Bag of Snakes is an occasional email series that highlights different aspects of the criminal punishment system in Arkansas. Learn more here.
Click here to catch up on Part One.
Be advised that this edition of Bag of Snakes features a song with explicit lyrics.
F*ck Tha Police: N.W.A’s Stunning Denunciation of American Policing
By andré douglas pond cummings
Hip hop music and culture profoundly influences attitudes toward and perceptions about criminal justice in the United States. At base, hip hop lyrics and their cultural accoutrements turn U.S. punishment philosophy upon its head, effectively defeating the foundational purposes of American crime and punishment. Prison and punishment philosophy in the U.S. is based on clear principles of retribution and incapacitation, where prison time for crime should serve to deter individuals from engaging in criminal behavior. In addition, the stigma that attaches to imprisonment should dissuade criminals from recidivism. Hip hop culture denounces crime and punishment in the United States in a way that essentially defies the underlying penal philosophy that has been adopted and championed by U.S. legislators for decades.
Since the inception of hiphop as a musical genre, hiphop artists have rhymed in a narrative format that starkly informs listeners and fans that the entire fundamental regime of prison for crime in the United States is suspect, illegitimate and profane. As U.S. criminal law and punishment is profane and illegitimate to many, as hiphop artists historically and fiercely argue, then two of the primary foundational underpinnings of the criminal justice system are lost on the hiphop generation, those of deterrence and stigma. “When . . . incarceration is not sufficiently stigmatized, it loses it value as deterrence.”
Harsh critique of the the inequities in the criminal justice system and police brutality was on early display in N.W.A’s 1989 track Fuck The Police:
Fuck the police comin’ straight from the underground;
A young n**** got it bad ‘cause I'm brown;
I’m not the other color, So police think; They have the authority to kill a minority;
Fuck that shit ‘cause I ain't the one;
For a punk motherfucker with a badge and a gun;
To be beaten on and thrown in jail; We can go toe to toe in the middle of a cell;
Fuckin’ with me ‘cause I’m a teenager; With a little bit of gold and a pager;
Searchin’ my car, lookin’ for the product;
Thinkin’ every n**** is sellin’ narcotics;
You'd rather see me in the pen; Than me and Lorenzo rollin' in a Benz-o;
* * * *
And on the other hand, Without a gun, they can’t get none;
But don’t let it be a black and white one;
‘Cause they’ll slam ya down to the street top;
Black police showin' out for the white cop;
Ice Cube will swarm;
On any motherfucker in a blue uniform;
Just ‘cause I’m from the CPT; Punk police are afraid of me, huh;
A young n**** on the warpath; And when I finish, it's gonna be a bloodbath;
Of cops dyin' in L.A.; Yo, Dre, I got something to say.
When N.W.A. released the furiously defiant “Fuck The Police” in 1989, a generation of young people were instructed that law enforcement routinely targets minority youth expecting most to be involved in drug trafficking and that the criminal justice system often prefers that young African American youth be installed in jails and prisons, whether guilty of crime or not. At that time, the l980s, this exposed notion of targeting, profiling and preferred imprisonment of inner-city youth for soft crime, and the clarion call for defiance in response to this unjust system, was audacious and stunning in its raw, stark realized exposé. And law enforcement, together with the traditional majority, reacted swiftly in an attempt to stifle and silence this critique.
Notwithstanding this attempt to silence, beginning in the 1980s with Public Enemy, KRS One, N.W.A and Ice-T amongst many others, hip hop artists began describing in stark rhymes and narratives, a United States criminal justice system that is inequitable and unfair, a system that targets and profiles African American and inner-city youth, and those artists’ descriptions became, in Chuck D’s words “the Black CNN.” These rap artists knew that they were the Black CNN and were influencing and molding a generation. Hip hop’s musical tradition is to be, in many instances, black America’s first response to current inequities and discriminations. “Whether it’s Katrina three years ago, the L.A. riots in 1992, Jesse Jackson’s run in 1984, you know, hip-hop was seen as black America’s first response.” In 2004, Professor Paul Butler wrote “At the same time that an art form created by African American and Latino men dominates popular culture, African American and Latino men dominate American prisons. Unsurprisingly then, justice—especially criminal justice—has been a preoccupation of the hip-hop nation. The culture contains a strong descriptive and normative analysis of punishment by the people who know it best.”
Thus, a movement that was beginning to dominate a generation combined with artists that understood the potential dominance and that lived on the front lines of the crime and punishment system in the United States, came together in a perfect storm of platform, audience and defiance. The hiphop generation was going to learn, in no uncertain terms, about the inequities, injustices and discriminations in the U.S. criminal justice system. Hip-hop exposes the current punishment regime as profoundly unfair. It demonstrates this view by, if not glorifying law breakers, at least not viewing all criminals with disgust which the law seeks to attach to them.
Hip-hop points out the incoherence of the law’s construct of crime, and it attacks the legitimacy of the system. Its message has the potential to transform justice in the United States. Thus, in the 1980’s and 1990’s hip hop stars were describing, to their eager audiences (including millions of suburban white youth), the inequities in criminal law and punishment, including: (a) the specific targeting of inner city communities (revealed by the now well known huge prison population disparity (more than 50% of imprisoned men are African American, while only 13% of the total U.S. population is black)); (b) the egregiously unfair imprisonment of inner city crack dealers versus suburban cocaine dealers (revealed by the well known crack vs. cocaine sentencing disparity (prison time for a crack seller or taker was 100 times greater than prison time for a cocaine seller or taker – now it is simply 18 times greater)); (c) the American epidemic of police brutality inspired by the “siege mentality” that infests most large police forces (revealed by the well known brutalizations of Rodney King, Abner Louima, Sean Bell, Eric Garner, Tamir.
In hearing and feeling these lessons dropped by hip hop educators, an entire hip hop nation learned and continues to learn a much different system of criminal justice than that what was taught to them in grade school, high school, college and graduate school, including law school. More than any other lesson learned from N.W.A and other hip hop pioneers, perhaps the most striking was that the entire foundational principle of prison for crime in the United States is suspect, illegitimate and profane.