guerillas in the mist (cop killing II)

Right about now NWA court is in full effect.
Judge Dre presiding in the case of NWA versus the police department.
Prosecuting attorneys are MC Ren, Ice Cube, and Eazy muthafuckin E.
Order order order. Ice Cube take the muthafuckin stand.
Do you swear to tell the truth the whole truth
and nothin but the truth so help your black ass?
- N.W.A., “Fuck the Police”

Prosecutors Ren, Cube, and E (like their compatriot T),  are not shy about pointing to police brutality as the root of their rage: whether that brutality entails being maced, beat or “slammed to the street top” — by either a white cop, or a black cop. What the conceit of NWA’s “Fuck the Police” also calls attention to, however,  is that this condemnation is not limited to the much-reviled po’, but in fact the entire legal establishment. A minority-killing police does not just kill minorities; he feels that he has the authority to kill a minority.

Readin my rights and shit, it’s all junk
Pullin out a silly club, so you stand / With a fake assed badge and a gun in your hand

Here, Cube sneers at the purported legal authority bestowed upon law enforcement officials by the “badge and gun.” At the same time he scoffs at the efficacy of Miranda rights, that much-valorized trophy of civil rights lawyers.

(For the nonlegal among us, the origin of being “read your rights” is the Supreme Court’s decision in Miranda v. Arizona, 384 US 436 (1966), in which the court held that a defendant’s statements are only admissible at trial if the s/he was informed of the right to an attorney; to remain silent, etc. Notably, the case came as a response to brutal police interrogation tactics resulting in coerced confessions/testimony).

NWA is apparently so disillusioned with the legal protections of the criminal justice system that it institutes its own court. The court is far from traditional — it strays far from legal ethics rules that would require Judge Dre to recuse himself, for example; the prosecutors are also witnesses; and from the sound of things, it’s clearly rowdy in this imaginary courtroom. Yet despite its procedural roughness, it has more legitimacy than the courts of the great state of California, or even the United States of America: it purports to present the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

FUCK THE POLICE, for Darryl Gates.
FUCK THE POLICE, for Rodney King.
FUCK THE POLICE, for my dead homies.
FUCK THE POLICE, for your freedom.
…
COP KILLER, but tonight we get even

- Ice T/ Body Count, “Cop Killer”

The truth, for example, that the Rodney King case failed to demonstrate. Now if you’re like me, you grew up with footage of the Rodney King beating, and the subsequent [choose your own adventure: (pg 1) riot | (pg 3) uprising]. But to recap:

• 

  After a highspeed car chase, LAPD order King out of his car, shoot him with taser, and beat him repeatedly with batons.

• Bystander videotapes it; shows tape to police; is ignored —————->
• LA district attorney charges LAPD officers with use of excessive force.
• California Court of Appeals removes the Los Angeles judge in charge of the case for “bias.”
• The new judge moves the trial from Los Angeles to Simi Valley,  a conservative and predominantly white city in Ventura County.
• Change of venue changes the jury pool. The King jury ultimately consists of Ventura County residents — ten whites, one Latino, and one Asian.  
• Jury acquits.

Lets be clear, Rodney King is a synechdoche of the failure of LA’s legal institutions to grapple with  police brutality, not an outlier case. Another excellent example of why some folks might think that Judge Dre would be a better choice than the federal or state judiciary is  Lyons v. City of Los Angeles, excerpted below:

The complaint alleged that, on October 6, 1976, at 2 a.m., [plaintiff Adolph] Lyons was stopped by the defendant officers for a traffic or vehicle code violation, and that, although Lyons offered no resistance or threat whatsoever, the officers, without provocation or justification, seized Lyons and applied a “chokehold” — either the “bar arm control” hold or the “carotid-artery control” hold or both — rendering him unconscious and causing damage to his larynx. [Lyon] alleged that the City’s police officers, “pursuant to the authorization, instruction and encouragement of Defendant City of Los Angeles, regularly and routinely apply these choke holds in innumerable situations where they are not threatened by the use of any deadly force whatsoever,” that numerous persons have been injured as the result of the application of the chokeholds, that Lyons and others similarly situated are threatened with irreparable injury in the form of bodily injury and loss of life, and that Lyons “justifiably fears that any contact he has with Los Angeles Police officers may result in his being choked and strangled to death without provocation, justification or other legal excuse.”

