Family Ties Put a Face on the Faceless Issue of Free Speech

Newspaper writers and rap stars, it is not widely known, have much in common.

Stereotypically speaking, both groups are almost impossibly bad dressers--rappers opting for gold, gold, Armani and gold; journalists for lightly stained Dockers. Both work with language and, on the rare fine day, spin mere words into music. And most notably, both are frequently saved from a societal whupping behind the woodshed by the protections of the 1st Amendment.

Brothers of a sort, we are.

What, then, to make of my dilemma with rapper Shawn Thomas? In a song called “Deadly Game,” Thomas, my free speech brother, advocates the killing of cops.

But I hear his words with new ears because now my real brother is a cop.

It’s a deadly game of baseball

So when they try to pull you over

Shoot ‘em in the face, ya’ll.

*

Thomas’ song is of course not the first by an angry young rock ‘n’ roller to lash out at police officers, the symbol and sometime instrument of real oppression, racism and brutality. Bob Marley shot the sheriff, but spared the deputy, in his spare, deceptively mellow classic.

Ice-T rose to the status of gangsta rap demigod when, in 1992’s “Cop Killer,” he declared:

I’m ‘bout to bust some shots off.

I’m ‘bout to dust some cops off.

But my younger brother Blake wasn’t a cop then, he was a high school kid. And when a group of Texas lawmen threatened to disrupt a Time Warner shareholders meeting if the label didn’t drop the Ice-T album, I derided them as simple, predictable reactionaries. I defended the rapper with a simple, predictable free speech mantra: Art does not beget violence. Today, I defend Shawn Thomas, who records under the name C-BO, with equal fervor but more thought, and--whether art begets violence or not--with the image of my little brother lying by the side of a road, shot in the face.

It was a year ago that the shades of gray began mottling my black and white mental canvas of artistic expression.

Two other reporters and I had stopped at the Tower Records in Northridge on our way back to the office from lunch. I don’t recall which albums I picked up, or which the other passenger picked up. I only recall that the reporter who was driving that day grabbed Ice-T’s 5-year-old album, “Body Count.” Back in the car, he slid it into the CD player and punched up the song that made Ice-T a star, “Cop Killer.”

We all cackled--not at the notion of killing cops, certainly, but because this rant of true and deep urban anger seemed a little silly now, having become a hit in Toledo and Yakima as well as South-Central L.A., and because Ice-T had become a well-paid movie actor with a television sitcom in pre-production.

My laugh, though, was not as hearty as it might have been. My little brother had become a cop by then, a deputy sheriff in Boise, Idaho. I figured I could still chuckle because Blake had drawn jail duty, where not even the officers carry firearms. He broke up brawls and held down screeching, flailing mental cases until they could be ushered off to safer facilities.

Cop killer, I know your family’s grievin’

Cop killer, but tonight we get even.

By late last year, Blake was itching to get out of the Ada County Jail and onto the street. He was quickly hired by the Police Department in Nampa, a suburb of Boise and a nice quiet place to settle in with his wife and two young, ballet-dancing daughters.

He had been at his new job 30 minutes--half an hour into his very first day--when a call came.

A white Mercury Cougar matching the description of one driven by a federal fugitive was flying through town. The driver should be considered armed and dangerous. He had vowed never to return to prison.

After a high-speed chase, the suspect high-centered his car on the tracks at the railroad yard and ran. Blake was close enough to see that the gun in the man’s hand was a .45-caliber semiautomatic, the classic 1911 model Army pistol.

Blake drew his Glock .40-caliber and sprinted after the man. The fugitive ran to an old railroad car, and turned. He saw Blake closing on his left, two state troopers on his right. He raised the gun to his right temple. And as Blake watched through the sights of his own weapon, the man killed himself.

Later at the hospital, when the physicians had officially declared the fugitive dead and left the room, Blake stayed with him for a few minutes. He wasn’t trying to understand why he’d done it. That would be impossible. He wasn’t questioning his actions or those of the other officers.

He was just trying to take in a little death, he told me later. He wanted to quietly immunize himself, just a bit, against the violence that would become part of his daily life.

Then he went home.

*

I stopped the other day at the same record store where my reporter friend had picked up Ice-T’s album. A couple of weeks had passed since the state parole board decided that C-BO had violated parole with the anti-law enforcement lyrics in “Til My Casket Drops”--a decision the board swiftly and properly reversed. I wanted to hear the CD.

It wasn’t selling so well, an employee said, and they had knocked $4 off the price.

In the album’s liner notes, before he thanks his parents for giving him “the motivation and talent to go after what I want, which is millions,” C-BO thanks God for giving him 25 years of life.

My brother Blake, who will defend C-BO’s right to rap about shooting cops until the day he dies, is just 25 himself.