Before Ice-T played a cop.

Welcome to part 2, the conclusion of our story of Ice-T and Body Count's self-titled album.

So everything we talked about all leads up to this moment. Cop Killer.

The song was conceived as most great songs are - goofing around in the studio. According to Ice: "When we wrote Cop Killer, I was in rehearsals singing Psycho Killer by Talking Heads, and Beatmaster V , said we need a cop killer. He's like, 'Cops are out there killing people, doing their bullshit, and getting away with it.'. He's like, 'Motherfuckers need to start taking off on the cops.' So I thought of a character, like, what if somebody snapped and went after them? And that's where the lyrics come from; I just started imagining if somebody went over the edge based on cop killings. You know, better you than me, I'm not gonna let you kill me.

And with that narrative in mind, Ice penned the lyrics to cop killer and onto the album it went.

Body Count's album debuted at No. 32 on Billboard's Top 50 albums,[2] peaking at No. 26 on the Billboard 200.

And immediately, parents and politicians across the country…did nothing. Nobody cared.

Overall, the reviews were generally positive:

Here's an excerpt from the Village Voice reviewing the album: Exploiting and burlesquing the style's white skin privilege from "Smoked Pork" to "Cop Killer," Ice-T's metal album takes rap's art-ain't-life defense over the top. Not only does he off pigs, he murders his mom and suggests that listeners with parents on the racist tip follow his example. A MINUS

In July of 1991, Body count hit the road on the first-ever lollapalooza, featuring the mind-blowing lineup of Rollins Band, Nine Inch Nails, Sixouse and the Banshees, Buthole surfers, living colour and janes addiction. Interestingly, Body count is billed only as "ice-t," and I'm guessing that had everything to do with name-brand recognition

So that would be the story of body count. An early 90's novelty act where the rapper is in a metal band. Grunge was taking over, and Body Count's musical stylings would soon fall out of favor.

But then the LA Riots happened.

On March 3, 1991, a black man named Rodney King was viciously beaten by LAPD officers while being detained for DUI and evading arrest. Official reports state that King suffered fractured facial bone, a broken right ankle, and multiple bruises and lacerations. When he was finally taken to the hospital, nurses on duty would later remark how the officers joked about how many times that had struck him

Plumbing salesman and amateur videographer George Holliday videotaped the beating from a nearby balcony. Two days later, Holliday called LAPD headquarters at Parker Center to let the police department know that he had a videotape of the incident. Rodney kings brother, Paul, also called to report the abuse. They did not care. He went to KTLA television with his recording. And the whole world saw what Ice-T had known all along.

Now, let's dispel the notion that maybe it was just a few bad apples. Following the public outcry, The Christopher Commission, named after co-chair Warren Christopher, was formed to examine the policies and procedures of the Los Angeles Police Department and make recommendations for reforms.

In their official 1991 report, the Commission conducted an extensive review of computer messages sent to and from patrol cars throughout the City over the units' Mobile Digital Terminals ("MDTs").

They examined 182 days of MDT transmissions selected from November 1989 to March 1991. Among the findings were officers casually talking about beating suspects, urging one another to quote, "capture him, beat him and treat him like dirt."

Some remarks describe minorities through animal analogies, such as "sounds like monkey slapping time."

The report goes on to remark these MDT conversations were: Often made in the context of discussing pursuits or beating suspects. The offensive remarks cover the spectrum of racial and ethnic minorities in the City ("I would love to drive down Slauson with a flame thrower ... we would have a barbecue"; "I almost got me a Mexican last night, but he dropped the dam gun to quick").

The officers typing the MDT messages apparently had little concern that they would be disciplined for making such remarks. Supervisors failed to monitor the messages or to impose discipline for improper remarks and were themselves frequently the source of offensive comments when in the field.

They also obtained logs from the officers and watch command immediately following the beating, with one of the officers remarking: "I haven't beaten anyone this bad in a long time." Watch command replies, "Oh no, not again; I thought you agreed to chill out for a while?"

So yeah, being a minority in Los Angeles in the 1990s is a goddamn horror show.

But having this casual malice captured on video could not be ignored. The Los Angeles County District Attorney charged four police officers with assault and use of excessive force. The jury consisted of ten white jurors, one bi-racial male,[38] Latino, and one Asian American.

On April 29, 1992, the seventh day of jury deliberations, the jury acquitted all four officers of assault and acquitted three of the four of using excessive force.

And for the next six days, the City burned.

The LA 92 riots would result in 63 dead, over 2,000 injured, 12,000 arrests and property damage totaling over 1 billion. And it was broadcast into homes via live cable television.

The situation in the Los Angeles area was resolved only after the California National Guard, United States military, and several federal law enforcement agencies deployed more than 5,000 federal troops to assist in ending the violence and unrest.[7]

As a quick postscript on those officers, I want to note that a subsequent Federal trial saw two of them do two and a half years in prison.

