Is Violence Ever Justified? Against The Police?

When I ran Sire Records and then Reprise bands often asked me if I would be the executive producer of their album. I never felt comfortable doing it-- showing that kind of perceived favoritism when I was responsible for all the bands and all their albums-- so I would routinely say "no, thanks." Except once. That once was a band I had signed to Sire, Body Count. My boss, Seymour Stein, had already signed the ground-breaking rapper Ice-T to the label but when Ice put together a punk/metal band, he brought it to me. I loved the live shows I had seen around L.A. and I saw how well they connected with a punk audience at Lollapalooza in 1991. I loved the songs Ice and lead guitarist Ernie C had written and I was excited-- and proud-- to be the executive producer.

We released the band's eponymous debut album on March 31, 1992. The first single was "There goes the neighborhood," a kind of ethos for what the band was saying about musical genre segregation and how that fit into a wider narrative of American racism:

Here come them fuckin' niggas
with their fancy cars.
Who gave them fuckin' niggas
those rock guitars?
Who let 'em in the club?
Did you make 'em pay?
Who let 'em on the stage?
Whose lettin' 'em play?

Don't they know rock's just for whites
don't they know the rules?
Those niggers are too hard core
this shit ain't cool.
Those blacks want everything
in the fuckin' world
That nigga plays so good
he took my muthafuckin' girl
there goes the neighborhood.

There goes the neighborhoooooood,
There goes the neighborhood,
There goes the neighborhood
There goes the neighborhood.

Da, Da, Da, Da, Da

We're here,
We ain't goin' nowhere.
We're movin' right next door to you,
Body Count, muthafucka.
And those of you that don't like it
can suck, my muthafuckin' dick, ha, ha, ha, ha.

There goes the neighborhood!
Ha, Ha, Ha, Ha, Ha, Ha, Ha, Ha, Ha, Ha, Ha
There goes the neighborhood!
Ha, Ha, Ha, Ha, Ha, Ha, Ha, Ha
There goes the neightborhoooooood!
There goes the neighborhood!
Ha, Ha, Ha, Ha, Ha, Ha, Ha, Ha
There goes the neighborhood!

Here come them fuckin' niggas
with their fancy cars.
Who gave them fuckin' niggas
those rock guitars?
Who let 'em in the club?
Did you make 'em pay?
Who let 'em on the stage?
Whose lettin' 'em play?
Don't they know rock's just for whites
Don't they know the rules?
Those niggas are too hard core
this shit ain't cool.
Those blacks want everything in the fuckin' world.
That nigga plays so good,
he took my muthafuckin' girl.
There goes the neighborhood
There, there, there, there goes the neighborhood.

Pretty outrageous-- ever if "niggas" was replaced with "black boys" for the video! The response to the album wasn't bad. Critics liked it; the live shows went well and the band expanded their audience. By the time the natural shelf life of the album was over we had sold a couple of hundred thousand records-- not bad... if not nearly as good as Ice-T's rap albums which were routinely going gold and platinum. The second single, "Cop Killer" had come out and it didn't make much of an impact and the project was pretty much over. Stores started shipping over-stock back to the warehouse. I figured if the second or third album was really big, the first record would eventually go gold. And then something happened: enter the Dallas Police Association.

