Elicser, or Lics, is a well known graf artist from Toronto and his characters can be seen all over the city. This particular illustration is from the 3rd Chamber. Details to note: 50 Cent saying, “Look, I’m so strong!” and the blood coming out from the victim’s head is actually the word “blood.”
In this installment of Never Seen Before! Tony Yayo puts logic into a headlock and suffocates it. I do like how he uses “victor” as the antonym of “victim.”
If he saying that the shooter is to be respected, well we shoot too, it’s not like we only getting shot.
I talked to Chris from Young Gunz a couple of weeks ago, and we were talking about G-Unit and he thought you guys fucked up the game because, “People are now following the shot instead of following the shooter.”
Yeah, but what he’s saying is irrelevant. If you got shot, you went through something, you survived something, through God’s will. So I mean 50 been shot nine times, he didn’t ask to be shot, he just got shot. People feel like, “Oh man, this guy’s been shot, he went through some shit,” and he has. So for [Chris] to say that people respect the victim instead of the victor, that shit is irrelevant. The things you go through make you who you are as a person. Me going through jail made me a different person. 50 getting shot nine time made him a different person. Buck getting shot twice made him a different person. So I mean the same people that got shot are willing to bust they guns now too because they’ve been shot before. So what he saying is irrelevant, and it’s real stupid, and it’s a stupid comment, and it sound like something a hater would say. We made it so the victims look ill? No. I mean the things you go though make you who you are. If you walk across the street and you get hit by a car and you survive, just like how Kanye West got into an accident, you know “Through the Wire.” His whole song was about him in the accident. What’s the difference between him and 50? 50 was just shot by somebody, he was in a car accident and had a near death experience. They just rhyming about the harsh realities of life and the things you go through make you who you are, do you agree?
Well I thought it was a fucked up statement.
You know so a lot of dudes make statements. If he saying that the shooter is to be respected, well we shoot too, it’s not like we only getting shot. And you can keep that off the books that we shot too, but we’ve been in predicaments were we do what we have to do. So that shit that he said is a bunch of bullshit. When a person is not selling and then they see an artist come in and sweep their sales not just once or twice, but double or triple their sales. If we go out there and look at the first week of Memphis Bleek or Young Gunz, it’s horrible, 50 or 60 thousand. So that’s my answer to that.
I talked to Yayo at the G-Unit office in New York City just before the release of his first solo record, Thoughts of a Predicate Felon. Yayo stood in the room while he previewed his record for me and some other journalists. He was really into it.
Police jumped out on me, I was in my friend’s car, and I bailed out and jumped. Had a whole precinct chasing me, but I got caught.
You have a lot of lyrics about guns, specifically P89s. Is that something you’ve been carrying before?
I got arrested with a P89 Ruger.
How’d you get that?
I can’t tell you how I bought it.
You don’t have to tell me exactly how you got it.
You know, it’s the streets man, there’s always guns on the streets—lots of guns on the street. I got caught with a P89 Ruger. What happened was there was a murder in the neighbourhood, I was going to the store, I came back from the store, police jumped out on me, I was in my friend’s car, and I bailed out and jumped. Had a whole precinct chasing me, but I got caught— everything happens for a reason. They did ballistics on the gun, found out I didn’t do the murder; actually it was one of my friends that did the murder. Basically he got locked up because everyone was telling on him, and I did my time for the gun possession, that’s how my story goes.
You were saying before that your mom, when you were younger, found pieces in your house and all that. What was the first piece you had, how old were you?
First gun I had was a chrome .32 revolver.
How’d you get that one?
You know through friends.
Do you know how much you paid for it?
Somebody gave it to me.
How many pieces have you had over the course of your life?
I ran through a lot. You have to understand, if I don’t have a gun one of my friends will have one, so I can’t sit here and name every single gun that has been in my hands or held before.
Inspired by Joe Budden’s victory over Joell Ortiz in a footrace, I thought I’d put up another Never Seen Before! starring the victor himself. Only a couple of quotes made it into ETBS from this interview, if I recall correctly he was at Burger King when we talked on the phone.
