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(NEW YORK) — A nonprofit organization is tackling growing attacks on the Jewish community in a splashy way – by installing bright pink billboards across the country that denounce antisemitism.

The New Jersey-based organization, JewBelong, launched the #EndJewHate campaign last June with billboards in New York, Boston, San Francisco, Washington D.C., Las Vegas and now, Miami, after flyers blaming Jews for Covid-19 were found distributed in two South Florida cities last month.

With messages like “I promise to love being Jewish 10x more than anyone hates me for it,” “3,500 years of antisemitism doesn’t make it right,” and “Does your church need armed guards? ‘Cause our synagogue does,” the organization hopes to spread awareness of antisemitism around the country.

Archie Gottesman worked in branding and marketing for over 15 years before co-founding JewBelong. Now the self-proclaimed Co-Chief-Rebrander-of-Judaism is taking notes from her previous experience designing witty billboards to draw attention to antisemitism.

“Jews belong in the conversation. Hate is painful. Hate is scary. It’s painful. It doesn’t allow us to become who we are,” said Gottesman. “It just makes us feel less than like all of those terrible things about marginalized groups, which again, this country is trying to work on and should be working on.”

According to a 2020 Pew Research Center report, there are 5.8 million Jewish adults in the United States, accounting for 2.4% of the United States’ adult population.

“One of the reasons that JewBelong is doing the campaign is not everybody realizes this, Jews are only 2% of the population in the United States,” said Gottesman. “We’re so tiny that it’s like, we need some help in terms of being able to get the message out there.”

According to the NYPD Hate Crimes Dashboard, there were 198 confirmed hate crime incidents against Jewish people in 2021, up from a still-alarming 121 incidents in 2020. The Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism recorded 2,024 antisemitic incidents in their 2020 annual audit, making it the third-highest year on record since 1979.

Incidents like the recent hostage situation at Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas, have prompted the Department of Homeland Security to address the “continuing threat of violence based upon racial or religious motivations, as well as threats against faith-based organizations.”

British national Malik Faisal Akram took a rabbi and other congregants at the Texas synagogue hostage on Jan. 15 for several hours before he was killed by police, authorities said. The incident prompted American Jewish organizations to offer solidarity and calls to action across the country.

Organizations like the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League have since urged the confirmation of President Biden’s Special Envoy nominee Deborah Lipstadt, who called the rise in antisemitism “staggering” in her confirmation hearing on Tuesday.

Lipstadt, who is currently the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University, previously served on the United States Holocaust Memorial Council.

“Dr. Deborah Lipstadt’s confirmation as the U.S. Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism would send a powerful signal to governments around the world that the U.S. takes combating antisemitism seriously and calls on them to do the same,” the ADL stated on their website.

The Vice President of the ADL’s Center on Extremism, Oren Segal, told ABC News about the importance of taking this data seriously and recognizing antisemitism and hate.

“And I should note that in the fight against antisemitism, ADL’s mission recognizes that you have to stand up and combat all forms of hatred, right, that you know, where racism or misogyny and Islamophobia grow so does antisemitism, and vice versa,” Segal said.

“The other thing that is important is to, you know, have leaders, policymakers, elected officials, reject antisemitism wherever and whenever it arises,” he continued. “Right? So, one of the problems that we’re seeing today is the normalization of antisemitism. I would even argue inability to recognize it. And that’s why it’s really important that people speak out against that wherever it happens.”

Lipstadt declined ABC News’ request for comment.

JewBelong is focused on raising awareness with their campaign that has garnered appreciation from the Jewish community and allies alike.

“I think allyship is very, very important. And I think that we’re hearing a lot from that,” said Gottesman. “We’re hearing from people who are Jewish too, who feel like they are seen – people who say things like, I am so glad that I see those billboards up because it has been a really rough time right now and I’m glad to see someone is saying something.”

Gottesman told ABC News that a woman even traveled from miles away to see one of the billboards in New York.

“I’m going to come because I want to stand there and see the billboard. I saw it on social media, but I want to come and see it because it’s really important to me,” she says the woman told her. “And then she got back to us,” Gottesman added. “She said, ‘I did and I started to cry when I saw it because I really feel like it was so important to see.’”

Despite overwhelmingly positive reception, JewBelong has been on the receiving end of hateful messages, too according to screenshots of emails and social media comments that Gottesman shared with ABC News.“We’re getting people saying you know, Hitler should have finished you all off…” she said.