Although not officially a KKK chapter, the Dallas Police Association was a union for racist white police in Dallas-- not to be confused with the normal police union, the Dallas Fraternal Order of Police nor, obviously with the anti-racist Black Police Association of Greater Dallas. Someone clued the Dallas Police Association onto "Cop KIller" after the record was essentially dead. They brought it back to life with a propaganda barrage that spread to more legitimate police unions, first in Texas and then around the country. They urged a boycott of Warner Bros. Records. Sales exploded and that whole shipping over-stock back to the warehouse reversed immediately. The album started selling again, but in much bigger numbers and quickly went goldm (500,000 copies in the U.S. alone). Conservative politicians, always ready to pander to the worst instincts of the most easily manipulated segment of the population, quickly jumped on board the anti-Body Count train. When the album went gold, I immediately ordered a gold award plaque for Vice President Dan Quayle who had gone on TV to call the album "obscene." (Lenny Waronker, president of Warner Bros, chanced by my office and saw the plaque and rolled his eyes. "You're not going to send that to Quayle, are you?" I was. "Can you wait 'til this all blows over first," he implored. I said OK. It didn't blow over. George H.W. Bush denounced our company. NRA spokesperson Charlton Heston, a senile old actor, went to the Time-Warner shareholders' meeting and read the lyrics to "KKK Bitch", which was very offensive to white people with a KKK mentality. But pressure started mounting on Warner Bros to withdraw the record. At first, properly seeing it as a freedom of speech issue, our corporate masters were appropriately defiant. That didn't last long.

In an Op-Ed article in the Wall Street Journal last month, Time Warner's president and co-chief executive, Gerald M. Levin, said that to give in to critics would in the long run be "a destructive precedent."

"It would be a signal to all the artists and journalists inside and outside Time Warner that if they wish to be heard, then they must tailor their minds and souls to fit the reigning orthodoxies," Mr. Levin said.

The 35,000-member National Black Police Association has said Ice-T is voicing the frustration and anger of millions of Americans over police brutality.

"Law-abiding people, not only African-Americans and Latinos but pockets in the white community, are angry with the police service in this country," said Ronald E. Hampton, the association's executive director. "These police organizations claim Time Warner has a moral obligation not to promote or condone the kind of words by Ice-T, but we say they have a moral obligation to not allow police brutality. We ought to have an even stroke across the board."

Ice-T himself has said the song is not a call to violence, but instead the first-person lament of a character who is fed up with police brutality. Addressing the New Music Seminar about two weeks ago, he said that "if the cops got a problem, let them come after me, not Time Warner."

The threat to Time-Warner's stock price quickly trumped any devotion-- real or feigned-- to the First Amendment or any kind of principles. Time-Warner told Warner Bros Records to make it go away. My bosses, Mo Ostin, Lenny Waronker and Seymour Stein were true believers and didn't budge an inch. I was very proud of them. Then the death threats started coming in. That didn't work either. Then the police tried a new tactic. They started "calling in" bomb threats to the Burbank police and the Burbank police would arrive and evacuate the building while they searched for a "bomb." It was impossible to get any work done. The corporate bosses in New York were flipping out because they said the stock price was being impacted. One day Mo and Lenny called me into Mo's office. Mo said the corporate guys were no longer asking; they were demanding. I said I was willing to talk with them. He looked at me as though I was crazy; then he laughed. He asked me if I had a suit. I said I'd buy one. I did... and flew to New York. It was a bad meeting. Me against a whole bunch of angry, Wall Street-obsessed suits. In the end there was no meeting of the minds and they walked out in disgust... angrily. I figured I was fired.

(I wasn't fired; Ice-T decided to withdraw the record himself. Hard to imagine, but he actually did. Soon after, he left the label, and Warner Bros was essentially excluded from the gigantic-- and growing-- rap music market for two decades. The next time I ran into those suits I had the meeting with in New York, I was introduced to them as the new president of Reprise Records. One looked like he wanted to vomit and one looked like he wanted to throw me out a window.)

Cop killer, yeah!

I got my black shirt on
I got my black gloves on
I got my ski mask on
This shit's been too long
I got my twelve gauge sawed off
I got my headlights turned off
I'm 'bout to bust some shots off
I'm 'bout to dust some cops off

I'm a cop killer, better you than me
Cop killer, fuck police brutality!
Cop killer, I know your family's grieving
(Fuck 'em!)
Cop killer, but tonight we get even, ha ha

I got my brain on hype
Tonight'll be your night
I got this long-assed knife
And your neck looks just right
My adrenaline's pumpin'
I got my stereo bumpin'
I'm 'bout to kill me somethin'
A pig stopped me for nuthin'!