Originally, Lyons’ complaint alleged that at least two deaths had occurred as a result of the application of chokeholds by the police. His first amended complaint alleged that 10 chokehold-related deaths had occurred. By May, 1982, there had been five more such deaths.

So then the LAPD loses its lawsuit, and has to change its policy of choking people until they pass out for no reason, right?
Wrong. The Supremest Court of this country threw out Lyon’s plea for a policy change because “it is surely no more than speculation to assert either that Lyons himself will again be involved in one of those unfortunate instances.”

To its credit, four members of the court dissented. And furthermore, they start their dissenting opinion: “Respondent Adolph Lyons is a 24-year-old Negro male who resides in Los Angeles.” The dissenters continue: “In a city where Negro males constitute 9% of the population, they have accounted for 75% of the deaths resulting from the use of chokeholds. Since 1975, no less than 16 persons have died following the use of a chokehold. Twelve have been Negro males.” In other words, “Yo Court, dude is black and lives in LA. It’s a lot more than speculation that the police will be hassling this guy again. Haven’t you been listening to NWA?”

So yes. Fuck the police for Rodney King. Also Adolph Lyons. But who’s this Darryl Gates fella?

O, Darryl Gates. Did you know you were going to be a rap music icon when you started that whole “Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums” business?

April 29th was power to the people/ and we might just see a sequel
cause police got equal pay / A horse is a pig that don`t fly straight
Doin Darryl Gates/ but is Willie Williams
Down with the pilgrims?/ Just a super slave
…
Gorilla straight from the mist / But I don’t miss when it comes to this
-  Ice Cube, “Wicked”

“Gorilla straight from the mist” being a reference to a comment turned up during the course of the Rodney King trial: one of the police officers most involved in King’s beating had come upon a domestic disturbance involving some Black folks shortly prior to the whole King incident, and described it as a scene right out of “Gorillas in the Mist” — the documentary starring, well, gorillas. Which is to say, hella fuckin’ racist. Ice Cube’s reclamation of it, though, hearkens back to the point I made in my previous post (BEARJEW).

Darryl Gates got the studio surrounded
Cause he don’t like the niggaz that I’m down with
Motherfucker wanna do us
Cause I like Nat, Huey, Malcolm, and Louis
-  Ice Cube, “When Will They Shoot”

One more!

Lettin’ off a hundred rounds / Let the barrel pick
And we gon’ sit here / Wait for the Darryl Gates
- Rick Ross, “One Blood (Dirty South Remix)”

***

Further reading on the topic, because we endeavor to deserve the Law in HipHlawg:

Punishment, Deterrence and Social Control: The Paradox of Punishment in Minority Communities
by Jeffrey Fagan and Tracey Meares,  in the Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law (2008)

Abstract: … High rates of punishment produce “stigma saturation” where punishment loses its contingent value that lends credibility to its claims of fairness and proportionality. As the social and cultural distance between the punishers and the punished widens, respect for the legitimacy of punishment suffers. Dissatisfaction with both procedural and distributive justice can motivate legal cynicism and noncompliance, and these processes are intensified in contexts of weak social control and high legal control.

As legal control replaces informal social control, the state’s role in socialization and the fostering of moral communities diminishes. The devolving of the public sector involvement in socialization further moots the reintegrative functions of punishment. This restructuring and devaluation of government, accompanied by the restructuring and fragmentation of economic activity in poor communities, complicates the achievement of a social consensus on the rationale of punishment in a broader context of social control, and limits the efficacy of informal processes of social regulation.

***

The jury has found you guilty of bein a redneck,
whitebread, chickenshit muthafucka.
“Wait, that’s a lie. That’s a goddamn lie.
I want justice! I want justice!”