I lose friends over politics. These days saying as much often looks like a brag, a woker-than-thou policy that you value urgent world affairs more than your personal relationships. But even in my liberal New York City bubble, I’ve found more ways and time to argue politics than the average citizen.
I can’t attribute this to one thing. It probably didn’t help to grow up with two lawyer parents, one of whom loved to argue at family gatherings (usually taking the conservative side against my mother’s family, and the liberal side against my father’s) and enjoyed making me defend any basic claim I made with enough arguments to sway a jury. I also spent my boyhood in swing state Northern Virginia, bordering America’s political capital Washington, D.C., where federal government discourse was practically second nature to anyone I came into contact with. When I left home for college, I was surprised to learn that not everyone liked to argue, or even cared about, American politics.
Still, I didn’t feel shy about questioning someone’s statement, or fact-checking their belief, or asking them to bolster their opinion with more evidence than they may have wanted to provide. My late grandfather, a former Kennedy administration official who held onto his memories of a time when the most-admired conservative in America was Dwight Eisenhower, had as much political wisdom as anyone I’ve met. Yet I wasn’t above clashing with him when he’d suggest that President Biden could unite the country by appointing Republicans to his cabinet, like a modern-day Team of Rivals.
It feels almost inevitable that I'd love the most combative, politically-confrontational rock band of my lifetime, Body Count. In high school I heard their first album, a revolutionary blend of punk and metal music, with hip-hop and horror movie-inspired lyrics, and thought I’d found the coolest band in the world. Their song “Cop Killer” set off a political maelstrom in 1992, which involved the United States president, congress, the FBI, and others in a campaign that eventually got the first Body Count album banned from stores. I heard. Years later, I’d see Body Count’s influence in the world’s increased conversation around white supremacy, police brutality, and great replacement theory, not to mention dozens of new artists inspired by Body Count’s sound and image. With a few years of journalism under my belt, I wanted to thank Body Count by writing the first-ever book about the band. I submitted a proposal to Bloomsbury Publishing, and set to work researching the book these innovative musical heroes deserved.
It wasn’t easy chasing down prominent musicians for interviews, and near-impossible to get any of the band’s vilifiers, which I needed for an even-handed account of the story. I could find plenty of ‘90s press about far-right anti-“Cop Killer” hatred, sometimes spilling over into racism and conspiracy theories. But I didn’t want anyone to think I was distorting conservative claims to make my case. Most of the conservatives I reached out to never got back to me. Dan Quayle’s representative dutifully took down my contact info before never responding to any more of my interview requests. Some of the most active law enforcement officials in the fight to get “Cop Killer” banned never replied to my emails or voicemail messages. But the most important one did.
Ron DeLord is described on his professional website as “Attorney at Law, Labor Consultant, Author.” As the co-founder of the Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas (CLEAT), he’s spent decades as one of the most powerful police union bosses in America. A 2021 New York Times profile described him thusly:
“Ron DeLord, a fiery former Texas cop turned labor organizer, has long taught union leaders how to gain power and not let go. He has likened a police union going after an elected official to a cheetah devouring a wildebeest, and suggested that taking down just one would make others fall in line.
He helped write the playbook that police unions nationwide — seeking better pay, perks and protections from discipline — have followed for decades. Build a war chest. Support your friends. Smear your enemies. Even scare citizens with the threat of crime. One radio spot in El Paso warned residents to support their local police or face ‘the alternative,’ as the sound of gunshots rang out.
‘We took weak, underpaid organizations and built them into what everyone today says are powerful police unions,’ Mr. DeLord said in a recent interview. ‘You may say we went too far. I say you don’t know how far you’ve gone until you’re at the edge of the envelope.’”
If there is one villain in the Body Count story, it’s Ron DeLord. In 1992, DeLord was the most high-profile “Cop Killer” opponent not surnamed Bush, Quayle, North, Gingrich, or Heston. DeLord was certainly the most involved one, organizing press conferences, appearing on TV panels, mailing hundreds of information pamphlets, and spearheading a nationwide boycott of Time Warner, the media conglomerate whose subsidiaries included Body Count’s record label, Sire. In a black and white photo from a Time Warner shareholders meeting, DeLord holds a sign naming Time Warner magazines, movies, TV networks, and amusement parks to boycott. Body Count frontman Ice-T called DeLord “that particular cop down there in Texas who’s trying to show that he’s supercop” in Rolling Stone. Various Time Warner officials pleaded with DeLord for mercy, begging for their family products to be spared from the boycott. DeLord was implacable.
“We don't care if they sell a million more copies because of our protest,” DeLord told the Los Angeles Times. “You have to speak out against this sometime. If not now, when? How bad will the next album Time Warner produces be? We're not backing down one bit on this boycott. We're going to stay on them until the stench of this will make them decide it isn't worth it."
The movement to ban "Cop Killer'' eventually cost Time Warner an estimated $150 million, resulting in the company pulling the record, and dropping both Body Count and Ice-T from the label. To this day, it’s the most successful police boycott of a major corporation—DeLord points out that more recent US law enforcement furor over Beyoncé’s “Formation” or kneeling Colin Kaepernick did not get the police’s desired results.
I found DeLord’s email address on his website and sent him an interview request. I didn’t plan on confronting him about the issue, like a Michael Moore-style ambush. I’d rather coax enough of his opinions out of him and give him enough rope, as the saying goes, to emphasize DeLord’s place on the wrong side of history next to my interviews with Ice-T. DeLord responded promptly and professionally to my request, and we found a time to talk that week.