It was an expensive gun that really had no business jamming. I think god spared my life. I thank him for it, I thank him for it everyday.
I read a story that you had an incident last year where somebody pulled a gun out on you, can you tell me about that?
I was in the hood, we was about five cars deep about 25 of us, 20 of us, something like that, and we on our way to a club to celebrate my man’s birthday. At the time I had about a 9”, 13” TV just put in my truck, so we was sitting on the block before we left trying to figure out how to work this shit and a guy rode up on a bike, he had a mask on, the windows were rolled down, it’s October, he just put the gun in the car and started shooting. He must have clicked about five times and nothing happened. He said, “my bad, I was playing” and he ran off. So I chased him in the car, chased him for about five minutes and he ran into the police station, which was probably the smartest thing he could do at that point. We followed the cops for a little bit, they took him away, found his gun, found the bullet lodged in there and that was the end of that.
Who did he point it at?
He pointed it at everybody in the car. There was four people in my car, me and three others, he pointed at everybody at least once.
How did you take that?
I feel like everything happens for a reason, even when the police found the gun they were pretty surprised – they thought it was my gun – because it was an expensive gun that really had no business jamming. I think god spared my life. I thank him for it, I thank him for it everyday.
Do you know what kind of piece it was?
Naw, naw, I do not know the name of it.
They just said it was a high-end one?
Yeah, and it looked high-end when I looked at it. I have know idea what type of gun it was.
What’d it look like?
It looked like some shit from out The Jetsons. [Ed. Note: My guess is that it was sport shooting handgun, they can be pretty futurtistic looking.]
It wasn’t just a pistol?
Naw, it wasn’t just a pistol, it wasn’t just a Glock, it wasn’t just a nine, it wasn’t a revolver – that shit looked like some other shit. It didn’t look like a gun like I had ever seen before. Like it wasn’t something that you could just buy in the hood.
What’s your general stance on guns?
I don’t really have a problem with that, I don’t really feel like guns kill people, I feel that people kill people. I ain’t got a problem with them at all.
What about the fact that the access creates violence?
Listen, if you go down South, or not even down South—in Miami you’re allowed to walk around the street with your gun in plain view. In Arizona, you’re allowed to go shoot wherever you want to go shoot. You can just be going down the highway and just start shooting out your window, the cops aren’t gonna say nothing. So I mean I can’t be too mad about the policies from where I’m from. You can’t just walk into K-Mart where I’m at and buy a gun. You can’t just go into the store when you want to buy one, you can’t just shoot when you want to shoot and you damn sure can’t have one in plain view. So, when it gets like that up here then I might start beefing.
I did this interview in December 2001, just before Stillmatic, just after 9/11 and way before ETBS was even an idea. As you can see we were still asking questions that would later prove to be relevant. I remember I waited about six hours for Nas’ call, and after about five hours and 50 minutes I decided I would take a nap—of course that’s when he called. I was pretty drowsy for the first few minutes, it’s a lesson I never forgot.
There’s a lot of wicked men running this shit and that’s not a part of the plan for a peaceful Black man to be a President.
What are your thoughts on the coverage of Islam in the media recently?
I mean Islam has been wantin’ they land —you know Israel—for a long time, man, and the Americans have assisted Israel in killing off a lot of Arab Muslims. And they’ve been fighting for they land and instead of coming with a solution for the Jews and Islam to be at peace and share it, they’re not doin’ it, they’re just cold-blooded strong-armin’, so the only way they can write that off is by calling Islam “terrorists” and shit like that, to justify what they’re doing over there to the people. The war between Christianity and Islam has been goin’ on for thousands of years, this is nowhere near the beginning of it.
What would you have done if you were in charge of some of the actions of the government?
Well, see the Black man is a naturally peaceful, righteous man, that’s why a militant Black man has never ran a plane into a building before, especially when we was going through civil rights, you know, we never did any shit like that. It’s always been like the white man here that blew up shit in Waco, Texas, the white man that’s spreading anthrax and starting diseases. So we as Black men would always be about peace and the truth, and unfortunately that would make me a victim. I wouldn’t last long because evil— there’s a lot of wicked men running this shit and that’s not a part of the plan for a peaceful Black man to be a President. I mean I couldn’t even think that far, dawg.
