![]() “We can see disproportionate and discriminatory treatment of Black people throughout the criminal justice process, and this use of rap feeds into that,” she says. She’s collated over 30 UK appeal judgements reported between 2005-2020 from publicly accessible legal databases, and the majority of the defendants in the rap evidence trials she’s identified are Black men and boys - particularly teenagers - which falls in line with the overwhelming over-representation of Black and minority ethnic boys within the prison population. This comes as little surprise to Owusu-Bempah. In their 2019 book Rap on Trial, authors Erik Nielson and Andrea Dennis write that “the sense that rap music is threatening or dangerous is a reflection of the stereotypes that many people harbor about Black people in general.” These studies also show that violent rap lyrics evoke stereotypes of Black criminality. In a 2018 study by Adam Dunbar and Charis Kubrin, authors of violent rap lyrics were still perceived more negatively than authors of violent country and heavy metal lyrics. In the latter study, those presented with a defendant as a rapper were more likely to think they were capable of committing murder, than one who wasn’t a rapper. When asked to comment on how offensive and dangerous they thought the lyrics were, the group given the supposed rap song reacted significantly more negatively. One group was told it was a rap song, the other a country song. In the former study, two groups of participants read a passage of violent lyrics. In 1999 studies, two studies were conducted, one by Carrie B. Studies in the US suggest that the use of rap evidence is highly prejudicial because people view rap more negatively than other music genres. “The risk is that juries will attach far more weight to the evidence than it warrants,” she says, “and the great danger which could then result is wrongful convictions.” She argues that because jurors are often not familiar with rap’s genre codes, such as braggadocio and fictional first person narratives, it’s easy for them to mistakenly conflate the menacing musical persona in the song with the young person sitting in the dock. Owusu-Bempah agrees. Rap is a complex and coded but very provocative kind of language, which has been proven to be extremely popular with youth audiences.” Quinn puts it this way: “Adopting a violent or criminal persona, as drill rappers do, can easily be misconstrued by prosecutors. She explains that violence and weapons “are common subject matter in rap music, so it becomes easy to make that link,” but argues that “when it comes to assessing the relevance of the evidence to the case, the courts often do so without considering that rap is an art form or the conventions of the music.” One of them is Abenaa Owusu-Bempah, an Assistant Professor of Law at the London School of Economics. Prosecuting Rap is networked with other academics and legal professionals. But she stresses, “what absolutely must not happen is that the heightened moral panic about drill and violence, with all its power and baggage, is pulled into the courtroom - and that’s exactly what’s happening at the moment.” “There are sometimes loose links between drill and youth violence and sometimes incidents of violence can authenticate the music in concerning ways, which has been greatly amplified by the media,” she says. Quinn sees the rise in rap evidence use coinciding with the popularity of drill music, which has been accused of exacerbating an epidemic of knife crime in the UK. On what basis is a musical genre being used as proof of criminality? And what’s being done to challenge it?Įithne Quinn is an author, Senior Lecturer at University of Manchester and the head of a research project called Prosecuting Rap: Criminal Justice and UK Black Youth Expressive Culture, which highlights the use of rap evidence in UK criminal trials. ![]() ![]() So far, researchers at University of Manchester have identified over 60 cases where “rap evidence” has been used in this way, dating from the mid ’00s till 2020. ![]() Increasingly, rap videos and lyrics are being used as evidence in criminal trials: presented by prosecutors as autobiographical confessions to crimes, threats of violence or proof of gang affiliation. But the phenomenon is becoming more sinister. In the UK, Form 696 was regarded as the London Metropolitan Police’s way of shutting down grime gigs in the ’00s, and more recently, drill artists have been slapped with injunctions, banning them from performing and making drill music. Rap music has long been subjected to heavy policing and censorship, and not just in the United States.
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