Nevertheless, JewBelong is determined to keep going. “The point is never to like, worry about the people who really hate you.” said Gottesman.

The group says people all over the country have reached to ask about getting a billboard in their cities and has plans to expand in the coming weeks, with one going up in downtown Toronto on February 28.

Copyright © 2022, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(NEW YORK) — The deaths of two young aspiring rappers last week have reinvigorated the debate about drill music, a popular subgenre of rap, and its connection to violence.

Jayquan McKenley, an 18-year-old aspiring rapper from the Bronx known as CHII WVTTZ, was shot and killed Sunday morning while leaving a recording studio in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant.

McKenley was shot in the chest, police said, and was transferred to a local hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

His death came days after 22-year-old Tahjay Dobson, who is known as rapper Tdott Woo, was shot and killed Tuesday in front of his home in the neighborhood of Canarsie hours after signing a record deal.

An NYPD spokesman told ABC News on Thursday that no arrests have been made in either case and the investigations are ongoing. Major crime in New York City is up 38.5% from January 2021 to January 2022, according to NYPD statistics.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who shared McKenley’s story during a press conference Thursday, addressed the problem of gun violence in the drill community and the proliferation of guns in the city while speaking to reporters Friday.

Adams said he is set to meet with “some very top known rappers” to form a coalition of hip-hop artists dedicated to tackling the problem.

“We’re going to sit down and really bring in the rappers and show how this is impacting and is causing loss of lives of young people like them,” Adams said, adding that he will share the names of the artists and details about the meeting soon.

What is drill music?

McKenley and Dobson were both part of the Brooklyn drill music scene – a hip-hop subgenre that started in Chicago and was popularized by Chicago rappers like Chief Keef, Lil Durk,·Fredo Santana, King Louie, G Herbo, Lil Bibby and Lil Reese.

Jabari Evans, a professor of race and media who studies subgenres of urban youth, at the University of South Carolina, told ABC News that the “well-defined sound” of drill music is what makes it unique, and the genre is sonically known for “chanty choruses, dark scents and kind of warring 808 [drum beats].”

But the violence described in the lyrics and the genre’s origins in Chicago gang culture are what make it controversial.

Erik Nielson, co-author of the 2019 book “Rap on Trial: Race, Lyrics, and Guilt in America,” told ABC News that drill music’s “primary connection to violence is artistic and creative” and for drill artists, the music is “a way out of the the violent neighborhoods that they chronicle.”

According to Evans, drill rap emerged in the Southside of Chicago in the early 2010s as Chicago’s version of “gangster music” and was centered around “well-defined gang politics.”

“The meaning on the streets of Chicago was, if you were doing a ‘drill,’ that meant you were doing a crime,” he said.

But drill music “evolved” over the years, as it blew up around the world, Evans added, becoming popular in cities from NYC, to Los Angeles and countries like the United Kingdom and Uganda.

And despite the diversity of the lyrics and the artists, Evans said the genre still carries the same violent connotation in the media and for law enforcement.

‘His music was anything but hopeful’

Over the years, drill artists have been monitored and targeted by law enforcement, with some being banned from performing in their own hometowns. But artists have long argued that their music is a form of self-expression that chronicles the struggles of life on the streets.

Such was the case of McKenley, Mayor Adams said on Thursday, as he discussed problems in the city’s social services, criminal justice and school systems that leave young people vulnerable.

“There are thousands of Jayquans in our city right now,” Adams said. “Thousands of children experiencing homelessness and poverty, who need educational support, who are at high risk … we cannot let thousands of children lose their lives to violence and neglect.”

Adams said that once he learned about McKenley’s life, “a clear profile emerged of someone who needed help” because he struggled in school and at home. He was also arrested multiple times between 2018-2021, most recently for attempted murder.

Like other drill music artists, McKenley and Dobson built a following and released their music on social media.

McKenley’s Instagram account has more than 27,000 followers and Dobson has more than 94,000 followers.

“Like many young men, Jayquan was an aspiring rapper. ‘Aspiring’ is a word that means hope, but his music was anything but hopeful,” Adams said.

Asked if McKenley and Dobson’s killings could be related to gang violence, the police did not comment.

