Split Decision by Ice-T & Spike

Author:Ice-T & Spike
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery Books
Published: 2022-07-19T00:00:00+00:00

ICE

When I was a full-time criminal, I never hated the cops.

A real criminal never hates the cops. He just looks at the cops as his opponents. I knew I was breaking the law. The law told me I can’t do this, but I said, “I’m gonna do it anyway.” This is the game; those are the rules. If you catch me, you catch me, and I cuff up. If you can prove I did it, I go to prison.

I never hated cops; I just thought I was smarter than them.

When I wrote “Cop Killer,” it wasn’t addressing all cops. It was addressing racist, abusive, corrupt, out-of-control cops. The kind of cops that’ll shoot an unarmed brother in the back. Or choke the shit out of a fifteen-year-old Black kid for having the audacity to try to run away from them.

But one thing people need to bear in mind—especially in light of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter and everything that came about in the decades after we made that record—I’m not saying, “Fuck all police!”

I’m saying, “Fuck police brutality!”

That’s a key distinction.

Looking back on it now, thirty years later, I’m glad I sang, “Fuck police brutality!” at the time that I did. I wrote it a year before Rodney King, and the album came out two months before the L.A. riots. “Cop Killer” was a protest song. It reflects how a lot of Black people were feeling in that particular historical moment. Folks in L.A. were at the point of exploding with rage at police brutality.

Another thing people need to realize about “Cop Killer” is that Body Count was playing that song on tour for a full year without controversy. Nobody even seemed to notice. The shit hit the fan in ’92 because that was an election year—“Cop Killer” was a ready-made target for the president, the vice president, and the NRA.

But here’s the real trip about the backlash: it wasn’t that “Cop Killer” was a bad song; what pissed them off is that white people liked it. When we played it there were thousands of white kids at our shows, wilding out in pits, shouting the words with fists in the air. If I’d made a song called “Baby Killer” or “Fireman Killer” or “Schoolteacher Killer,” my own fans would have been the first to bite my fucking head off.

But cops symbolize authority, and a lot of people hate authority. To this day, anywhere we go—Germany, Italy, Brazil—the mosh pit goes craziest when we play that song. Worldwide, cops are not the most beloved public servants.

The main thing I learned about “Cop Killer” is this: when you inject white kids with Black rage—and you do it through something as seductive and persuasive as rock ’n’ roll—that’s dangerous. To the people in authority, that’s always going to be seen as a threat.

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