Hip Hop & Policing
A Seven Part Series from decARcerate
Sound of da Police
How KRS-One Led the Way for Hip-Hop's Critique of American Policing
Donald F. Tibbs
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Hip Hop artist KRS-One, whose moniker stands for “Knowledge Reigns Supreme,” shows how rap music uses art to dialogue and openly critique law, race, and the Fourth Amendment. Here, I will show the connective fissures of race and legal consciousness during the early years of Hip Hop to demonstrate the power of Hip Hop’s critique of policing in the United States.
KRS-One is significant because of his body of work. His most familiar songs—Criminal Minded, Black Cop, and my personal favorite, Sound of da Police—are some of the earliest expressions of “conscious rap” during the early years of Hip Hop. Finally, KRS-One does something more than most of current Hip Hop: he actively, as part of his rap persona, seeks to teach history and philosophy through his lyrical styles, thereby justifying his self-proclamation as the Teacha and supporting his popular songs like You Must Learn and My Philosophy.
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But it is his groundbreaking song, Sound of da Police, where KRS-One walks us through the first stage of Hip Hop’s critical musings on colorblindness and state power by issuing a powerful critique of the nature of Black alienation in a society experiencing change and challenge in the post-Civil Rights Era. Although much of the criticism of Hip Hop has centered largely on the violence present in its word—the racism, homophobia, misogyny, drug dealing, and financial irresponsibility—Sound of da Police claims no ownership.
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Rather, the song investigates the struggle of Black existentialism within a system of American criminal justice that appropriates colorblindness as an interpretative strategy for understanding the disjointed character of Black double consciousness under American law. Using policing and Black existence as a backdrop, the song suggests how Black identity remains problematized and even fragmented by the law in the post-Civil Rights Era. KRS-One explains this in his first verse:
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Stand clear! Don man a-talk
You can’t stand where I stand, you can’t walk where I walk.
Watch out! We run New York,
Police man come, we bust him out the park.
I know this for a fact, you don’t like how I act
You claim I’m sellin’ crack
But you be doin’ that
I’d rather say “see ya” Cause I would never be ya
Be a officer? You WICKED overseer!
Ya hotshot, wanna get props and be a saviour
First show a little respect, change your behavior
Change your attitude, change your plan
There could never really be justice on stolen land
Are you really for peace and equality?
Or when my car is hooked up, you know you wanna follow me
Your laws are minimal
Cause you won’t even think about looking at the real criminal
This has got to cease
Cause we be getting HYPED to the sound of da police!
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Using Hip Hop, KRS-One narrates how policing Black people is actually the cornerstone of anti-Blackness under American law. Although African Americans are, arguably, protected by the U.S. Constitution to the same degree as whites, KRS-One claims that those “laws are minimal,” meaning they fail to protect Black freedom from police oppression. According to KRS-One, this is possible because the police “won’t even think about looking at the real criminal,” by which he means the police themselves. Worse, civil rights organizations, which were once the hallmark of Black liberation and freedom from legal oppression, are struggling to find modern ways of effectively managing police practices. The ability to sue police, departmentally and individually, has become so bootstrapped with legal protections that it is nearly impossible to prevail in a civil lawsuit challenging oppressive police practices.
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Between departmental cover-ups, police protocol and training policies, and the creation of legal protections in the Good Faith Doctrine and Qualified Immunity, legal vindication against police violence is Sisyphean: an endless, unavailing labor or task. Further, post-Civil Rights juries continue to encourage bad police behavior through outright acquittals in criminal trials involving police brutality or reward the same through the reinstatement of rogue cops to their jobs, with the added insult of back pay. The conflation of Blackness and criminality is not limited to the perimeter of the urban core; rather, its pervasiveness stretches into nonBlack communities as well. In other communities, the police have extended and the courts have endorsed the “out-of-place” practice of reasonable suspicion, which permits a police officer to find suspicious a person of one ethnicity in an area primarily populated by another. Thus, when Blacks enter white neighborhoods, their race becomes the outward indicator of potential criminal activity and justifies stopping, questioning, searching, and in some cases murdering them. Similarly, when whites enter the ghetto, the police either assume that they are engaged in criminal activity, typically as consumers of drugs or prostitution, or that they are lost or in need of help. The “out-of-place” practice of reasonable suspicion applied in both communities and random investigatory stops and street sweeps applied in Black ones indicates how race is often the sole factor in deciding which criminal suspects to detain.
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The U.S. Supreme Courts’ widespread acceptance of race as probative of criminal activity and the steady erosion of the reasonable suspicion standard set by the judiciary’s racist interpretations of Terry v. Ohio produce one surety: poor, urban Blacks will always find themselves caught in the clutches of the penal system in numbers and with an intensity far disproportionate to their criminal involvement. In this regard, the conflation of Blackness and crime, as collective representations of justice policy, remakes race and reactivates racism by re-legitimating racism in American law and order.
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In the post-Civil Rights Era, this current expression of anti-Black animus takes the form of public vituperation of young Black men as criminals and violent deviants. Here, modern policing draws on slave and Jim Crow paradigms for policing Black communities. This is what KRS-One means when he claims the police act as modern day overseers of state power vexed against Black freedom.
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Now here’s a likkle truth,
Open up your eye
While you’re checking out the boom-bap, check the exercise
Take the word “overseer,” like a sample
Repeat it very quickly in a crew for example
Overseer
Overseer
Overseer
Overseer
Officer, Officer, Officer, Officer!
Yeah, officer from overseer
You need a little clarity?
Check the similarity!
The overseer rode around the plantation
The officer is off paroling all the nation
The overseer could stop you what you’re doing
The officer will pull you over just when he’s pursuing
The overseer had the right to get ill
And if you fought back, the overseer had the right to kill
The officer has the right to arrest
And if you fight back they put a hole in your chest!
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Unlike the first verse of Sound of da Police, KRS-One uses his second verse to ask for an explanation about police rather than make a statement about it. Specifically, he wants to know why Blacks are policed more heavily than whites. Hefty resources are spent on overseeing the Black population in ways that place Blacks and the police at ideological odds: freedom vs. repression, survival vs. destruction. Perhaps KRS-One recognizes these ideological odds, analogizing plantation overseers to modern police overseers:
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(Woop!) They both ride horses
After 400 years, I’ve got no choices!
The police them have a little gun
So when I’m on the streets, I walk around with a bigger one
(Woop-woop!) I hear it all day
Just so they can run the light and be upon their way.
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KRS-One’s reference to how the police “oversee” Black men is rooted in current policing’s reaffirmation of the omnipotence of a legal Leviathan in the restricted domain of public order maintenance, symbolized by continuous battles against street delinquency. For example, Broken Windows styles of policing, which focuses on enforcing minor petty offenses such as jaywalking, loitering, or vagrancy, is used by the modern metropolis to address major political dysfunction within local communities. Instead, however, it only succeeds at encouraging anti-Black policing and prosecutions.
As a result, Hip Hop artists have replaced the political visionaries of the Black Power Era as the voices of resistance to, and freedom from, racial and political oppression deeply embedded within American law. Recognizing the rise of Hip Hop, and rap music helps us clearly see how stories of law and order shifted from the soapbox poets of Black Power to the street poets of Hip Hop. In this space, Hip Hop’s shifting discourse on law takes a decidedly different form: where reading or listening to rap music reveals how the fallout of the war on crime and the war on drugs exposes the deep connections between Black social existence and transformation within American law.
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