‘We can’t stereotype an entire group’

The Brooklyn drill music scene was brought into the mainstream by artists like Fivio Foreign and the late rapper Pop Smoke, who was one of the biggest stars to popularize Brooklyn drill before he was shot and killed on Feb. 19, 2020.

Hot 97’s DJ Drewski, whose legal name is Andrew Loffa, was an early supporter of Pop Smoke and the Brooklyn drill music scene. He said on Tuesday in a message posted to his Instagram Stories that while he will continue to play drill music, he will no longer play “diss/gang” music that is aimed at rival rappers.

“If ya dissing each other in the songs, don’t even send it to me!” he wrote. “We r losing too many young men and women to the streets!”

Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez told Fox5NY earlier this week that there have been “a number of shootings in Brooklyn recently that are directly related to drill.”

“These drill rap videos are causing young people to lose their lives. It’s not that the music is the cause of the violence, but it’s fueling the desire to retaliate,” he said.

Fivio Foreign, who was friends with TDott Woo, defended the genre in an interview with TMZ Tuesday, saying, “It’s not the music that’s killing people, it’s the music that’s helping n—– from the hood get out the hood.”

But Perry Williams, McKenley’s father, criticized the impact of drill music scene in an interview with Fox5NY, saying his son faced intense competition as an aspiring rapper.

“Our hip-hop is no long hip-hop anymore, and now, if you’re not doing drill, you’re not going to get no play,” Williams said.

Evans said that while “drill has produced real violence,” artists have a right to self-expression and each artist has unique motivations.

“We can’t stereotype an entire group based on the genre of music that they’ve chosen to participate in,” he said.

There’s a longstanding tradition of artists feuding through their music in hip-hop and it’s possible that it “spills over into the streets or in real life,” Nielson said.

But he added that drill music has become “a convenient boogeyman” for law enforcement – “a lazy, misinformed narrative” that ignores the “systemic causes of violence in these neighborhoods.”

Evans echoed Nielson, saying that “it’s easy to make drill a scapegoat,” but “in reality, the situations, the spaces, places, and problems that existed in certain communities existed far before drill.”

In sharing McKenley’s story, Adams addressed those systemic problems, including homelessness and poverty that left the teenager vulnerable.

“To Jayquan’s mother and father, I want you to say I’m sorry,” a tearful Adams said.

He added, “I’m sorry that your son was passed over for so long and taken from you too soon. I’m sorry we betrayed him, and so many others like him.”

ABC News’ Aaron Katersky contributed to this report.

Copyright © 2022, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(NEW YORK) — The world’s biodiversity is constantly being threatened by warming temperatures and extreme changes in climate and weather patterns.

And while that “doom and gloom” is the typical discourse surrounding how climate change is affecting biodiversity, another interesting aspect of the warming temperatures is how different species have been adapting over the decades, as the warming progresses, experts say.

Species typically adapt in one of three ways, Morgan Tingley, an associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California Los Angeles, told ABC News. They shift their distribution, change spaces or move from one place to another when the region gets too hot (either to a cooler region to higher altitudes). There are also shifts in phenology, or the seasonal timing of biological events, such as when deer are born or when birds return from migration. And finally, the species themselves change, either through evolution or natural selection, Tingley said.

How the species are changing is the least well-studied, but more and more research is emerging to pinpoint climate change’s role in adaption, Tingley said.

The loss of biodiversity is complex — and the most direct impact humans have on it is through habitat loss, rather than climate change, according to the experts. But as more research emerges, the role of climate change is being considered as well.

“Climate change is like this global killer,” Maria Paniw, an ecologist at the Doñana Biological Station, is a public research institute in Seville, Spain, told ABC News. “In effect, it often makes all the other risks that animals face much worse.”

Here are some unusual ways climate change is affecting nature:

Tuberculosis risks in meerkats increasing

Higher temperature extremes may increase the risk of outbreaks of tuberculosis in Kalahari meerkats by increasing physiological stress, as well as the movement of males between group, according to a study published in Nature Monday.

As the Kalahari Desert in South Africa continues to warm, the meerkats become more physically stressed and therefore cannot wake up early to forage for most of the year, Paniw said. The heat, combined with drought conditions from decreasing rainfall amounts, results in the decreasing availability of food as well.

That widespread physical stress can lead to endemic diseases such as tuberculosis to end up in outbreaks, exacerbated by the fact that meerkats are a social species that interact in groups.

