Former mayor Sabrina Francis was taking questions at a council meeting on Monday

CAMDEN’S culture chief said some venues were being “overpoliced” when asked why rappers were struggling to get a booking.

Sabrina Francis suggested on Monday that venues felt pressure to rip up bookings when officers raised a complaint.

She said: “When I sat on licensing committees, we had very clear instances of police overpolicing specific events and using tiny legal by-laws to not let events take place.”

Cllr Francis was the first black woman to become Mayor of Camden two years ago and now sits on Camden’s cabinet, holding the culture and youth safety portfolio.

She was taking questions at a meeting of Camden’s culture scrutiny committee where it was suggested that young artists in the rap industry were being blocked from performing.

Chairman Councillor Awale Olad said: “Recently I’ve been getting a lot of complaints from – I don’t know if you refer to them as grime artists or drill artists but they come under the umbrella of hip hop musicians, quite famous ones.

“They struggle to get Camden venues to give them space to perform and the reason for that is the police threaten those venues with pulling their licence.”

He said he was trying to persuade them to find venues to film their music videos as residents were complaining that they were being shot on the streets.

Cllr Olad said the “core problem is the police” and not the venues themselves, which were happy to host them.
Drill music specifically has been at the centre of a heated debate on the lines between creativity and the glorification of territorial violence – as some tracks have referenced real life crimes in Camden and elsewhere.

But other young rappers in the borough have been praised for finding a voice through music and the poetry and realism in the genre.

Cllr Francis said: “The difficulty is that a venue can effectively say no to who they want, but it’s really hard to prove the pressure they are getting from the top. I do get to speak to Camden police quite often, so it’s something I will take away.”