’t cooperate. It’s not hard to see why venues complied. They had no other option.
Chapter 2: The New Stop-And-Search
You might be wondering why these genres in particular were targeted by form 696, and still continue to be suppressed by police action to this day. There’s no study or statistic that shows hip hop shows are more violent than bands, yet this is the assumption the police seem to run with. To the police, it doesn’t matter what the music is - it’s just a large gathering of young minorities and that was perceived as a threat. In fact, a recent study published by City University London argues that the police response to drill has been influenced by decades of racial stereotyping of young black men as gang members and by conflating violent images with violent individuals. It’s like issuing Quentin Tarantino with a court order for Kill Bill.
It’s not just the violence that caught the media’s attention, but the fact that it was black on black violence. White crime isn’t all that exciting to an editorial team, but black and asian crime opens up a whole world of sensational headlines and possibilities. Gangs, rap music, turf wars and drug dealing, you name it - if it’s stereotypically black then you can bet that a tabloid will link it to crime. The problem is that this stereotype isn’t solely confined to the bile spewing tabloid columnists.
The ‘gang matrix’ is a database created after the London riots to help the Metropolitan police track ‘gang’ activity. Widely scrutinized for disproportionately targeting black teenagers, the database has come under fire for perpetuating an unhealthy narrative that all knife crime is committed by young black men in gangs. 78% of individuals listed on the database are black despite black people only being responsible for 27% of youth violence. This is made more bizarre by the fact that 80% of knife crime incidents are believed to have no relation to gang crime. The myth of black gangs and knife crime is a dangerous one, one that is perpetuated by a toxic tabloid culture and a police response that distorts an already warped narrative.
Suddenly it’s not just about music, it’s about gangs.
The media, police and public assumed that rap music was influencing young black teeangers to commit crimes, join gangs and kill each other. They assumed the violent lyrics were glorifications of gang violence and knife crime, rather than what it mostly was - a way for them to discuss the troubled environments they grew up in. Hip hop has always had a great propensity for storytelling, and since the early days of the genre it has functioned as a way for artists to speak out about the deprived neighbours they lived in and crime they witnessed. The violence spurned the music, not the other way round.
As MC Konan (from grime duo Krept & Konan) explained in an article in The Guardian, “the problem isn’t with the music, it’s with the issues that the music is expressing. It’s like looking at the symptom while totally ignoring the cause.”
Only by listening to this music can we see the problems these individuals face, and better help combat them. By blindly labelling them all as violent thugs, we are ignoring the root cause of these issues faced by many young black kids in London and criminalising them for talking about it. There are plenty of solutions to help curb the rates of crime in London, policing music is not one of them.
The police did not see it like this. Form 696 became a symbolic extension of the invasive stop-and-search policies implemented around the same time, targeting black and asian individuals for a crime that hasn’t yet happened, like a sort of racist Minorty Report. You didn’t need to have committed an offence to become a target, you just needed to look like you might commit one. For over a decade, form 696 was used to suppress young, black creatives - a clumsy instrument for the police to combat a very real problem from completely the wrong angle. In their crusade to tackle knife crime, gang violence and drug dealing, culture was caught in the crossfire.
Chapter 3: Legacy
Form 696 wasn’t the only tactic employed to target these genres, and it’s removal hasn’t changed much. While a 696 was somewhat covert in its discrimination against black artists, recent uses of the Serious Crime Act (and Serious Crime Prevention Orders) against drill and grime MCs have been anything but. Originally intended to break up gang culture in London, the Act was used to target individuals suspected of inciting violence or unrest. From removing hundreds of music videos to banning artists from performing and even issuing prison sentences, the Serious Crime Act is a blunt instrument used for a variety of tasks that it is completely unfit for.
Suddenly drill rappers were being charged under the same legislation as traffickers, drug dealers and terror suspects for nothing more than suspected gang affiliations or violent lyrics. The commander of the Metropolitan Police’s gang-crime unit even suggested that drill rappers should be treated as terrorists.
In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, it’s easy to assume that British police are less racist than their US counterparts. Unfortunately, we’re more similar than we’d like to admit. Over the past two decades, dozens of black men have been shot down in the street or killed in police custody. A recent study shows that stop-and-searches are eight times more likely to target black people, despite overwhelming evidence that this is ineffective and unjust. The ‘gang matrix’ is flawed and the knife crime narrative false. The UK has a problem with race and this affects all facets of modern life, including music.
While the Metropolitan Police has a duty to protect the public from gang violence and crime, it has no place in censoring black music or culture. What started with form 696 and the cancellation of grime shows, has led to a decade of discriminatory practices against black musicians. First these artists were deplatformed, victims of targeted bans and their shows cancelled. Now the Serious Crime Act is treating them like terrorists. Whether this is intentional or not - it doesn’t matter. It’s a problem and we are a long way from finding a solution.
Epilogue
When I started writing this piece, I had no idea this was where I’d end up. An essay about censorship turned into one about false gang narratives, media perception and terrorism. But I’m glad this is how it turned out, because I believe that the censorship of black music is something we don’t hear a lot about and when we do, it’s usually accompanied by the image of a car full of weapons or a rapper killed in a gang feud. Perception is a very real problem that grime, drill and UK hip hop has faced for well over a decade, and a large part of that comes from treatment by police and the press as well as our own subconscious biases. Although this argument might not be as sensational as ‘Blood Money: Fury Over Drill Killings’ (a headline from The Sun in 2018), it is a conversation we need to be having about the police’s relationship with black culture and music.
What started with a risk assessment form and cancelled shows has spiralled into something a lot worse and it’s time we started talking about it.
Alex Thompson
Editor
Below are a variety of articles, essays and documentaries I used in researching this article and from which I have lifted several of my arguements. They are all worth a read if this article has left you with more questions than answers.
Ryan Bassil ‘Banning Drill Does More Harm Than Good’ Vice
‘The Police vs Grime Music’ Noisey
Konan, ‘Music Saved My Life…’ The Guardian
Ciaran Thapar, ‘The Moral Panic Against Drill…’ Pitchfork
Vikram Dodd, ‘Stop And Search 8 Times More Likely To Target Black People’ The Guardian
‘What Is The Gang Matrix’ Amnesty International UK
Jonathan Ilan ‘Digital Street Culture Decoded…’ The British Journal Of Criminology
Ciaran Thapar ‘Don’t Censor Drill Music, Listen To What It’s Trying To Tells Us’ The Guardian
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