Gangs’ sick ‘scoreboard’ sport with factors awarded for stabbings and murders
Gangsters in the UK are using social media to keep ‘tallies’ in a sick scoreboard game that’s fuelling deadly street wars. They’re being awarded points for violence in twisted league-style tables shared online. And the more serious the attack, the more points a gang member gets.
Police say this scoreboard system is one of the main reasons for a rise in youth violence across Lambeth and Southwark this year, which has seen 11 murders in just eight months.
The grim trend was exposed in an investigative report by LBC. It found gangs using platforms including TikTok and Snapchat to post and update “gang scoreboards” and Premier League-style league tables tracking who is “winning” the street war.
25-year-old bus driver Auguste-Marie Bile-aka Amoa(Image: Metropolitan Police/PA Wire)
YouTube is also being used to publish drill rap videos in which gang members openly reference the scoreboards and boast about their standing. Police intelligence suggests the tallying is not just bravado, but a structured “scoring” system that awards points based on the severity of an attack and even the location of injuries.
UK gang experts have documented a tiered scale that can award 50 points for wounds to the head, 30 for wounds to the chest, 20 for wounds to the stomach, 10 for wounds to the leg and five for wounds to the arm, Sky News reported in 2019. The biggest, unquantified scores are reserved for fatal attacks, with murders treated as the maximum “win”.
The scoreboards are also said to track a range of crimes, starting with filmed car chases and turf incursions where gang members record themselves entering rival areas. They then log violent attacks including “ching” and “quining”, terms used to describe stabbings or swinging large blades such as machetes or zombie knives, as well as drive-by shootings involving illegal firearms and, at the most extreme level, murders.
Met makes hundreds of arrests in week-long gang violence crackdown(Image: Met Police)
Investigators say the online boasting is laced with deliberate humiliation designed to provoke retaliation. In one post uncovered by investigators, a gang member taunted a rival by writing: “We are wiping the floor with you on the scoreboard,” London Evening Standard reported in 2021.
Police and youth workers fear the “gamification” of violence is removing empathy from the attacks, turning real injuries and deaths into something teenagers treat as competitive “fun”, points and clout. The result, officers say, is a vicious cycle of tit-for-tat revenge as gangs attempt to outdo each other and climb the table, the Daily Mail reported in 2019.
The tally system is also dragging innocent people into the chaos. Among the 11 murder victims this year was Auguste-Marie Bile-aka Amoa, a 25-year-old bus driver shot dead in a drive-by in Clapham. Police reportedly confirmed he was an innocent bystander with no connection to gang activity, killed simply because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
An operation targeting and disrupting gang violence in South London has seen nearly 300 arrests and 38 dangerous weapons seized(Image: Met Police)
The obsession with “scoring” has surfaced in other cases too. Undercover Met documentation has described a Premier League-style table active across South London, with the “67 Gang” from Brixton listed at the top of one tracking system, competing against groups from Upper and Lower Tulse Hill and the GAS Gang from the Angell Town Estate, Metro reported.
In another example, teenager Rhyhiem Barton rapped about the digital “scoreboard” in a Moscow17 drill video that clocked more than 300,000 views on YouTube before he was later fatally shot in London. In Ipswich, four young men – Aristote Yenge, Kyreis Davies, Isaac Calver and Adebayo Amusa – were sentenced to life in prison for murdering Tavis Spencer-Aitkens after uploading a YouTube video setting out their intent to “score points” against a rival group from a different postcode.
In response to the spiralling violence in South London, the Met has launched a major undercover crackdown dubbed Operation Gallium to target what officers describe as a brutal, social-media-driven gang war, according to LBC. The Met’s Proactive Firearms Team and specialist gang hunters have executed hundreds of warrants and made more than 700 arrests aimed at the most dangerous gang networks.
The major week-long crackdown across Lambeth and Southwark saw officers execute warrants, conduct stop and searches to remove dangerous drugs and weapons from the streets (Image: Met Police)
Officers have also reportedly seized more than 41 weapons, including illegal firearms, machetes and zombie knives, alongside hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of class-A drugs. But police insist enforcement alone will not end the bloodshed if social media continues to host the scoreboards.
“There is no doubt social media is used to agitate and incite violence,” head of Metropolitan Police’s Trident Unit, which tackles London gangs, Craig Turning, told Sky News in 2019. “We take them down as quickly as we identify them.
“If we were to see something like scoring, we’d seek to take those websites down.”
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