Now we have black kids who don’t think of the future, who are discouraged from being educated, and who see the world as beginning and ending where their neighborhood ends. They start to dabble in crime both due to peer pressure and how the authorities regard them. Eventually, like any ignorant kid, they’ll fuck up and get caught. That’s when the hammer of justice comes into play.
OUR legal system is just like our political system: It is designed for the benefit of the wealthy. Yes, there are allowances for people who can’t afford things. But no one who is on food stamps is thriving. No one with an overworked public defender is going to be “taken care of,” so to speak. In this country, you get what you pay for. And when you can’t pay anything, you get shit in return. It’s no surprise what happens to poor, ignorant inner-city kids when they have dealings with the justice system. Let me first show how things operate from the other perspective: the buying of “justice.”
In late 1997, I was playing a gig in Westchester County, New York. At the time, I was bringing my gun with me everywhere I went. But at that same time, New York had a law that said that you couldn’t carry a gun. We had ourselves a dilemma.
I got to JFK airport with my gun in my bag. Back then, Delta had it set up so that you went through the metal detectors before you even walked into the airport. Before I had a chance to declare that I had a gun, the skycap ran my bag through the machine. Naturally, the alarm went off.
I got arrested.
I went directly to central booking. There was a kid in there with me who was sixteen or seventeen years old. Back in the day, he had written on a public desk and gone to jail. I don’t know if it was at a school or at a library or whatever. All I knew was that his mother hadn’t had the two hundred dollars to pay her son’s fine.
That boy had ended up going to Rikers Island. When you’re at Rikers and you’re a teenager and you’re scared out of your mind, you’re not thinking about following the law or good behavior. You’re thinking about survival. Something happened when he was at Rikers—I never found out what—and that kid got sucked into the legal system. By the time I had crossed paths with him, he was in the process of getting two years. I asked the officers if I could take care of his present fines myself, and they told me it had to come from a parental figure. Someone had to go to court and simultaneously declare that they would be responsible for the kid.
Has anyone ever heard of a white kid going to jail for writing on a desk? Or even being suspended from class? But for the fact that kid was black, he never would have been arrested. But for the fact that kid was poor, he never would have gone to Rikers. I can’t imagine what those two years in jail did to him. Can anyone claim that this was justice? How long would it take for him working at minimum wage to get that desk repaired and restored to as-new condition? A week, maybe?
If you drop out of school, you can redeem yourself. You can get a GED or take adult-education classes later. Once you’re in the system, that’s it. Criminal records are like the scarlet letter of our day. That ignorant kid making a stupid mistake is marked for life. Every other judge in the future will see him as a serial criminal—and the cycle will continue.
But I didn’t have to go to Rikers. There was a twenty-four-hour court, so instead I went straight in front of a judge. “Mr. Hughley,” she said, “haven’t you been watching the news?” She had a point. Christian Slater had just gotten in trouble for pretty much the same thing, and some big famous newscaster was also in hot water for trying to bring a gun on a plane.
“Your honor, I didn’t know.”
“You can’t come to New York with a gun!”
She wanted me to stay in New York until the trial, but I said that I had a family and that I had obligations. And I sure did. ABC had just picked up my show The Hughleys, and if I didn’t get back to Los Angeles, who knows what would have happened.
“We don’t know if you’re going to come to court,” the judge said, “so we’re going to have to impose a significant bail before you can be released on your own recognizance.”
I felt my mouth go dry. I didn’t know what she meant by “significant,” but it sure as fuck sounded more expensive than “insignificant.”
“That’ll be ten thousand dollars,” she decided. That meant that I would have to post a one-thousand-dollar bond.
One thousand dollars? That was it? Shit! At that rate, everybody could go home with me. I had just played the gig, so I had all cash on me. I was ready to make it rain in the courtroom. The judge charged me with a class D felony. Class D is better than Class A, which is for things like murder, but it still came with mandatory jail time.
I left court and got on a Delta Airlines first-class plane all the way to L.A. When I got into L.A., I was still wondering what was going to happen. This could have killed my new series before it even started, so I wasn’t about to leave anything to chance. My business manager knew of a lawyer named Murray Richman. They call him No-worry Murray because he takes on clients and always gets them off. I hired him, just like DMX, Jay-Z, and Ja Rule hired him. That motherfucker knew how to play the game. I paid Murray thirty grand and talked to him on the phone twice. The following week, I returned to New York. We went to court at eight a.m. Murray walked into that court wearing a black-and-white tie that said O.J. WAS FRAMED. This was at a time when people were still pissed about the verdict.
