Prosecuting Rap: Criminal Justice and UK Black Youth Expressive Culture

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Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) people are heavily overrepresented in the criminal justice system of England and Wales. While they make up 14% of the population, they represent 25% of adult prisoners and an alarming 41% of under 18s in custody. These figures led Theresa May to commission a review into the treatment and outcomes of BAME people in the criminal justice system and the resulting high-profile Lammy Report (2017) revealed a lack of scrutiny in policing and prosecution processes that is fostering unfair outcomes, especially for BAME youth. Lammy's findings have since been amplified by reports from the UN (2018) and Amnesty International (2018), which both suggest that UK policing and prosecuting practices toward young black men are contravening human rights laws. One under-scrutinized area that may be feeding into these disparities is how police and prosecutors are using black youth expressive culture as evidence to shore up their criminal cases. Since the arrival of Grime in the early 2000s in London, UK rap has become hugely popular, producing household-names like Dizzee Rascal, Wiley and Stormzy. Many young people emulate these rap stars by composing rap verse and making amateur videos which they post on digital platforms for free. However, if these young people fall under suspicion of gang involvement or a crime, the police have increasingly come to search their phones and bedrooms for rap lyrics and trawl the internet for videos to help build a case against them. Rap is a slippery form of expression and entertainment that should be used with extreme caution by prosecutors. Because the young people who make rap are often poor and black, the danger is that rap music works in inflammatory ways for the prosecution, confirming stereotypical ideas for majority-white judge and jurors about young black men. Preliminary findings suggest that rap can work powerfully as a pathway to conviction, even sometimes in cases in which there is a shortage of conventional evidence.Some types of rap music are no doubt vulnerable to such use by the criminal justice system. Some Grime and most Drill rap strikes a menacing pose, claims to 'keep it real', and includes violent 'badman' themes. This music can be disturbing (indeed, one of Drill's intentions is to provoke). But the lyrics are by no means simply autobiographical and realist. Instead, it combines elements of autobiography with black folklore, working-class youth alienation, macho swagger, and commercial formula, operating in a broader pop-culture landscape for young men in which violent and criminal themes are pervasive (e.g. violent gaming culture, action and gangster films, etc.).The introduction of rap culture into legal cases typically goes uncontested by defence counsels. Defendants in these cases are very rarely called to the stand in their own trials. Therefore, the use of rap by the Crown is not normally scrutinized or contested. This is especially worrying when rap is used in serious crime and joint enterprise cases, including murder trials that carry mandatory life sentences.This project will bring the kind of much-needed scrutiny called for in David Lammy's report to the legal use of rap culture in order to help ensure fairer trials. It will: foster the development of rich, interdisciplinary arguments about rap to enhance understanding; support defence counsels by developing a handbook on how rap evidence can be contested; coach new scholar-defence experts who can scrutinize this legal use; engage with the media and public to raise awareness; and work with advocacy groups to communicate with policymakers and challenge prosecuting rap trends and the wider criminalization of black youth.