Mayday!: The Prosecution & Criminalization of Rap Lyrics, Flawed Gang Databases and Racial Dispartities
By: Fatima Baqi
Tags: Racial Justice, Public Policy, Drakeo The Ruler, Law, Hip Hop

In the United States, we are supposed to be protected by the Bill of Rights, in which are supposed to be applied in every court jurisdiction, every arrest. However, the narrative of Ice-T’s “freedom of speech…just watch what you say!” is all too familiar in the world of the double standard of hip-hop lyrics. While the First Amendment states we are to have freedom of speech, it all really comes down to what you look like, what genre of music you create, and even where you come from. While Johnny Cash openly says he shot a man in Reno, are we to take him seriously? Is this just storytelling in a musical form? So my question is why isn’t this applied to rap artists as often? In fact, in the rap world, you are actually more likely to be criminalized, and prosecuted based on that same freedom of speech doctrine supposed from the First Amendment. The country capitalizes on the sales of the genre of “gangsta rap”–and the listeners are not only the so-called violent members of society that prosecutors claim them to be — in fact sales in the Midwest peaked, so why are we ostracizing the same artists we are celebrating?

America’s justice system is already inept, this shouldn’t come as a surprise to anybody. Former presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg openly enforced the whole stop-and-risk policy that racially profiles and adds to the narrative of criminalizing the young, Black and Brown body as a threat. Being pushed through a window by police has apparently become a new reality for brown-skinned kids. Yet how is such aggression and violence justified by law enforcement, and are these incidents to be imagined as mere coincidence — or explained as reflective of black pathology rather than police pathology?

The country seems to think they are revolutionary and constantly attacks others–including the Arab Spring movement–but the same actions taken in Morocco against El-Haqed for criticizing police, who launched repeated attacks on the state with his lyrics during Morocco’s February 20 movement is the same punishment happening to Drakeo the Ruler in Los Angeles or Bobby Shmurda in New York. Rap has been a soundtrack of revolution and change, too, but also one with potentially steep consequences for performers like incarceration.

Like this policy, another key role in legal harassment serves as the counterpart of this — the gang database system, that law enforcement and District Attorneys use to justify this outlandish behavior.

Simply put: CalGang is an inaccurate, highly flawed and unnecessary database that the state of California uses to track whom they classify as “gang members”, started in 2003.

It is supposed to only be accessed by law enforcement agencies and used to add people to gang injunctions, support arguments for enhanced sentencing in court and even be used to disqualify families from living in public housing and civil liberties. These proposed regulations misidentify people wholly unconnected to gang activity as gang members or associates. Some of the criteria for this database includes dress, zip code, among other things. In fact, many juveniles were added to this list.

In 2013, CalGang was audited, when juveniles were added to this list. The audit, conducted by California State Auditor Elaine M. Howle, “found 42 individuals in CalGang whose birthdates indicated that they were less than one year old at the time their information was entered, 28 of whom were entered into the system in part because they admitted to being gang members.” In 2015, a 33,000 were removed, but 15,000 were added.

A recent Los Angeles Times article showcased that a dozen Los Angeles police officers were recently suspended for falsifying records to enter innocent people into the gang database, when in reality that the administrative leave would be pointless if they repeat the same behavior and in a perfect world they would be terminated.

While many policing methodologies such as this one and the infamous Predictive Policing (“PredPol”) have been proven time and time again to be racially biased, there is no doubt that CalGang’s criteria has many poorly executed, technical flaws.

This ties in to the identity of the “gangsta” rapper–the persona that law enforcement have taken into an entire new level of criminalization and prosecution in the courtroom, whom many, like N.W.A, Drakeo the Ruler & Ralfy the Plug, and Bobby Shmurda have been classified as gang-related people because of their art.

When N.W.A dropped their controversial, iconic album “Straight Outta Compton”, it caught the eyes of many. The was the first time that a group of bold men, whom are products of the Watts Riots, during Ronald Reagan’s crack era, both moments of time when there were spikes in Black unemployment, police brutality and families torn apart by drug use and incarceration. One of the tracks in particular, “Fu*k tha Police”, which critiqued the frequent police brutality and racial profiling, caught the attention of the F.B.I, was a harsh reminder that rap artists are always put in a different standard when it comes to exercising their First Amendment.

More recently, Darrell Caldwell, also known as Drakeo the Ruler, is a rapper who is currently facing a life sentence in jail. His original charge, murder, was acquitted, but, Jackie Lacey and her minions at the District Attorney’s office are having a field day playing with his life. Caldwell is a native of South Central Los Angeles, the same area that gave us the ’92 Riots, Jim Dandy’s, and Ice Cube.

He, along with his brother, who is also incarcerated, Ralfy the Plug, members of a rap group called The Stinc Team (Stincs for short) were classified as a gang. The District Attorney’s office used Drakeo’s music videos and lyrics to attempt to justify what was a murder that was proved time and time again that he did not commit. The DA reopened the case on “gang conspiracy” and “shooting from a moving car”; the gang being Drakeo’s rap group, the Stinc Team. The notion of rap artists “normalizing violence” is minutia in comparison, to say, Johnny Cash, who admit he shot a man in Reno, who was never taken seriously. Rap artists, who are majority Black men, are deemed as threats because of the stereotypes perpetuated and the fear law enforcement tries to play on society when it comes to them.

Prosecutors using racism to do their job isn’t a shocker, it is the abuse of power and the notion they are “protecting the people, and controlling crime.” We live in a time when music videos are treated as irrefutable evidence in court, but Jackie Lacey refused to use real-life cell-phone footage of police killing an unarmed person as skepticism and suggestions that we should doubt our eyes, on over 585 people in Los Angeles County since she entered office. She refuses to prosecute these men and women using “probable cause” to kill young black and brown folks. The hypocrisy relies on racist ideas, in both cases, about who deserves their rights and humanity.