It sounded like he might be calling me on speakerphone from his car, perhaps confident he wasn’t going to need all of his attention and intelligence to handle me. I’d read that Ron spent his youth as an inner city cop in Beaumont, Texas, thrown into the job at age 21 with no weapons training or criminal code experience. He did not seem like the kind of guy who’d be concerned about something a New York liberal might say about him in a book.
Ron spoke with the Texas accent I knew from old news clips. He was genial, knowledgeable, funny, and remained steadfast in his belief that he’d been right about “Cop Killer.” He offered behind the scenes insights, articulating why it was important for the police to protest the Time Warner corporation and not Body Count or Ice-T. He revealed that he wanted to continue the boycott after the record had been pulled, and that the president of the Police Benevolent Association had to talk him out of it. (“He said ‘Ron, it’s over. We won, move on.’ And I said, ‘You’re right.’”) Ron remembered names and positions with expertise, and expressed sympathy for Ice-T and nonwhite Americans as subjects of police brutality. He even praised Ice’s acting skills as a Law & Order policeman, a casting choice that has infuriated some conservatives and law enforcement officials. He expressed hope for more progressive police reforms. Ron made some points I disagreed with—it’s hard for me to hear “Cop Killer” as encouraging targeted violence, or equate the song with writing a composition called “Jew Killer” or “Gay Killer.” But I couldn’t argue with Ron when stated that corporations don’t have free speech rights. Ice-T could sing whatever he wanted, Ron asserted, but Time Warner did not have the same protections.
“I wanted the companies to understand, you have the right to do whatever you wish but it does not come without consequences if you're selling something to the public,” said Ron. “They just didn’t put a human face on the police side of this argument. Whether police officers should or shouldn’t have dealt with someone in a certain way is not the issue. There’s 800,000 police officers out there, and we can’t advocate killing them as some solution to social injustice.”
“You can be for social justice, you can be that police have mishandled cases, or you can accuse them of racism, or systemic racism in our own criminal justice system,” he elaborated. “The point was, you can’t be a corporation, particularly in the family entertainment business, who allows someone to target anyone . . . for violence or death.”
It’s almost too easy to say Ron reminded me of a John Wayne movie character, and it did feel at times like I was speaking with a remaining pillar of traditional American masculinity. But Ron was varied enough—he didn’t speak in one-liners, or offer any hints of violence—to make me think that real tough guys are pretty different from the ones in movies. I thanked him for his time and we ended the call. Later that day, Ron sent me a photocopied excerpt about the “Cop Killer” controversy from a book I’d been unable to find. He CC’d a photographer who’d been on the frontlines of the story and asked for photos. “If you need anything else please reach out to me,” Ron concluded.
People ask what it’s like to interview Henry Rollins or Jello Biafra or Chuck D. But the interview I’ve since reflected on the most was probably Ron DeLord’s. I wanted to include more of our interview and write more about him in the book, which I still needed to edit to make the word count. I read that Ron had joined the Texas police force when jails were still racially segregated and Black officers were not allowed to arrest white citizens. In Dan Charnas’ book The Big Payback, I learned that Ron worked with one of the only Black Texas state senators, Royce West, “to fight for legislation mandating statewide technical, cultural, and racial sensitivity training” for nearly sixty thousand Texas officers, laboring for years to get the bill eventually passed over the objections of major lawmakers and most of the state’s police chiefs. Reading up more on Ron, I was saddened to find out that Ron’s father Clyde, a blue collar union bricklayer, died the summer of the “Cop Killer” scandal, ten days before Ice-T’s press conference announcing the record’s removal. There was no mention of this from Ron or in any of the press I read about him. When I see my friends’ “ACAB” or “ABOLISH THE POLICE” social media posts, I sometimes think of Ron. My grandfather died in 2023, and the week of his funeral I had a dream that Ron had died. “You love Ron!” my wife remarked, upon hearing my umpteenth reflection on one of our conversations.
When my publisher sent me the first copies of my book, Ron was the second person I mailed one to, after Body Count guitarist Ernie C. I was touched to receive a thank you message from him, and shocked to see the photograph Ron posted on his social media accounts, smiling, holding a copy of my book directly in front of the camera. I looked closer at the bookshelf behind him, taking note of his numerous American history books, and was almost unable to fathom that my book might share a space with such prestigious works. “I was interviewed by author Ben Apatoff for his new book Body Count 33-1/3 about Ice-T’s album in 1991. Cleat and I were involved in pushing back against the rap song Cop Killer.” wrote Ron.
Trying to form words to thank him, I looked at the comments from Ron’s friends, some with “likes” by Ron.
It was an unacceptable song that never should have aired.
We should focus on Jason Aldean and Small Town! 😎
I remember him shooting the finger.
ironic that he was allowed to play a cop on Tv.
I thanked Ron privately, and never commented on his social media posts. I reached out to him again when Rolling Stone ran an excerpt from the book, and Ron encouraged me to write another one. (“Do it you obviously have the talent.”) Ron sent me a signed copy of his academic book Police Unions and the Reform Movement: The Battle for the Future of America’s Police. I’m a little afraid to read the whole thing and learn more of Ron’s beliefs. Flipping through the chapters, I can already see a contribution by someone who endorsed a presidential candidate I can’t abide. Maybe one day I’ll feel as tough as Ron DeLord and read the rest.
No comments:
Post a Comment