One of the officers who evaded charges, Timmothy Wind, was hired as a police department community relations officer for the LA suburb of Culver City in 1994 and remained in that job until 2000, when he moved to my old town of Fishers, Indiana, to attend law school, which he graduated in 2003. He was subsequently unable to find a job.

An article from the Chicago Tribune remarks: "Timothy Wind has no job, no money, no friends. His ulcers remind him daily of his one overwhelming regret: ever stepping foot in Los Angeles." Oh, and he's also entirely unrepentant about the Rodney king thing, so fuck him.

So, after all, was said and done, the LAPD and law enforcement across the nation had a reckoning with themselves and decided to root out the systemic racism that had poisoned the justice system.

We as a society decided to take a closer look at those sworn to serve and protect, to see them as people and set aside blind hero worship.

Of course, I'm kidding. None of that shit happened, or we wouldn't be talking about this song. So how did a song recorded and released without incident well before the LA riots become a target for cops and politicians after the fact?

It all started with a Dallas officer Sr. Corporal Glenn White.

One morning in May 1992, senior corporal Glenn White reported for duty at the northeast substation of the Dallas Police Department. White was a patrol officer and spent most of his day on the street. But he also worked part-time as the vice president of the Dallas Police Association, editing the DPA's monthly newsletter, "The Shield."

That morning, White's friend, Sgt. Ron Rose approached White with a tip for the next issue. Rose produced a piece of paper containing the lyrics to a song called "Cop Killer,"

Holy shit," White remarked

Rose also compiled a list of Warner Bros subsidiaries. The way he saw it, every time he took his kids to Six Flags over Texas, he was, in some way, rewarding a company that profited from music that openly called for his own death.

"Can you let people know about this?" Rose asked White. White obliged.

"Are you ready for his?" began the article on page nine of the May 29 issue of "The Shield," entitled, "New rap song encourages killing police officers."

"I urge you to BOYCOTT any and all Time Warner products and movies until such time as they have recalled this tape .... If we want this pulled from the record stores, we're going to have to make it happen ourselves. WE CAN DO IT!" White ended it by printing the president of Warner Brothers, Lenny Waronker's name, address, and phone number.

"The Shield" arrived in the mailboxes of thousands of active and retired Dallas police officers and other police associations across Texas. A few days later, White's phone rang. It was Eric Ramp of the Corpus Christi police, asking if he could forward White's article to a reporter at the local paper, the Caller-Times. The reporter, in turn, called the state's largest police advocacy organization, the Combined Law Enforcement Association of Texas, or CLEAT.

Ron DeLord, CLEAT's co-founder and president, took the call. It was the first he had heard of any boycott.

CLEAT is the state's most powerful police union and a major player to this day.

On June 10, 1992, Mark Clark, director of government relations for CLEAT, told reporters, "What we can't believe is that people who are in the business of entertaining the public would enter into a business relationship that would jeopardize the lives of the men and women that police our communities,"

In a 1992 issue of Law Enforcement News, Clark was quoted in a section called "on the record":

"Our quarrel is not with ice-T, but with the beautiful people that run Time-Warner who like to present themselves as being in the business of family entertainment."

Some other choice quotes from on the record:

"We have to support all the laws, and as long sodomy is against the law, we can't hire someone who acknowledges violating the law."

— Sgt. Jim Chandler, spokesman for the Dallas Police Department,

on the department's ban on hiring gays and lesbians as police officers.

"It's just a bunch of guys running around naked and drunk as a skunk in the woods 25 miles from nowhere."

— Det. Jim Mahoney, president of the Boynton Beach (Fla.)

Police Benevolent Association, regarding a videotape that allegedly shows officers on a weekend camping trip shooting at a black mannequin, scrawled with a racial epithet, and another that shows an officer simulating sex with a colleague in a rabbit costume.

"Bill Hart was a good man and a good cop. His nearly 40 years of faithful police service cannot go unrecognized."

— Detroit Mayor Coleman Young, following the conviction of his long-time

Police Chief for theft, embezzlement and tax evasion.

So yes, CLEAT gets a wild hair up their collective asses and decides to announce a boycott of time warner and all its properties

So Ron DeLord laid out the terms: "If Time Warner fails to act by July 16, the boycott ensues."

And here are the demands:

Time Warner was to pull the song from the album and issue an apology to police officers everywhere. Time Warner was to donate proceeds from the album sales to build a community center in South Central Los Angeles. Oh, and they wanted a million-dollar donation from Ice-T too.

CLEAT also assembled information packets which were distributed to police chiefs in every state in the union. It included the names of major Time Warner shareholders and directors, song lyrics, descriptions of Time Warner's products and companies

And it wasn't long before other police unions around the country coalesced around the boycott.