Cop killer, better you than me
Cop killer, fuck police brutality!
Cop killer, I know your momma's grieving
(Fuck her!)
Cop killer, but tonight we get even, yeah!

Die, die, die, pig, die!

Fuck the police!
Fuck the police!
Fuck the police!
Fuck the police!

Fuck the police!
Fuck the police!
Fuck the police!
Fuck the police!
Yeah!

Cop killer, better you than me.
I'm a COP KILLER, fuck police brutality!
Cop killer, I know your family's grieving
(Fuck 'em!)
Cop killer, but tonight we get even, ha ha ha ha, yeah!

Fuck the police!
Fuck the police!
Fuck the police!
Fuck the police!

Fuck the police!
Fuck the police!
Fuck the police!
Fuck the police!
Break it down

Fuck the police, yeah!
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
Fuck the police, don't be a pussy
Fuck the police, have some muthafuckin' courage
Fuck the police, sing along

Cop killer!
Cop killer!
Cop killer!
Cop killer!

Cop killer! Whaddyou wanna be when you grow up?
Cop killer! Good choice
Cop killer! I'm a muthafuckin'
Cop killer!

Cop killer, better you than me
Cop killer, fuck police brutality!
Cop killer, I know your momma's grieving
(Fuck her!)
Cop killer, but tonight we get even!

I can only imagine the kind of pressure Gordon Barnes, editor-in-chief of The Advocate, a CUNY grad school student paper, must be feeling today. The New York media has gotten its hands on an editorial he wrote, overtly supporting violence as a response to the police murders of black males.

Police killings of unarmed men are not unique to the black demographic. Indeed, extrajudicial murders-- what most police killings tend to be-- occur across gender and racial lines, though of course Afro-Americans, Latinos, the mentally ill, migrant laborers, and anyone who does not immediately submit to police power and authority seemingly bear the brunt of the violence meted out by police. One needs only conduct a brief Internet search to see videos of police in the United States wantonly killing people whilst in the line of duty.

The 24 November grand jury decision not to indict Darren Wilson over the 9 August fatal shooting of teenager Michael Brown has been met with a mixed consensus amongst people in the United States. On the one hand, there are those who claim that the rule of law has prevailed, and that there is nothing else to do. For others, there is a feeling of indignance that has catapulted people into large, sometimes violent, demonstrations in Ferguson and across the United States. State officials and political pundits have either vilified the protests or appealed for some semblance of calm in the wake of the grand jury’s decision. There is almost no discussion on the anti-democratic nature of the grand jury process, on Jay Nixon preemptively calling a state of emergency, or the role that the police play in this society. The focus, it seems, is on the lack of so-called civility on behalf of some of the protesters. Conservatives often use racialist, if not overtly racist, rhetoric when considering what is happening in Ferguson. Liberals appeal to the protestors to harken to the whitewashed legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. and engage in peaceful demonstrations.

The time for peace has passed, indeed it never existed in this country. It doesn’t matter if Brown robbed a convenience store, or even if he assaulted Wilson. What matters is that the case highlights the depths to which the capitalist state and its police forces will protect their own and attempt to stifle any sort of dissent. Imagine if Wilson was the aggressor in the situation-- which is more likely than Brown being the aggressor-- and Brown defended himself with deadly force, mortally wounding Wilson. Brown would have likely go to prison for life, whereas Wilson has been cleared for what has been deemed a justifiable shooting. And it is justifiable based on how police operate within the United States: with near impunity.

