Back in 1988, the legendary Los Angeles-based Hip Hop group N.W.A. released the controversial protest song “F### Tha Police.” The Straight Outta Compton track directly shined a spotlight on police brutality and racial profiling.
Fast forward to the 2020s, police violence is still a serious issue across the nation. For example, the 2020 murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin sparked one of the largest protest movements in human history. N.W.A. founding member Ice Cube told The Breakfast Club he believes the entertainment business is partially to blame for aggressive cops.
“I think Hollywood is [complicit] in this too. They done put out so many images that teach the police how to do us. If you’re a 12-year-old kid watching TV and you grow up, you probably done seen hours and hours of how Black people are treated in this country… So by the time you become a cop, it’s already etched in your brain, from watching these dumb-ass shows – ‘Oh, this is how you treat them,'” offered Ice Cube. “Hollywood is helping the racism flourish.”
After Charlamagne Tha God questioned Cube if he regretted N.W.A. being responsible for showing the public how police officers dealt with African-Americans in a combative and unlawful way, the star of the cop-centered movie series Ride Along and 21 Jump Street responded, “No, not at all. We were youngsters trying to figure it out, just trying to point out what we were going through. When you look up, everybody’s going through the same thing. That’s why that music caught on.”
Source :. AllHipHop