There are a lot of illusions in this music that we’ve created—a lot of hypocrisy. I just wanted your feelings on the messages and the way people portray themselves and how a lot of times these aren’t very honest. What is it about rap that has put us in a situation where we feel we need to perpetuate certain myths about people and about ourselves? Why do you think that we’ve fallen into kind of trap illusions and creating these false things—images?
You can’t just think about it like that, you gotta say it’s entertainment. And that’s like a contradictory thing to say—entertainers, why create images that are not real and shit like that. It’s entertainment. The reason that hip-hop is real is ’cause it’s from the streets—it’s ghetto niggaz talking so we not gonna hold back no punches. And that’s what it is.
What does being American mean to you?
Being American to me is a beautiful thing. It’s just that some Americans don’t like darker skinned Americans and won’t let darker skinned Americans progress. Killin’ em in the streets, by racial profiling, putting ‘em jail, by flooding the ghetto with drugs, by not having good school systems. But overall, being American, I don’t think I would liked to have been born in Australia or any other place in the world. I’m proud to be here—where hip-hop is, where the Black American is, because we identify with our people everywhere we go. Sometimes I go overseas and them niggas over there act like they ain’t niggas. I don’t know who the fuck they is, and there’s niggas over here like that, too, but there’s more of a Black awareness thing over here in the States. I’m just happy to be an American born here.
You mentioned the Black man being peaceful but you also have several songs about guns on the album. What do you think of gun culture?
Well, the Black man’s a peaceful man but that doesn’t mean he’s dumb. He’s smart, so if you come at me with a gun and I keep seeing everybody around me drop with guns ’cause they don’t have one, what do you think I supposed to do? I go get myself a gun so that’s what the song is about.
One of my favourite interviews for ETBS was with Paul Wall (February 2005). Like all good Texans, he was very open and willing to discuss his guns. After the interview he took me out to his car and showed me one of his Glocks. Paul was nice enough to disarm the gun before handing it to me, which, I have to say, he did quickly and expertly. This is some extra material that hasn’t been published before, hence, NEVER SEEN BEFORE!
I got nine, eight guns. I keep one in every car, every room in the house. I dunno. We’ve always been kinda paranoid.
Were you around guns when you were younger?
Yeah, my pops had a gun. But, my mom ain’t know about it.
Do you know what kind it was? Handgun or shotgun?
Yeah it was a handgun. But, I seen it, and I got in trouble actually, because I found it. And then I got my pops in trouble. I was like four or five. I got a bunch of guns. I got some in the car right now I think. I got nine, eight guns. I keep one in every car, every room in the house. I dunno. We’ve always been kinda paranoid. My car got stolen a couple of times. We had some experiences with people trying to rob us. Unsuccessfully, but, it’s like, “better safe than sorry”. Better to have it and not need it, then need it and not have it. I have a Glock .45, it hold 7 bullets. That’s the one I have in the car. Some of ‘em are registered, not all of ‘em. Yeah, I got a Glock .40, it’s the same basic thing, except it has .40 caliber, so smaller bullets. I have a .44 special, snub nose, you know, it’s a revolver. And the thing about revolvers is, when you shoot the revolver, the shell to the bullet doesn’t eject, so it stays into the revolver. So you can shoot it and it won’t pop out. The thing about those is it leaves less evidence. say something goes down and I shoot with a regular handgun, the shells are gonna eject and are gonna be on the ground. But with the revolver they don’t eject. But I got that one, I got a shotgun, a pump, I got a sawed-off shotgun, I got a .223 semi-automatic, I got a AK-47…
You got an AK? Is it legal?
Uh…no the one I have isn’t. they just passed a law, I think, that you can have those now.
Yeah I think once again it’s legal. How’d you get them all?