The court was packed when we entered, with many cases to be tried that day. Murray talked to the prosecutor and made a compassionate argument on my behalf. The judge apologized and told me that I should have never been arrested. By 8:20, the arrest was expunged from my record. Twenty minutes might be way too generous: It might have been even faster than that.
Now imagine that same situation if I didn’t have a good lawyer. I would be going to jail. That’s what “mandatory” means: You have no option but to go to jail. Any argument I made that it was a misunderstanding or that they ran the bag before I could say anything would have made me a laughingstock.
Now imagine that same situation if I didn’t have a good lawyer and it was 2012. I’d probably be declared a terrorist.
After we were finished, I saw the lines of poor browns and blacks waiting for their chance to have their cases heard. If their cases were going to take twenty minutes, the outcomes would have been diametrically the opposite of what mine had been.
“Man, only suckers go to jail,” Murray said. “I told you that you’re not going to jail. All of them on bonds, that don’t have the money? Those guys are going to jail.”
Some people might find his comment offensive. But I don’t understand how anyone can be offended at a statement that perfectly captures the truth of the situation. It might be wrong, or it might be fucked up, but at the end of the day, Murray was right. That’s how the justice system works, and I had just fucking witnessed it work in exactly that way. Lawyers are just like lobbyists: You throw money at the expensive ones, and they make your problems go away because of their connections. It really is as simple as that. What poor youth has access to a wealthy lawyer? This ain’t Diff’rent Strokes, this is real life.
But even though things worked out in my favor, the situation still left me with a very ambivalent feeling. I was walking out the door, but those kids were fucked. I know people who get fucked by the legal system all the time. I had a friend who was my warm-up. He got into an argument with some dude and said, and I quote, “I’m going to kick your ass. Motherfucker, I’m going to kill you! You don’t know who you’re fucking with.” That exact quote is being said by a dude in some bar in America right now. We’ve all heard it, and we all roll our eyes at it. It’s a stupid, ridiculous thing to say. It’s a cliché.
My friend got charged with making terrorist threats because he publicly threatened to kill someone. This is not some left-wing fear-mongering scenario. This happened to someone I know, and it’s obviously happening many times to people I don’t know. The anti-terrorist laws are being used for purposes that have nothing to do with terrorism
, even remotely.
My friend called me, scared out of his mind. They had set the bail at $250,000. If he wanted to get out, he would have to put up $25,000 just for running his big mouth. My wife would have been found guilty of murdering me if I tried to put up that money. It was just not going to happen. My friend ended up having to take a public defender to get a plea deal. He didn’t do time, but he got convicted. It was a strike on his record—and he’s one third of the way to getting “three strikes and you’re out,” to getting life in prison.
But the three-strikes law isn’t really a deterrent against crime. It’s a deterrent against crime in California. In 2007, my twenty-two-year-old nephew was in a store with his white girlfriend, and they were shoplifting. They were putting women’s clothes into the baby carriage that she was pushing. Guess who got in trouble when they got caught? The girlfriend never got charged with anything. She never even went to jail. My nephew got a public defender and pled out, with this counting as a strike.
Very intelligently, he left California. That’s the thing behind the three-strikes law: “We don’t care where you’re going, but you’re getting the fuck out of here. We want you to leave.” Is this a government of laws and not men, where everyone is treated fairly wherever they go in this nation? Shrinking budgets are causing the states to turn on one another, and it’s only going to get uglier.
Our justice system is further being used to divide family and friends. People my age remember the horror stories about the Soviet Union and the KGB, how their government had spies among the people so that everyone was always paranoid about who they talked to. It was inhumane and held up as an example of the brutality of communism. Well, at least the KGB paid those motherfuckers! Uncle Sam is drafting us into service for free.
Right after 9/11, Congress passed a piggyback law for wiretapping. In a society in which people’s rights are respected, like the right to privacy and the right to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures, the police need a warrant to tap into your phone. Fair enough. But then they changed the law. Now if I’m talking to someone who has a wiretap against them, his warrant can be piggybacked and applied to me.
As a result, many cats I know went to jail—and not a single one of them had anything remotely to do with the terrorism used as an excuse to pass this law. After a while, I was like, “Man, don’t call me. Ever.” Everybody I know has somebody in their family that’s shady. You could be talking to them about anything. He could be trying to talk you into doing something, and you’re point-blank refusing. It doesn’t matter. They can’t get him, so they want you to tell on him—to betray your own family member in the name of “building a strong community.” They’ll arrest you for some minor bullshit to make you tell on him.
Case in point: Michael Vick went to jail because a dude who was supposed to be his boy told. Foxy Brown went to jail because the motherfuckers who were supposed to be her people told. The government plans it that way. They usually get to their targets right when the working week ends. On a Friday, they’ll arrest a bunch of people. That way, they’ve got the whole weekend to freak. They’ll be told that the first one to get to the DA gets the deal. You’ll see motherfuckers racing in there to tell, racing. Who can stand up under that pressure? The people who can are the hardened criminals we really need to be worried about anyway!