“Because of the physical stress involved and less food availability, unhealthy conditions, these endemic diseases can turn more frequently into severe outbreaks in desolate miracle groups in this new get groups,” Paniw said.

Similar behavior has been seen in squirrels, which, when infected with a bacterial infection, can spread it “more widely” in warmer conditions, she added.

Rising ‘divorce’ rates among albatrosses

Albatross penguins, a monogamous species famous for mating for life, are seeing higher “divorce” rates as temperatures warm, a study published in the Royal Society Journal in November found.

The rate of Black-browed albatross pairs that split up and and found new mates rose to 8% during years of unusually warm water temperatures, researchers who studied more than 15,000 albatross pairs in the Falkland Islands over 15 years found.

The previous rate of divorce, 1% to 3%, typically involved female penguins finding a new mate as a result of an unsuccessful breeding season, scientists said. But during the years of atypical warmth, breakups rose even among couples that successfully reproduced.

The research is the “first evidence of a significant influence of the prevailing environmental conditions on the prevalence of divorce in a long-lived socially monogamous population,” the authors concluded.

The findings will also provide “critical insight” into the role of the environment on divorce in other socially monogamous avian and mammalian populations, the researchers said.

Polar bears are inbreeding due to melting sea ice

Polar bear populations were found to have up to a 10% loss in genetic diversity over a 20-year period as a result of inbreeding due to habitat fragmentation, a recent study published in Royal Society Journals in September found.

Scientists studied in Svalbard, the Norwegian archipelago on the Barents Sea, and found that the inbreeding in which the inbreeding occurred correlated with a “rapid disappearance of Arctic sea ice.”

Simo Maduna, a researcher at the Norwegian Institute of Bioeconomy Research and author of the study, described the results were “alarming” and “surprising” to ABC News.

The lack of genetic diversity could also eventually lead to the species’ inability to produce fertile offspring or withstand disease, Maduna said.

“With genetic diversity, when the population becomes so small, you’ll find that there will be a higher chance of closely related individuals mating and producing offspring,” he said. “But with that comes a risk in the sense that some of the traits … that are recessive, will now basically be unmasked in the population.”

When gray seals give birth is changing

Researchers who monitored gray seals in the U.K.’s Skomer Marine Conservation Zone for three decades found that climate change has caused older seal mothers to give birth to pups earlier. The observation that favors the hypothesis that climate affects phenology, or the timing of biological events, by altering the age profile of the population, a study published November in the Royal Society Journals found.

In 1992, when the researchers first began surveying grey seal populations, the midpoint of the pupping season was the first week of October. By 2004, the pupping season had advanced three weeks earlier, to mid-September, according to the study.

Warmer years were also associated with an older average age of mothers, the scientists found. Gray seals typically start breeding around 5 years old and can continue for several decades after. But the older the seals got, the earlier they gave birth.

The changes were not isolated to the U.K., as there have been observable changes in the timing of seal life throughout the Atlantic and the world, according to the study.

Amazonian birds are shrinking

Birds in undisturbed areas of the Amazon rainforest, the largest in the world, are experiencing physical changes to dryer, hotter climates, according to research published in Science Advances in November.

Scientists who studied four decades of data on Amazonian bird species found that 36 species have lost substantial weight, some as much as 2% of their body weight every decade since 1980. In addition, all of the species showed a decrease in average body weight.

“Faced with a changing environment, biological responses of species are limited to extinction, distribution shifts, and adaptation,” the authors said. “For birds in lowland Amazonia, population trends for a subset of the community are not encouraging.”

Birds are considered by scientists to be a sentinel species, which indicate the overall health of an ecosystem. The precipitation in the region declined as average temperature rose — all during the study period.

Tingley, who studies birds, said a general hypothesis surrounding this phenomenon is that animals must shrink as temperatures rise to become more “thermo-efficient” and regulating body heat.

“Because as things get warmer, it’s basically more sort of thermo-efficient to have a smaller body size because you can dissipate heat more effectively,” he said.

Copyright © 2022, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(NEW YORK) — In the five years since Utah passed the strictest legislation in the country on blood alcohol driving limits, there have been fewer traffic deaths overall in the state and lower driver alcohol involvement, a federal study found.

A law that lowered the state’s legal blood alcohol concentration limit to .05 from .08, the national standard, went into effect in 2018.