The street. Some of them I just go to… matter of fact I have a gun licence.
How much did you pay for the AK?
That one I think was like $400. Guns down here are a lot cheaper than in New York and stuff. Like um, my boy was telling me, like I got some $400 guns, in New York, they’re like a thousand dollars. I got a Smith & Wesson, it’s a .40 caliber.
Have you ever had to shoot at someone?
Yeah.
How many times?
Just like, somebody tried to rob us one time.
Did you hit them?
Naw, we left. I don’t think I did though. I wasn’t really scared I was just nervous. Like, um, I been through lot of life changing, life threatening situations in my life, at a young age. So it’s like, I don’t really panic too much, under pressure. So I just… reflexes, just…like somebody just try to rob us. We were getting gas and they try to rob us. It was me and my cousin. He was just crazy, like wildin’ out , and he had a crowbar and shit, he was tryin to rob us. So we just starting shootin’ and we just burnt off. That was like a couple years ago. About two years ago. But definitely having a gun, like it doesn’t make me cool. A lot of people I see get guns, and it changes their demeanor. They go from being a pop tart to all of a sudden they’re like super hard and aggressive. Like, “I got a gun, you know what I’m capable of” type shit. But they think like they super heroes or shit ’cause they got a gun. That’s not what it’s about. The people don’t realize the power is just as much negative as it is positive. And it’s definitely not something that…I don’t wanna kill nobody. I wasn’t trying to do that when I shot at him, I was just tryin to get him to leave me alone and to get outta there. It’s one of those things like, I still stay in the hood, so like, a couple of days ago one of my homeboys got robbed, when he came home, there was three dudes with guns to his head. Actin’ like they were the police. And they robbed him and took a lot of money from him and stuff. And it’s like the situations that happen on a daily basis where I live. Where it’s like, that could easily be me. And I’m a rapper too.
One of my favourite sidebars in the book, mostly because of the excellent illustrations by Shingo Shimizu. Peep that amazing ’70s haircut in the “pistol whip” drawing. Woooo!
You wouldn’t know this if you didn’t buy the book, but ETBS is full of beautiful art. One of my favourite pieces was by Mirak Jamal. His style has evolved a lot since he did this piece, but I love some of the little details: the bird, the bandana, the diamond. So dope.
* The murder of Oscar Grant by a BART transit officer in Oakland has led to the inevitable (and justified) rallies, discussions and outrage that follow high-profile shootings of civilians by law enforcement. So I thought I’d share something from our book on the subject of police work and police shootings. Starring Freddie Foxxx, Noreaga, Talib Kweli, David Simon and Jelleestone. Excerpted from the 3rd Chamber of Enter The Babylon System, originally published in 2007 by Random House Canada.
Emphasizing guns and gun use to police the public creates a chasm between the cops and the community. We only need to look abroad to see the result of barrel-oriented police work.
We on the grind every day of the week
I’m from Houston, where the cops don’t sleep
— Lil’ Flip,“Certified Gangstas,” off Jim Jones’s Diplomats Present (2004)
After Rodrigo passed through security, Senior Officer Warren Jones of the Houston Police Department greeted him with a smile and a firm handshake. He’s a tall, smooth-complexioned brother with a perfect moustache. He wears well-tailored but casual office attire and walks with the strong gait of the physically fit. For nineteen years he’s worked some of Houston’s toughest beats. Like many big Southern cities, Houston sees its fair share of shootings, and although it’s only slightly less populous than Toronto, the Texas city has anywhere from two to seven times as many homicides every year. These days Jones works from the HPD headquarters as a community relations specialist, which seems an appropriate placement for the soft-spoken, God-fearing, highly presentable officer. Like all HPD cops, Jones carries a .40 calibre semi-automatic with a high-capacity magazine; his is a Glock, an HPD-sanctioned brand.
“Have you ever been in any shooting incidents?” Rodrigo asked, as they took seats in his cubicle.
“No, I haven’t,” he answered, with a mixture of bewilderment and discomfort, giving the impression that the whole topic was foreign to him.
“Do you feel like the police are out-armed?”