The violence of the police is almost always defensible in the eyes of the ruling elite, as evinced by Barack Obama’s platitudes to liberal desires to the rule of law in the aftermath of the grand jury decision. So, why then is the violence of the protestor so reviled? It is confounding that the people seem more concerned about the loss of property than the loss of life in the aftermath of the Ferguson decision. While there are opportunists who have used the protests to their own end, the acts of looting, destruction of property, and violence directed towards state representatives is not only warranted, it is necessary. If people could, they would target the police, but the protesters know that a direct confrontation (with what is now a military force in this country) at this time would likely result in their deaths. The destruction of property in the area is the next best option. And while it is lamentable that some so-called mom-and-pop shops are targeted alongside the larger businesses, it is the truly dispossessed, downtrodden, social ostracized, and oppressed peoples who are engaging in the only viable option to lash out at an increasingly militarized, bureaucratically regimented, and authoritarian society. It is clear that while the murder of Michael Brown was the catalyst for these events, it is not the cause. The cause is the decades long, the centuries long, daily oppression people experience at the hands of the capitalist state.

Historically, the police, and specifically the policing of minority communities in the United States can be traced to the epoch of chattel slavery. The modern police were developed from, at times directly so, the ranks of slave catchers. The racialized policing and subjugation of Afro-Americans and, later, of Amerindians, European immigrant communities, Latinos and others was born from the desire to maintain a white supremacist state. It does not seem as though much has changed in this regard since the defeat of Radical Reconstruction in 1877. The problem with the protestors’ violence in Ferguson is that it is unorganized. If the violence was to be organized, and the protestors armed-- more so than the few that sparingly are-- then the brunt of social pressures would not be laid onto middling proprietors, but unto those deserving the most virulent response of an enraged populace.

Calls for calm emanating from the upper strata of society are an attempt to mitigate the popular indignation that has long been bubbling under the surface of the society. The violence against property, that is destruction and theft, is only an unorganized form of something with the potential to be far more revolutionary and inspiring. To say that an all-out class war is on the horizon would be hyperbolic at this point, and maybe even myopic, but the undergirding social structures that position disenfranchised and working class peoples well below the dictatorship of capital are being pressured, the police being only one such institution. With increased organization, the Ferguson protests and riots do have the potential to transform from seemingly random attacks to ones that aim at puncturing the status quo. This is not a quixotic notion, it is within the realm of material possibilities, and activist-scholars should be lending their weight to this and other attendant struggles. The reliability and social productivity of voting for bourgeoisie parties is long dead. The demonstration turned riot, turned revolt, is the most effective means to bring about a new, more egalitarian social paradigm. While the current “unrest” in Ferguson and around the country is unlikely lead to any revolutionary impetus, it is a start. As people’s consciousness is transmuted from subservience to the prevailing ideologies of the elite to something related to their actual position in the society, drastic social change will become increasingly possible.

The death of Michael Brown has spurred this process and has fomented mass discontent with the government. Furthermore, the events in Ferguson have fomented the most visible resistance to the status quo in the United States. What is needed now is to take the next step from indiscriminate attacks to ones directly pointed at state power as well as at the lackeys and apologists who allow it to prosper. The transformative potential emanating from the protestors’ violence in Ferguson and elsewhere will not help recoup some “golden age” in the United States-- there never was one-- but can hopefully prove to be the kernel of radically altered social relations.

During the protests in New York City in the days after the decision to not indict Wilson, thousands took to the streets empathetically chanting “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot!” Some, however, went even further, shouting the slogan “Arms Up, Shoot Back!” The former statement represents an appeal to state authorities, namely the police, to cease its murderous rampage upon those living in this country. The latter, represents a challenge-- albeit prematurely and an incendiary one, given the balance of forces-- to those that currently wield power, and have the legal (fictitious) right to kill whom they see fit. Instead of attempting to demonize the rioters and looters by invoking the image and memory of Martin Luther King Jr., it would be more advantageous for those “progressives” in our society to understand the Ferguson protests as part of the same genealogy as the Deacons for Defense, Malcolm X, Robert F. Williams, and the Black Panthers. What is occurring in Ferguson is symptomatic of the social dislocation that has been ever present but has yet to ferment. When the state comes down on its citizenry violently, we must resist, with equitable violence if necessary. The attacks on property in Ferguson only need be redirected for a magnificent transformation of consciousness to come out of Michael Brown’s death. If not, then Brown’s death, the deaths of the aforementioned men, and the millions who suffered and died under the jackboot of state oppression in this country would have partially been lost in vain. Let us not protest the protestors, but express our solidarity, and our commitment to their struggle, which is invariably our own struggle. As we solidarize and join with the embattled communities in and around Ferguson, let us also remember to look beyond the provincial confines of our own state and express solidarity with others who struggle for a more just and equitable society, be they in Palestine, Mexico, or Burkina Faso. In the word of the late Burkinabé revolutionary Thomas Sankara, “It took the madmen of yesterday for us to be able to act with extreme clarity today. I want to be one of those madmen. We must dare to invent the future.”