In a new study published Friday, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration compared data between 2016 — the last full year before the law was passed — and 2019 — the first year under the lower legal limit. It found that Utah had fewer traffic fatalities and fewer fatal crashes in 2019 despite drivers logging more miles.

There were 248 fatalities and 225 fatal crashes in 2019, compared to 281 fatalities and 259 fatal crashes in 2016, according to the report.

The fatality rate fell by 18.3% and the fatal crash rate decreased by 19.8% during that time, researchers found. In comparison, the rest of the United States saw a 5.9% and 5.6% decrease, respectively, during that time.

In the months following the laws’ passage and enactment, researchers also found a reduction in the rate of crashes involving alcohol at multiple BAC levels.

Additionally, the study noted survey data that found 22% of drinkers said they had changed their behaviors once the law went into effect, most commonly “ensuring transportation was available when drinking away from home.”

The passage of the law “had demonstrably positive impacts on highway safety in Utah,” the report stated. “The crash analyses highlighted reliable reductions in crash rates and alcohol involvement in crashes associated with the new law that were consistent with, or greater than, those observed or predicted by prior research.”

Utah is the first and only state to adopt the .05% BAC limit, based on recommendations from the National Transportation Safety Board.

At the time, there were concerns about the law’s potential impact on the state’s economy. However, the law does not appear to have impacted tourism, researchers said, noting that alcohol sales and consumption “appeared to continue their increasing trends under the new law as did tourism and tax revenues.”

Arrests for driving under the influence also did not rise sharply after the law went into effect, researchers noted.

“Utah typically has one of the lowest rates of impaired driving fatalities in the nation, but this study shows that all states have room for improvement,” NTSB Deputy Administrator Steven Cliff said in a statement. “As our study shows, changing the law to .05% in Utah saved lives and motivated more drivers to take steps to avoid driving impaired.”

Cliff said he hopes the study will be a “useful tool” for other states considering adopting a lower BAC limit. Lawmakers in several states, including New York, California and Hawaii, have explored it, but all states except for Utah still use .08% as the legal limit. Forty-four states have increased penalties for drivers convicted at higher BACs, according to the Governors Highway Safety Association.

Every day, 29 people in the U.S. die in crashes involving an alcohol-impaired driver, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Copyright © 2022, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(NEW YORK) — The deaths of two young aspiring rappers last week have reinvigorated the debate about drill music, a popular subgenre of rap, and its connection to violence.

Jayquan McKenley, an 18-year-old aspiring rapper from the Bronx known as CHII WVTTZ, was shot and killed Sunday morning while leaving a recording studio in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant.

McKenley was shot in the chest, police said, and was transferred to a local hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

His death came days after 22-year-old Tahjay Dobson, who is known as rapper Tdott Woo, was shot and killed Tuesday in front of his home in the neighborhood of Canarsie hours after signing a record deal.

Rising Brooklyn rapper TDott Woo fatally shot as gun violence plagues hip-hop community
An NYPD spokesman told ABC News on Thursday that no arrests have been made in either case and the investigations are ongoing. Major crime in New York City is up 38.5% from January 2021 to January 2022, according to NYPD statistics.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who shared McKenley’s story during a press conference Thursday, addressed the problem of gun violence in the drill community and the proliferation of guns in the city while speaking to reporters Friday.

Adams said he is set to meet with “some very top known rappers” to form a coalition of hip-hop artists dedicated to tackling the problem.

“We’re going to sit down and really bring in the rappers and show how this is impacting and is causing loss of lives of young people like them,” Adams said, adding that he will share the names of the artists and details about the meeting soon.

What is drill music?

McKenley and Dobson were both part of the Brooklyn drill music scene – a hip-hop subgenre that started in Chicago and was popularized by Chicago rappers like Chief Keef, Lil Durk,·Fredo Santana, King Louie, G Herbo, Lil Bibby and Lil Reese.

Jabari Evans, a professor of race and media who studies subgenres of urban youth, at the University of South Carolina, told ABC News that the “well-defined sound” of drill music is what makes it unique, and the genre is sonically known for “chanty choruses, dark scents and kind of warring 808 [drum beats].”

But the violence described in the lyrics and the genre’s origins in Chicago gang culture are what make it controversial.

Erik Nielson, co-author of the 2019 book “Rap on Trial: Race, Lyrics, and Guilt in America,” told ABC News that drill music’s “primary connection to violence is artistic and creative” and for drill artists, the music is “a way out of the the violent neighborhoods that they chronicle.”