“There’s a lot of firepower out there for kids,” Jones answered.
“They have these multi-shot guns where they are able to shoot a hundred shots a minute.”
“What have you seen on the street?”
“All kinds of stuff, like, um . . . I don’t know the names, but they have everything out there.”
“How do you prepare mentally for the possibility of being shot?”
“Just trust in God. If it’s meant to happen, it’ll happen.”
“Is it something that you think about much?”
“No, I don’t.”
Officer Jones’s attitude revealed a healthy perspective on the likelihood of an officer’s being shot. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, in 2004 there were just under 800,000 sworn law enforcement officers in the United States. In that same year fifty-seven officers were murdered, fifty-four of them with firearms. These numbers work out to a homicide rate of 6.6 per 100,000 police officers, just above the national average of 5.5 homicides per 100,000 citizens, and well below the average of most major American cities. Of 59,373 total non-fatal assaults on officers that year, 2,109 were committed with firearms, producing just over two hundred injuries. Compare this to the number of assaults on officers with “personal weapons”—fists, feet and teeth—which produced more than fourteen thousand injuries out of 47,545 assaults, and you might think policemen would spend more time at the dojo than the range.
In fact, the deadliest decade for police was the 1970s, when over two hundred police officers were killed annually; since then there’s been a steady decline. Still, in the mid-eighties, when the preferred armaments on the street went from six-shot revolvers to semi-auto-matic handguns, police naturally began to feel outgunned. As The Wire’s David Simon said, “I covered the Baltimore Police Department when they were going from .38 revolvers to 9mm, and [I remember] how intent the officers were on getting 9mm because they felt they were being outgunned, that even with speed-loaders they couldn’t possibly compete with people that had sixteen, seventeen in a clip.” He continued, “It’s just so ingrained in the American culture—the omnipresence of firearms—that you don’t get a lot of cops arguing against the availability of weapons. They want to be able to go into this weapon-saturated environment with the advantage.”
Jan Libourel sees the increased demand for and reliance on greater firepower as a step backwards. “I sometimes think that we have lost something in the wholesale abandonment by police and security personnel and much of the civilian market of the revolver in favour of the automatic pistol,” he said. “I still think that the revolver is a somewhat more trouble-free weapon, capable of doing most of the things a defensive handgun will be called upon to do.” Libourel added, “I think that in some law enforcement circles, a spray-and-pray mentality has taken hold.”
On July 18, 2005, Newsday reported that the NYPD’s total number of shots fired had jumped from 352 in 2004 to 616 in 2005. At the same time, shooting accuracy dropped from twenty percent to eight percent. In NYC most officers carry 9mms that hold fifteen rounds—up from the ten rounds their guns held in 1993 and the six-round revolvers they last carried in 1992. A high-ranking official’s words in Newsday mimicked Libourel, saying, “Guys are just letting loose with more and more shots.”
The DoJ reports that while police pointed a gun at U.S. citizens 125,872 times in 2002, rarely do they shoot. In 1997 Boston police reported only two intentionally fired shots. The force’s high mark, achieved in both 1990 and 2002, was a mere nineteen. While Boston does boast the lowest firing rate of any major U.S. police department, it does illustrate how real police work is very different from what movies—or the cops’ drive for bigger guns—would have the public believe.
Still, specialized gun magazines that cater to the law enforcement community consistently peddle stories of lone cops saving the day with steel. Eight hundred thousand potential customers represents big money—and the consumer vanguard. A police department’s sanctioning of a particular brand provides the manufacturer with a potent selling point for the public. It’s hard to fault officers who just want to get home safely to their families and who feel that having the latest armament will help them survive another day on the beat. But an arms race with the public is an unwinnable war when the public has access to all the same weaponry with none of the accountability. It’s also a step backwards in effective policing. Emphasizing guns and gun use to police the public creates a chasm between the cops and the community. We only need to look abroad to see the result of barrel-oriented police work.
Between 1999 and 2004, police in Brazil’s two largest cities, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, killed a staggering 9,889 people, most of whom were shot.