Shortly after, the CLEAT boycott was announced. The New York Patrolmen's Benevolent Association (largest in the country) joined in, asking its pension fund board to divest itself of Time Warner stock worth $100 million; its Boston counterpart is seeking similar action on the $3.5 million in stock that it holds.

And, of course, now the entire nation is paying attention:

In his book In the book Footsteps in the Dark: The Hidden Histories of Popular Music, author George Lipsitz described how police in Greensboro, NC, "delivered an ultimatum to the management of one retail store that, if it kept selling Body Count, the police would not respond to any emergency calls at the establishment."

And so it went with the police unions. Adding fuel to the fire was the fact that 1992 was an election year! You had George H.W. Bush and Dan Quayle running against Bill Clinton and Al Gore. I don't need to tell you how much an endorsement from police unions goes when you're running a campaign. So let's listen to Vice President Dan Quayle during a campaign stop at San Deigo's national sheriffs' association:

The president got in on it too. At the opening of the Drug Enforcement Administration's new Manhattan office, saying So you've got every officer's association in the country and the president of the united states decrying your song; now it's time to meet the third player in this trifecta of bullshit: The National Rifle Association and its then spokesman and future president, Mr. Guns n Moses himself, actor Charlton Heston. Known for his roles in Ben Hur, Planet of the apes and the ten commandments, Heston's legacy is a complicated one. Here is a man who served as a radio operator and B-52 aerial gunner in WWII and who later in life would provide voice talent for the army on nuclear weapon instructional films, which no shit gained him Q-level clearance. In 1964 he was an outspoken supporter of the Civil Rights act, he backed the Gun control act of 1968, marched in the picket lines of a segregated Oklahoma theatre showing one of his movies, and accompanied MLK to a number of his speeches.

And then the party of Lincoln became the party of Regan, and it fuckin melted his brain and saw him join the ranks of the burgeoning neocon movement.

So with a massive war chest and famous spokesman at their disposal, the NRA launched a full-court blitz against Body Count and Time Warner.

The NRA took out newspaper ads pledging legal assistance to the interests of any police officer shot or killed if it is shown that Ice-T's "Cop Killer" incited the violence.

And most famously, on July 16, Heston appeared before Time Warner's shareholders, giving us this incredible moment in history:

But the one person we haven't heard from in all this is the artist himself, so what did Ice-T have to say about all this:

So a deadline has been set, the battle lines drawn, and now it's time for Time Warner to feel the wrath of the blue

But in spite of everything, it took only six weeks for Time Warner to fold. On July 28, 1992, Time-Warner announced it would be pulling body count's album from the shelves. The move was positioned as a decision made by Ice-T himself.

He's quoted at the time saying: "At the moment, the cops are in criminal mode. They've threatened to bomb the record company. I'm in the position now where I think Warner Bros. is taking the war for me. So, as of today, I'm gonna pull the song off the record."

The album was pulled and eventually replaced with an alternate copy, with modified artwork and absent the sketch "out in the parking lot" and the song "cop killer." Cop Killer was replaced by a track called "Freedom of speech," which, for all its venomous railing against right-wing culture warriors, feels toothless.

But Warner Brothers appreciated Ice-T sticking up for them, so much so that in January of 1993, they dropped him and refused to distribute his upcoming album, Home Invasion, a month before its intended release.

As of today, cop killer is still unavailable on any streaming platform anywhere. The only place to find it is if you're lucky enough to own a copy of the original album or pull up a random youtube upload.

The song's Wikipedia page states that the song has been "memory-holed: It's an Orwellian term for deliberate alteration or disappearance of inconvenient or embarrassing documents, photographs, transcripts or other records, as part of an attempt to give the impression that something never happened. But it did happen, and it's our job here to make sure you damn well know about it.

In the wake of more recent social unrest, this song feels more urgent than ever. "It should be there. It absolutely should be there, "Some of these kids that are out there [protesting], they're 30, 31 — they were newborns when this was going on. What we talked about 30 years ago, we're still talking about."

So! Where are they now:

Body Count would go on to release the lackluster sophomore effort, Born Dead, in 1994 and a third album, "Violent Demise, The Last Days."

In 1996, Beatmaster v died from leukemia

In 2000 Mooseman died when he was caught in a drive-by shooting

In 2004 D-Roc passed away from complications from lymphoma

To date, the only original members of body count left are Ice-T and Ernie C.

In 2000, Ice-T joined the cast of Law & Order, special victims unit as Detective Fin Tutola, a role he's still playing 22 years later.

Body Count returned with a new lineup in 2006, releasing Murder 4 Hire. But it wasn't until 2014 when they released "Manslaughter" and the hit song "talk shit, get shot:" that body count again got the attention they deserved. Since then, they've enjoyed success in the metal scene, regularly playing festivals around the world and released two more albums, with a third on the way.

And that concludes the talk of body count and cop killer.