Why is the Met Police using EsDeeKid for ‘copaganda’?

Slop Enforcement — Among the AI slop and ragebait of late-stage social media, newsletter columnist Emma Garland has noticed a jarring trend – London’s police force appropriating criminalised subcultures for engagement purposes.

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Recently, I have noticed something strange happening on Instagram. And no, it’s not those AI generated soap operas of anthropomorphic fruits being unfaithful to one another, though they are certainly cause for concern in their own way. Right now though I’m talking about whatever’s going on with the official Instagram page for London’s Metropolitan Police.

I first noticed it back in February, when the account posted a video advertising the force’s new fleet of Surrons. Smash cuts of officers flipping their visors up and down or whipping across Tower Bridge are stitched together with body cam arrest footage, accompanied by audio of ‘Mist’ by the masked Liverpool rapper EsDeeKid. “Actually, we will be riding in the mist…” the caption read, “on our Surrons.” Cue an inevitable parade of flame emojis in the comments, alongside users admitting that “as much as i want to disagree this is tuff” or “the met have gained so much aura recently.”

Since then, I’ve noticed a constant stream of engagement bait coming from @metpolice_uk – mostly through hyper-stylised edits of bodycam footage with jungle music over the top, or evidence of particularly bad escape attempts (scaling a building backwards, hiding in a river) presented as “fail” videos. Sort of like You’ve Been Framed but for people experiencing one of the worst moments of their lives. Occasionally the account deals in culture news as well. The other day, they posted a fake video of Justin Bieber pulling up one of their arrests in Kilburn on YouTube during his Coachella set.

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To an extent, this is just the internet now. Every independent business, multi-media conglomerate, and government body has a 21-year-old social media manager whose strategy is to pander to an increasingly brain-rotted general population by bragging that their product mogs, or else “clapping back” at a rival brand in a co-ordinated attempt to boost their respective reaches. For years now the U.S. Department of Justice has been using X like a teenage boy, intercutting clips from Hollywood blockbusters like Gladiator, Braveheart and Top Gun with real-life drone strike footage, and releasing it as propaganda for the Iran War. (The video concludes with a voiceover declaring “flawless victory.”)

The Met is basically reworking the same formula for a British audience. While not in the least bit surprising, what I find particularly egregious about it is the choice of references. Surrons, EsDeeKid, jungle… These aren’t exactly widely known or discussed things in British mainstream culture. If they were mentioned on Sky News, they’d be read out by broadcasters in the same stilted, patronising cadence typically reserved for someone’s TIkTok handle. They’re underground references; subcultural indicators. On top of that, they’re class indicators. And in this context, they’re flagrantly being used to culture wash a police force that goes out of its way to target the same people they’re borrowing these references from. Scroll through the Met’s feed and the individuals being caught with their pants down (sometimes literally) doing petty crime are overwhelmingly young men in tracksuits.

To break down the hypocrisies one by one: most Surron models aren’t road legal in the UK. If you’re caught on one, police will likely seize it under Section 165 of the Road Traffic Act. The same goes for riding them around the streets or in parks. Coined “the 56mph electric bike bringing terror to our streets” (The Daily Mail), Surrons have become widely associated with crime in recent years. And yeah, they’re popular vehicles of choice for those in the business of phone and watch-snatching, because they’re nippy and have “excellent mobility” (as the Met put it in the caption of their IG post about what makes their own fleet of bikes so amazing). However, they are also just staples of UK street culture both in and outside of London, used for motocross and customising and generally having a laugh. I have no problem with the Met actually doing something about phone snatching, but the drill video edit about beating thieves “at their own game” smacks of the ‘one rule for me, another for thee’ principle that defines the criminal justice system in this country. As one Instagram user who was not licking the Met’s arsehole in the comments put it: “They’re having fun and we can’t?” That’s right brother, welcome to Britain.

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“I have no problem with the Met actually doing something about phone snatching, but the drill video edit about beating thieves ‘at their own game’ smacks of the ‘one rule for me, another for thee’ principle that defines the criminal justice system in this country.”

Next up is the use of jungle music, which has been heavily criminalised since the mid-90s when John Major’s government cracked down on free parties and sound system culture with The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act – a piece of legislation intended to force raves into licensed clubs (where tickets and drinks could be charged, and the profits taxed). Back in the mid-2010s, the Met’s use of live facial recognition technology was initially trialled at Notting Hill Carnival, the de facto home of sound system culture. Despite significant controversy, legal challenges, and high error rates, live facial recognition was widely rolled out in 2025, once again using Notting Hill Carnival as its launch pad. You can check Big Brother Watch, a UK-based civil liberties and privacy campaigning organisation that fights against surveillance, to see how that’s going.

Lastly, EsDeeKid is sort of a phenomenon unto himself in the music world, but it is extremely common for UK police to shut down drill (a culture EsDee is at the very least adjacent to) shows and use rap lyrics as evidence in criminal trials. A February 2021 report by the human rights charity JUSTICE described “the misuse of drill music to secure convictions” as “one of the most profound examples” of systemic racism in the UK. Meanwhile, as part of the same targeted campaign, the Met has issued takedown requests for thousands of drill and rap videos on YouTube in the last ten years. The platform has complied in the vast majority of cases. In a 2023 investigation into the impact of the video removal policy on young artists for DJ Mag, journalist Will Pritchard notes: “To date, no other genre has been targeted in the same way.” A bit rich, then, for the same force to be posing on an e-bike to a song about rolling weed blunts and having “coke for breakfast.”

All in all: extremely galling. It’s one thing to use a Tropic Thunder clip for warmongering and get a slap on the wrist from an A-list celebrity like Ben Stiller, and quite another to leverage heavily criminalised street culture into social media clout for a force that was very recently subject to an undercover Panorama investigation exposing widespread corruption, racism, and brutality. At this rate I wouldn't be surprised if the Met starts raiding stash houses in TNs and rolling out police issue balaclavas for the colder months. This used to be what old school rappers meant by “stay woke,” but unfortunately that phrase has been rendered both meaningless and cringe by the last ten years of boomers learning about it and misusing it constantly on Facebook and morning television. Regardless – and I can’t believe I even have to say this, but – if you can’t tell the difference between the kind of “hard edit” you’d see in a D-Block Europe joint and bare faced copaganda then it’s time to throw your phone in a bog. For slop you are, and to slop you shall return.

Emma Garland is a culture writer and editor based in London. Follow her on Instagram.

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