Discussão, soco na cara,começa a porrada
Mente criativa pronta para o mal
Aqui tem gente que morre até por um real
Equando a polícia chega, todo mundo fica com medo
[Discussion, punch to the face, the beatings begin
Creative minds ready for the worst
There are people here that die for real
And when the police show up, everyone gets scared]
— MV Bill,“Traficando Informação,”off Traficando Informação (2000)
As a resident of Los Angeles, producer Madlib has seen what can happen when those who serve and protect don’t do their job by the book. But as a globetrotting collaborator and deejay, he’s also seen worse. “Go to Brazil for a day,” he said. “It ain’tthat bad here. Go to Brazil for one day—it’s crazy.”
Between 1999 and 2004, police in Brazil’s two largest cities, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, killed a staggering 9,889 people, most of whom were shot. In São Paulo alone the number of civilians killed by police per year increased from under four hundred in 1998 to over six hundred in 2003. When confronted by the media and concerned citizens’ groups, São Paulo police cited a rise in confrontations with criminals. But, looking at the number of officers killed in that same period, no corresponding rise is apparent.
Jamaican cops allude to similar reasons for the elevated rate of homicides by police officers. The country of 2.6 million has averaged over 140 citizens killed by police annually for the past twenty years, including a high of 354 killings in 1984. While Jamaican police are undoubtedly at greater risk than American police, losing 112 officers in the past ten years, their rationale for killing so many civilians fails under scrutiny. For its part, the Jamaican Constabulary Force, an organization of approximately seven thousand officers, claims in nearly every instance that its members were fired on first, hence justifying the use of deadly force. But when British police looked into the JCF’s records, they concluded that—in accordance with international experience that the retaliator in a shootout always sustains more injuries—many more police injuries should have been reported by the JCF. An investigation by Amnesty International found that autopsies were performed to the lowest standards, no formal system of reporting shootings existed, and “if mechanisms currently exist in Jamaica to fairly adjudicate whether a police officer is guilty of human rights abuses, the resources those mechanisms require and the political will to enforce them appear to be lacking.”
Senior Superintendent Renato Adams once led the controversial and now disbanded Crime Management Unit, which orchestrated raids in the early millennium that resulted in at least forty killings. He released his rap single “To Protect and Serve” after being acquitted by a Kingston jury on charges of murdering two men and two women and planting guns on their bodies. In the song Adams threatens criminals with the very real boast “they will feel the full extent of the law.”
Rarely does an officer in Jamaica face trial, even for the well-documented extrajudicial executions that take place. With the government never acknowledging the existence of these executions and the minister of national security stating “The police must be able, if challenged [by gunmen] to respond swiftly, efficiently and effectively”—adding that a gunman’s “place belongs in the morgue”—Adams’s mandate is clear.
The atrocious policing environment in Brazil, Jamaica and many other parts of the world is owed in part to the officers’ training. In Brazil the police force operates as a wing of the military, and officers are trained more like infantrymen. A separate civil police force investigates crimes after the initial police response, but day-to-day police–community interactions are the purview of a deeply militarized force, and full-fledged battles in crowded areas are not uncommon. Exacerbating matters are low salaries and difficult working schedules. Most officers in Brazil must work a second job to support themselves while still adhering to the force’s “twenty-four hours on/seventy-two hours off” shift system. The force, already ill equipped to deal with the civilian population, becomes prone to exhaustion and susceptible to bribes and corruption; most horrifically, it resorts to excessive force and extrajudicial killings. While Brazil and Jamaica serve as cautionary examples to North Americans of policing by the barrel, we shouldn’t be too smug; some of our worst-served communities aren’t far behind.
While the DoJ’s annual report on the deaths and injuries of officers clocks in at over a hundred pages and is filled with every conceivable type of data, no such yearly report exists for Americans killed by police. The DoJ has released just one such report in the past thirty years. The bias of its title, Policing and Homicide, 1976–1998: Justifiable Homicide by Police, Police Officers Murdered by Felons, is clear. In the report’s twenty-two-year survey, police killed nearly four hundred people a year in the United States. The report contains no statistics of injuries by police gunfire. This information is, not surprisingly, difficult to obtain, and would require perusing thousands, perhaps millions, of police reports.
