Hey there, welcome to That Dang Dad, my name is
Phil and tonight I want to discuss an interesting situation I encountered and participated
in when I was a police officer. As many of you know, I was a cop in Southeast
Los Angeles for nearly ten years. Now, I’m a police and prison abolitionist. You don’t
have to agree with police abolition or even know what that means, just know that I am now a fierce
critic of the culture and behavior of cops based on things I’ve seen and done on duty, as we
ll
as things I’ve learned about the history of policing and prisons in the United States.
A while back, I did a video on Rage Against the Machine and many commenters on the video
mentioned that they knew active duty cops and military people (as well as right
wing politicians) who loved listening to Rage. People seemed flabbergasted that
cops and chuds didn’t understand that they were the machine being ragéd against.
Well, I want to talk about that in detail and to do so, I’ll do you one bet
ter. Me and the guys
I worked with used to blast KRS-One’s “Sound of da Police” from our cop cars on duty, especially
rolling up on calls for service with the windows down. I knew guys who would play it through
the loudspeakers in their car when they went to break up parties or hassle gangsters.
How could cops gleefully blast anti-cop music from a cop car, you may be asking. I’m going to give
you two answers to that. The first one will make you mad. The second one may teach you something
a
bout cop brain that you never knew before… and it just might make you even madder. Curious? I bet you are, you saucy little minx. Come… I have such
terrible sights to show you! Anyway, let’s start by talking about the song
itself. Obviously I can’t play the whole thing for you because of copyright protection, so I’ll link
it in the description, but the main thing you need to know is that it has a really strong start: It essentially functions like wrestling entrance music with that iconic begi
nning.
So, when you picture cops using it as a cellphone ringtone or blasting it from the
car, for a lot of them I don’t think it’s any deeper than that because they may have
never actually listened to the lyrics. Lyrics that say things like: Let me tell you from experience,
if there’s one thing cops hate, it’s being told to show respect to members
of the public, especially people who are… y’know…. Police officers are trained to
demand and to expect respect from others and they withhold gi
ving it until
you’ve earned it from them. So right there, you’d think
cops would hate this song. But then the lyrics get even more feisty.
And yes, I know me reading out rap lyrics is pretty much the height of cringe, but my hands
are tied here. Anyway, he goes on to say: In a couple previous videos, I’ve touched
on the origins of modern policing and how police departments evolved (directly or
indirectly) from fugitive slave patrols. An entire genre of vagrancy laws were invented
during a
nd after the civil war to criminalize newly freed Black people and allow cops to put
them in prison where they were… you guessed it… forced back into labor without their consent. So KRS-One is absolutely 100% not being
hyperbolic when he links police officers to plantation overseers. There is a
direct line there. And because of that, it’s also apt to link the plantation overseer’s
exclusive monopoly on violence to a police officer’s similar monopoly on violence.
So for as fun as the whoop w
hoop beginning is, the track is very VERY unapologetically anticop and
in no uncertain terms. Why would a police officer tolerate the song, much less play it gleefully?
Same with a cop playing Rage Against the Machine or NWA or the Callous Daoboys… how can they listen
to music made by people who loathe them? Like I said I have two explanations.
The first is as simple as it is infuriating: it’s a display of total power. A cop blasting an
anticop song with a smile on his face is showing you t
hat your pouty little art projects
have no effect on him. He is showing you that he isn’t threatened by radical art,
that it is so powerless to effect change, he can even enjoy it and dance along.
I remember once on patrol we were hassling some gang members loitering at a park or whatever
and one of them said something to me like “You’re just a fat pig who was too stupid to get
a real job.” So I smiled and said “Hey, stand up.” He stood up, probably assuming I
was about to arrest him or so
mething. Then I said “Okay, sit down.” He sat back down all
confused. And I said “I may be a fat stupid pig but you still stand and sit when and where
I tell you to.” I’m not proud of this attitude but it’s the same mindset as with anticop
music: tell your little jokes all you want, you still obey me. I’m still above you.
This idea reminds me a lot of what big brain academics would call “recuperation”.
Ron Adams, translating Guy DeBord, defines recuperation as: However, the anarchists of th
e Ontario-based North Shore collective put a little spin on this idea and I think it’s really apt. In a blog post opposing a prison expansion, they write: And this is a segue into the second
explanation I want to offer for why a cop like me would blast Sound of da Police.
In fact, let’s talk about a Cop Like Me, specifically ME. Back on patrol, I listened
to all the lyrics, I even understood what they were referring to. I understood Sound of
da Police as a biting criticism of policework, a c
areer I took a lot of pride in at the
time. But even though I was susceptible to haughty demonstrations of power, that wasn’t the
headspace I was in listening to KRS-One. See, I would have told you, quite sincerely,
that I was not a racist cop. That I, in fact, hated racist cops. I would have told you that I
was actually pretty reasonable and actually pretty cool, and thus, I could listen to KRS-One critique
the police because I agreed with him that cops who act like plantation overseers we
re bad. And I
could agree with him because I wasn’t one of those bad cops. (i know… i know… settle down… we’re gettin’ there!) As a white guy raised in upper middle class Orange County, my understanding of racism was that
it was a personal failing mainly perpetrated by loser skinheads and hillbilly klan members.