Anecdotally, as this issue of the Advocate went to press, Eric Garner’s murderer, Daniel Pantaleo, has been cleared of any wrongdoing, a grand jury in Staten Island opting to refrain from indicting him on 3 December. On 17 July 2014, Pantaleo, and NYPD officer placed Garner in a chokehold (illegal even by the standards of the NYPD) which resulted in a fatal heart attack for Garner. Garner was not bellicose in his interactions with police and was unarmed. The video of his murder sparked wide spread protests in the New York City Metro area, and the grand jury decision is likely to do so as well.

Bob Fredericks covered Barnes' editorial, which he called "a screed" and a "jargon-filled diatribe," on Christmas Eve for the New York Post: "The editorial-- illustrated in the online version with the circled, capital A that symbolizes anarchy-- also urges rioters to emulate the Black Panthers and Malcolm X instead of Martin Luther King and other advocates of nonviolence-- and hopes the unrest will morph into a revolution... CUNY Grad Center President Chase F. Robinson condemned the editorial. 'While freedom of speech must be protected, and the views expressed by the editor in chief of this student newspaper are stated as sole views, we deplore calls of any kind for violence. As Martin Luther King’s birthday approaches, we should instead recommit ourselves to nonviolence as the true path to social justice,' Robinson said."

Yesterday Fredericks followed up with another attack on Barnes in the Post, this time calling the editorial "venomous."

“I still stand by what I said. I endorse an individual’s right to self-defense, even if it’s against a police officer-- by any means necessary,” Gordon Barnes told The Post.

Cops, he suggested, deserve anything they get because of what he called their aggressive tactics to control the protesters who’ve clogged streets in the weeks since a Staten Island grand jury declined to indict an NYPD cop in the death of Eric Garner.

“Self-defense is justified when people are attacked if the police are the aggressors, and most of the aggression in New York has come from the police. They’ve been too aggressive, with their batons and pepper spray,” Barnes said, adding that protesters have the right to bear arms and violently resist arrest.

Barnes, editor-in-chief of the graduate-student newspaper The Advocate, scoffed when asked if the murders of the two NYPD cops by a man out to avenge the deaths of Garner and Michael Brown made him reconsider his Dec. 3 editorial “In Support of Violence.”

“I think it should stay up” on the paper’s Web site, he said, insisting that he had nothing to apologize for.

A New Jersey native pursuing a doctorate in history, Barnes said the ultimate goal of the protests is revolution-- one that would necessarily be bloody.

“I advocate a social revolution, one in which people are equal, have equal access and equal means. History tells us violence would be necessary for there to be substantial and lasting social change,” he said.

Barnes’ editorial called for violent protests.

“The time for peace has passed,” he wrote, adding that protesters needed to be armed and better organized.

“The acts of looting, destruction of property and violence directed towards state representatives is not only warranted, it is necessary,” wrote Barnes, who once studied in Cuba and refers to the United States as a “white supremacist state.”

Another CUNY spokesman, Jay Hershenson, called Barnes’ views “deplorable.” Sounds like New York will soon have a scapegoat for the shortcomings in getting the authoritarian streak out of its police force.