In July 2004 the Houston Chronicle’s Roma Khanna and Lise Olsen did just that, and published their findings in an investigative report on police shootings in Harris County, Texas, which includes Houston. In the five years they studied, 193 Harris County Police officers had killed or wounded 189 citizens. Nearly 80 percent of these shootings involved the HPD and the sheriff’s department, almost tripling the NYPD’s rate of police shootings. Of the 189 citizens who were shot by Harris County officers, sixty-five were unarmed, and seventeen of these unarmed citizens were killed. Only half of those 189 carried either a knife or a gun. Only five of the 193 officers faced any disciplinary measures. Those measures were limited to three reprimands, one suspension and only one firing.
“Those cops shot Amadou Diallo because they were working a community where no one looks like them and they can’t relate to anyone in the community” — Talib Kweli
Just business enforcers with hate in they holsters
Shoot you in the back, won’t face you like a soldier
Kurt Loder asked me what I say to a dead cop’s wife
Cops kill my people everyday, that’s life
— Talib Kweli,“The Proud,”off Quality (2002)
Every city has its own high-profile police shooting. In February 1999 four NYPD officers who were searching for a rape suspect shot Amadou Diallo forty-one times. When police had approached Diallo, he reached into his jacket and the police opened fire. Diallo, it turned out, had been reaching for his wallet. In 2000 his family launched an $81-million lawsuit that resulted in a $3-million settlement. None of the officers were charged.
Talib Kweli, who like so many New Yorkers was outraged by the incident, responded by organizing Hip-Hop for Respect, a CD whose proceeds went to combating police brutality worldwide. Six years later Kweli reflected on the Diallo incident. “Those cops shot Amadou Diallo because they were working a community where no one looks like them and they can’t relate to anyone in the community,” Kweli said. “It’s just a job. They don’t have a respect for the people in the community. Had they been patrolling their own community, they would be less likely to shoot that quickly and that amount of times. They would have thought a bit more ‘Maybe he is a good person, maybe he’s not a criminal, maybe I’m making a mistake.’ But because they’re working in a neighbourhood where they assume everyone is a criminal, it’s easy for them to make that judgment call.”
Fellow New York emcee Victor Santiago, known to the public as Noreaga, doesn’t need to read the papers to learn about police shooting citizens. “When I was seven or eight years old,” he said, “I saw somebody get shot in the face. It was like, ‘Wow.’ I seen the dude run from police, and the police officer basically almost killed him for running from them. So I learned at an early age that these dudes is crazy.” When citizens feel threatened rather than protected by the police, a common reaction is to take security into their own hands. “In our community, most of the time it’s kill or be killed,” Nore added. “You gotta protect yourself because nobody is going to protect you. Nobody trust the police, ’cause the police has done so much foul shit to you, and if not you directly, to people around you. Why would you trust them? They basically the enemy, and they basically only show you they the enemy.”
Long Island native and veteran emcee Freddie Foxxx echoes many of the same feelings as Nore, as he too witnessed police brutality at a young age. “I seen a police officer beat my mother when I was a little kid,” he remembered. “Like, literally beat her up. A man was beating on my mother because some lady spanked my brother and my mother said, ‘Don’t put your hands on my kid,’ and beat the lady up. It put a bad taste in my mouth about cops.”
Foxxx’s view of the police surfaced when his brother was shot and killed in 2000. “The police have come at me on a few of occasions,” he explained, “to try to sit down and talk with them, but I’m not interested in that, because I don’t know nothing about it and I don’t want to talk about it. They got a job to do and they gotta do it. I gotta deal with the everyday pain of knowing that my brother is not here.” No one has ever been charged in the murder of Foxxx’s brother.