Racism was a bad thought that one guy would entertain about another person that could lead to
that guy making a cruel or violent choice. And I was raised on Captain Planet and Fresh
Prince and very special episodes of Saved by the Bell, so I knew that everyone was created
equal, that no one should be mocked or hassled just for being different. I had dated Black girls
and Mexican girls, my ex-pastor dad was tight with his church’s Hispanic outreach team, I used to
swap Shareware game CDs with the Dominican kid on my bus (shout out to Wani, hope you’re still
gaming out there)… In fact, I guess you could say, I was pretty colorblind. So when KRS-One or Rage Against the Ma
chine were yelling about racist cops, racist
governments, fascism, injustice, I could nod and say “Yeah, totally, I’m with you!” with absolute
sincerity and a clear conscience. Their critiques were valid! I didn’t want to return to segregation
and Jim Crow, I didn’t support Westboro Baptist protesting funerals, I was a huge critic of
LAPD’s corrupt Rampart division at the time, I never once planted guns or drugs on anyone,
I saw American History X like 5 times… To put it simply, KRS-One and
Rage were complaining
about those guys over there, not me. Of course, this is… incorrect. It wasn’t until
many years later that I understood what the Machine meant in Rage Against the Machine.
It wasn’t until years later that I understood that KRS-One’s linking of police to slave patrols
wasn’t just for thematic flavor. It took me a very long time to understand that racism, that fascism,
that injustice wasn’t merely something individuals did to other individuals at specific dates and
time
s but rather interlocking systems that are self-perpetuating and all-encompassing.
The area I worked in was about 90% first and second-generation immigrant, mainly from
Mexico but also Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. And while I could confidently say
“I don’t arrest people just for being Mexican” it took me many years to see that the system,
the machine, didn’t need me to be personally bigoted for me to do the work of bigotry.
When an immigrant can’t get a driver’s license and can’t g
et a legal job, so they get paid under the
table, get exploited by their boss, and we show up to “keep the peace” if they complain, it doesn’t
matter whether the responding officers “like Mexicans” or not because the cops will protect the
exploiting boss over the exploited worker. When an immigrant is kept in a state of
precarity through this labor exploitation and they can’t make rent, the cops showing
up to forcibly evict them are contributing to that exploitation whether or not they gave
The Blindside 5 stars on Letterboxd. And when some children of these precarious
families grow up watching society exploit and abuse their parents and act out in rebellious
ways, cops enforce the curfew laws, the loitering laws, and the vagrancy laws that trap those kids
in a carceral vortex that strips them of agency, strips them of legal protection, and opens
them up to, you guessed it, labor exploitation inside prison and outside of it.
There’s this phrase I’ve been obsessed with ever s
ince I heard it a few weeks ago. It’s
a systems thinking heuristic coined by cybernetics researcher Stafford Beer and it goes like this:
“The purpose of a system is what it does”. What this means is that, according Beer, for whatever
the designers and builders of a system claim to want, a system’s purpose can be discovered by
the actual effects it has in the world rather than effects it consistently fails to achieve. If
a system constantly arrives at a certain outcome, that outcome is the p
urpose of the system.
The outcome our police and prison system consistently achieves is one in which
racialized, queer, and disabled members of the community are kept in a state of legal
and economic precarity that enables capitalists to use them either as cheap labor, or as
a warning to other workers about what will happen to them if they stop cooperating.
The police and prison system consistently fails to achieve safer, thriving communities,
long-lasting behavioral interventions, or long
-term economic stability in those
who find themselves caught in it. The purpose of a system is what it does. The purpose of the police and prison system is to create exploitable labor, a docile public, (and otherized scapegoats for that public to rally against). This is what KRS-One and Rage are talking about! And when you tell me that actually
your brother, your aunt, your best friend is one of the good cops, this is the analysis
I’m 99% certain your brother, your aunt, your best friend are
n’t grappling with.
They are “one of the good ones” in a system whose purpose is to exploit and suppress.
So was I. It’s bullshit! It’s like looking at a gun used in a mass shooting and
expecting me to care that the steel in the barrel is high quality. Who gives a fuck?
So anyway, the next time you hear a cop’s ringtone come in with that iconic Whoop Whoop, the next
time you see Paul Ryan clanging iron to Killing in the Name Of, it may be that they are arrogantly
showing off a little capita
list recuperation, or it may be even worse: they may be so vain,
they don’t realize the song is about them. So what’s your reaction to all that? Which
one of my explanations frustrated you more? And what does this mean for artistic critiques
of power?? Is there even any point if they’re just going to get recuperated all to fuck? Let
me know what you think in the comments. Thank you for indulging me with your presence
tonight. I’m trying not to dine out too much on the ex-cop thing but this
topic has been
on my mind for awhile and I thought you might find it interesting. If you did, a Like would
go down real real smooth. A subscription? From you? An honor and a privilege. And if you
really wanted to blow my skirt up, you’d share this with friends and loved ones.
But either way, I just appreciate you being here. I hope you're well and I hope to see
you on the next one. Have a good niiiiight!
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