According to Evans, drill rap emerged in the Southside of Chicago in the early 2010s as Chicago’s version of “gangster music” and was centered around “well-defined gang politics.”

“The meaning on the streets of Chicago was, if you were doing a ‘drill,’ that meant you were doing a crime,” he said.

But drill music “evolved” over the years, as it blew up around the world, Evans added, becoming popular in cities from NYC, to Los Angeles and countries like the United Kingdom and Uganda.

And despite the diversity of the lyrics and the artists, Evans said the genre still carries the same violent connotation in the media and for law enforcement.

‘His music was anything but hopeful’

Over the years, drill artists have been monitored and targeted by law enforcement, with some being banned from performing in their own hometowns. But artists have long argued that their music is a form of self-expression that chronicles the struggles of life on the streets.

Such was the case of McKenley, Mayor Adams said on Thursday, as he discussed problems in the city’s social services, criminal justice and school systems that leave young people vulnerable.

“There are thousands of Jayquans in our city right now,” Adams said. “Thousands of children experiencing homelessness and poverty, who need educational support, who are at high risk … we cannot let thousands of children lose their lives to violence and neglect.”

Adams said that once he learned about McKenley’s life, “a clear profile emerged of someone who needed help” because he struggled in school and at home. He was also arrested multiple times between 2018-2021, most recently for attempted murder.

Like other drill music artists, McKenley and Dobson built a following and released their music on social media.

McKenley’s Instagram account has more than 27,000 followers and Dobson has more than 94,000 followers.

“Like many young men, Jayquan was an aspiring rapper. ‘Aspiring’ is a word that means hope, but his music was anything but hopeful,” Adams said.

Asked if McKenley and Dobson’s killings could be related to gang violence, the police did not comment.

‘We can’t stereotype an entire group’

The Brooklyn drill music scene was brought into the mainstream by artists like Fivio Foreign and the late rapper Pop Smoke, who was one of the biggest stars to popularize Brooklyn drill before he was shot and killed on Feb. 19, 2020.

Hot 97’s DJ Drewski, whose legal name is Andrew Loffa, was an early supporter of Pop Smoke and the Brooklyn drill music scene. He said on Tuesday in a message posted to his Instagram Stories that while he will continue to play drill music, he will no longer play “diss/gang” music that is aimed at rival rappers.

“If ya dissing each other in the songs, don’t even send it to me!” he wrote. “We r losing too many young men and women to the streets!”

Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez told Fox5NY earlier this week that there have been “a number of shootings in Brooklyn recently that are directly related to drill.”

“These drill rap videos are causing young people to lose their lives. It’s not that the music is the cause of the violence, but it’s fueling the desire to retaliate,” he said.

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Fivio Foreign, who was friends with TDott Woo, defended the genre in an interview with TMZ Tuesday, saying, “It’s not the music that’s killing people, it’s the music that’s helping n—– from the hood get out the hood.”

But Perry Williams, McKenley’s father, criticized the impact of drill music scene in an interview with Fox5NY, saying his son faced intense competition as an aspiring rapper.

“Our hip-hop is no long hip-hop anymore, and now, if you’re not doing drill, you’re not going to get no play,” Williams said.

Evans said that while “drill has produced real violence,” artists have a right to self-expression and each artist has unique motivations.

“We can’t stereotype an entire group based on the genre of music that they’ve chosen to participate in,” he said.

There’s a longstanding tradition of artists feuding through their music in hip-hop and it’s possible that it “spills over into the streets or in real life,” Nielson said.

But he added that drill music has become “a convenient boogeyman” for law enforcement – “a lazy, misinformed narrative” that ignores the “systemic causes of violence in these neighborhoods.”

Evans echoed Nielson, saying that “it’s easy to make drill a scapegoat,” but “in reality, the situations, the spaces, places, and problems that existed in certain communities existed far before drill.”

In sharing McKenley’s story, Adams addressed those systemic problems, including homelessness and poverty that left the teenager vulnerable.

“To Jayquan’s mother and father, I want you to say I’m sorry,” a tearful Adams said.

He added, “I’m sorry that your son was passed over for so long and taken from you too soon. I’m sorry we betrayed him, and so many others like him.”

ABC News’ Aaron Katersky contributed to this report.

Copyright © 2022, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.