Foxxx’s distrust of the police is so pronounced that he wouldn’t cooperate with their investigation, even if it meant the murderer going free. “I don’t know a lot of the particulars of the case,” he said, “but what I do know, I’d rather keep it to myself. The thing about the police is, you can’t trust them, youknowhatImean? I understand why people don’t want to talk to the police. I know there are people that might want to talk to them, but the police are liars. They’ll sit down and they’ll tell you, ‘Listen, this is totally confidential and nobody will know that you were here’. They’ll do anything to get the information they need.”
What Freddie Foxxx sees as manipulative and deceitful, Detective Randy Carter of the Toronto Police Service, who solved Kempton Howard’s case, might see as good police work. Like most officers, Detective Carter joined the force because he wanted to help serve the community. But Carter and his colleagues, under pressure to produce results for the administration, the media, the community and often their own consciences, sometimes resort to tactics that hurt their relationship with the community in the long term. “We are always smarter than the bad guy,” Carter said. “Sometimes we are hampered by a lack of witnesses, and even then we are smarter sometimes, because we have ways of giving witnesses the confidence they need to come to plead and say what they saw.”
Toronto emcee Jelleestone’s outlook on community cooperation reflects a common disposition among citizens who live in heavily policed neighbourhoods. “The story never gets told,” he said. “The court isn’t about the truth. Everything is about punishment and justification and revenge. Then you talk about why people don’t talk. People understand these things on another level.” It’s a point that Detective Carter also concedes: “I’d like to believe that if it’s your community, you should be taking an active role in making it a safe community. Now, having said that, the court system is often not kind to witnesses.”
The result of the broken trust between citizens and the police produces a troublesome opportunity. “That could be a good thing for me and a bad thing for them,” said Foxxx of his brother’s unsolved killing, “if I decided that I wanted to deal with it—street justice.” The problem with street justice is that it’s usually not justice at all. It’s more guns and more bodies and more grieving families—and often, more street “justice.”
According to Jelleestone, the onus is on the police to become more involved in the communities that they work in, to reform those bonds with conscientious police work, taking an interest in the communities they serve, like the officers who participated in the Kempton Howard Memorial Basketball Tournament for boys and girls in October 2005. “You gotta be part of the community so that you are going to be privy to the information that the community shares,” Jelleestone said. “They talk about community policing, and that’s a policeman that is in the community and works in the community, not only in an enforcement capacity. Somehow you are involved in the community and kids can come learn other things from you.”
We found a policeman who agreed. Superintendent Roy Pilkington of Toronto’s 31 Division, which serves the Jane and Finch area where Jellee grew up, told The Globe & Mail on November 10, 2005, that the key to good policing is for the community to “get to know police officers in the context of being people, and not just police officers.” When we reached Pilkington—a 33-year veteran of the force—he had just inherited supervision of the district, in which 84 separate shooting incidents had taken place during the previous 11 months. He was affable but hesitant: “My views aren’t exactly popular around here.” Unable to grant his own interviews, Pilkington directed us to Toronto Police Department’s media relations, “They probably won’t let me talk to you,” he added. Months of fruitless back and forth with the TPD proved Pilkington correct.
Much like the NYPD—who told us “Guns are illegal in this city, what good can come from talking about them?”—and the LAPD, who similarly rebuffed us, the Toronto Police Department’s interactions with the community struck us as inconsistent. While policemen like Pilkington understand the positives of strong community–police relationships, we also witnessed the arrogance and hostility that alienates the public and serves to confirm perceptions police forces are trying to counter. Instead of Pilkington’s progressive thinking, the public too often receives politically motivated leadership focused on budgets and media headlines instead of the public they are employed to protect. Without a community-oriented approach, the relationship between marginalized communities and the police will continue to be as dire in some areas as what David Simon describes as an occupying force: “In West Baltimore, if you’re nineteen and black, twenty-two and black or fourteen and black, what it feels like is it’s Gaza and these are the fucking Israeli tanks.”
Back in 2007, during the first week of press for the book I did 38 interviews. Chris was there for a bunch of them and then he did another handful on his own. But just like the reviews a lot of the interviews are gone, here’s what I could find.