The misappropriation of hip-hop in this way, besides being questionable in a court of law, requires, on the part of the prosecutors, the judge, and the jury, an intellectually dishonest reading of what art is and of the function it serves for both creator and audience. It ignores how the telling of such stories has lifted many people out of otherwise oppressive situations (if only for the duration of a song). Every instance of a legal authority using a rapper’s creative output as proof of character or crime whispers that the power of imagination doesn’t belong to disenfranchised black and brown people.

New York rap artist, Bobby Shmurda, born Ackquille Jean Pollard, rose to commerical success in 2014 with his single “Hot Nig*a”, which featured a dance challenge that went viral on social media and gained him a large following and an instrumental from fellow NY rap artist Lloyd Banks, of 50 Cent’s G-Unit entourage. Later that year, he was arrested by New York Police on murder conspiracy charges, weapons possession, and reckless endangerment.

Police said Shmurda was “the driving force in a gang also known as GS9”, which is the name of his record label, as they “dealt crack and waged deadly battles with rival gangs for territory”. However, the only evidence ever used were the lyrics in “Hot Nig*a”, in which NYPD said is a “real life document of what they were investigating.” “I been selling crack since like the fifth grade” raps Shmurda, who is not the first rapper to speak about drug trafficking, in fact many do. Even the Supreme Court of New Jersey ruled that prosecution based solely on rap lyrics is unconstitutional as it violates the First Amendment unless they have a “strong nexus.”

The proliferation of violence and “unacceptable sexual messages “in young people’s music is due in large part to the record industry’s avarice of gangsta rap music. Or so they say.

Sometimes, different federal government entities become involved over song lyrics. Rapper 21 Savage, born Shéyaa Bin Abraham-Joseph, is a rapper who grew up in Atlanta, Georgia. In 2019, he released a single called “a lot” in which contains many political lyrics, but one in particular: “Been through some things, but I couldn’t imagine my kids stuck at the border” is believed to coercise the Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) to have target 21 Savage, and shortly after, he was arrested and detained at an ICE detention center. The rapper, who came to the U.S from England at age 7, overstayed his Visa. This took the hip-hop world by storm and opened up talks on immigration reform as in my opinion, is a violation of human rights law. He was released on bond shortly after and is now an advocate for reform.

Sacramento rapper X-Raided, who served 26 years in prison over his lyrics, was recently released without any proof but his art. This was a result of then-conservative public policy of Pete Wilson, who is also the same man who was behind Prop 187–which turned California blue. His lyrics were used as state’s evidence, despite being recorded likely a year before the deadly encounter.

Since hip-hop is a very diverse art, I’m going to switch up the focus a little now, and go into another world of the rap world, first touching on the Chicano and Asian gangsta rapper. While they do exist and are underrepresented, they are rapidly influencing those who live in these heavily policed areas where LAPD corruption and gang misidentification is the norm. Many of these children are first-generation and with that comes confusion on many factors of identity, state sanctioned and gang-related violence, drug addiction and cycles of incarceration.

The Psycho Realm, a Mexican-American rap group hailing from Los Angeles’ notorious Pico-Union district in Downtown, consisting of members Sick Jacken and Big Duke.Pico-Union is home to Loyola Law School, but outside of the home of aspiring lawyers, holds socioeconomic factors stated previously. Pico-Union also has one Los Angeles’ highest homicide rates, and top rankings with biggest cuts in social service programs.

In 2011’s People v. Garcia, Garcia was convicted of murder with special gang enhancements, from word of mouth, and alleged social media posts, which included lyrics from “Stone Garden” a Psycho Realm song, in which the District Attorney used in consideration for the gang enhancements. On average, gang enhancements, which are in violation of California’s Penal Code (186.22), carry an average extra five to ten years to an individual’s sentence, including entrance into the notorious CalGang database. While nor Sick Jacken or Big Duke is the victim in this scenario, it shows what extent the DA will go.

Sad Boy Loko, born Mario Hernandez-Pacheco, is a up and coming rapper from California’s Eastside Santa Barbara neighborhood. An affiliate of Compton superstar and fellow gangsta rapper YG (notoriously affiliated with Tree Top Piru Bloods), Sadboy had commercial success and millions of views on his Youtube videos. In January 2020, he was sentenced to three years in prison for felony assault and street terrorism (which is broadly defined, yet no specific example was used in Pacheco’s case), one of the factors that played into his gang enhancements are his lyrics.

Long Beach rapper, $tupid Young, born Alex Pham, hailing from the Eastside neighborhood, is a first-generation Cambodian-American who’s parents fled to America after the Khmer Rouge genocide in the 1970s. He is openly an Asian Boyz (ABZ) member, and while his crimes were all convicted by fingerprint, his latest prosecution did involve his music videos for “I Don’t Like”, a remix to Chicago rapper Chief Keef’s song of the same title. The odd thing that struck us all weird that his crimes convicted had nothing to do with his gang, but the music did add to his gang enhancement. But even though prosecutors are supposed to find material connections between rap lyrics and crimes, judges have discretion as to what is admissible, and differing levels of familiarity with genre conventions may make certain lyrics appear more unique and threatening than they are. He has been out since 2016.

So the First Amendment protection seems to be selective when it comes to music. Socioeconomic factors, racial disparities and rebellion will all be used against you at one point-even seen as a “remarkable tool” for District Attorneys, Police and other governmental entities that want to criminalize art. Freedom of speech, just watch what you say…and what you look like.