This is not some political issue that I care about in the abstract. They almost got my kids. My younger daughter, Tyler, was hanging out with these kids over at somebody else’s house. She was in high school at the time, and she was doing what high school kids do all over the country: going to a party. Everyone at the party was drinking. Toward the end of the night, these two guys were messing around with these girls on tape. They were simply feeling them up. That’s not exactly classy, but it’s hardly a porno.
While this was happening in California, I was in New York staying at the Hudson Hotel and gigging at Caroline’s. My wife, who never listens to me, called me, freaking out. “The police are here and they want to arrest Tyler!” LaDonna screamed. “Don’t let them arrest my baby!”
I didn’t know what was going on, and I didn’t know what had happened. But I knew what to do in the situation, regardless of what had led up to it. “You tell the police that Tyler is not there,” I said.
“They’re already in here and they’re talking to her!” LaDonna confessed.
I felt like I was living in a fucking horror movie and “the call was coming from the house.” “See?” I told my wife. “You never listen to me, and this is what happens.” I called my lawyer and my lawyer got on the phone with the police. Then I called back Tyler to try to talk some sense into her and to find out what had happened. She explained what had been going on at the party. It turned out that not only were they trying to get her, but everybody who was at the party was getting arrested.
“What the fuck,” I asked my daughter, “possessed you to a) ever answer my door anyway, and b) answer the door for the police? What would ever possess you to do that? Don’t you ever answer my door anyway, and especially to answer it for the police. That’s my goddamn door. Then, when the police ask you a question, don’t ever tell them shit. Ever.”
Here’s another thing about the police. If my neighbor came to my house and asked to borrow a drill or a handsaw or some other tool, I would be glad to lend it to him. Maybe sometime down the road I would need a favor and he could reciprocate. Maybe he’ll never get to pay me back, but it sure doesn’t hurt to be cordial with people you are living in close proximity to.
But if that neighbor said to me, “I can and will use this power tool against you,” I would run into my house as fast as I could, lock the door, and get my gun ready. No one would ever warn you that they mean you harm unless they do, in fact, mean you harm. So when the police explicitly tell you that anything you say “can and will be used against you,” why the fuck would anyone ever give them those weapons? Has any police officer ever recanted and said, “Nah, forget what you just said. It’s water under the bridge.” Or will they twist the words to make it seem much worse than it is, so that they’re perceived as bringing in a stronger case?
Cooperating with the police is like cooperating with a mugger. Yes, you should do it—but only if the consequences of noncompliance are much worse. The cops are not there to protect someone proactively. They can’t. They can retaliate after someone fucks with you. But to protect someone before anything happens? Anyone who has ever had to deal with harassment or stalking or anything like that knows what bullshit “to protect” really is.
As I was trying to knock some sense into my daughter’s head, my lawyer was calling the cops. In minutes, they left without arresting Tyler. We made a deal with them that she was going to turn herself in that Monday. All the other dudes at the party went to jail and stayed there for the whole weekend.
I flew home that Monday to try to clean up the mess. I knew a lieutenant for the LAPD, and he was friends with the person who worked the case. That lieutenant was telling us information—and it wasn’t pretty. The first response was that they wanted Tyler to plead guilty, which would have resulted in her being registered as a sex offender. She was fifteen years old, and for being at a party she was going to be publicly marked as a sex offender for the rest of her life.
It’s no way in fuck that I was going to let that happen.
My lawyer took care of everything. It cost me $65,000 to do it, but it went away. The charges were dropped, nothing ever came up, and they didn’t find anything. Thankfully, because Tyler was going to fight it, everybody else’s cases got dropped. All those other kids got out without having their lives ruined over nonsense.
A similar thing happened with my oldest daughter, Ryan. She got a DUI, and we had to get her a lawyer and pay for it. She could have lost her license, but ended up getting it suspended for six months instead. Ryan was in England for an exchange program anyway. We wouldn’t be seeing her for six months, and by the time she got back, it was done.
&nbs
p; I’m in a fortunate place where I could keep things from spiraling out of control for my kids. I’m not letting them get away with what they did. I have the same deal with both my daughters: I’ll pay for college, but they have to pay me back the tens of thousands of dollars I spent on lawyers to keep them out of trouble. I’m not going to pay for their stupidity.
Kids don’t have the right to be stupid—but they are. This idea that kids should have their lives ruined when they make teenage mistakes is completely absurd to me. What most people don’t realize is that these kids, these kids, are treated in the same manner as professional criminals are treated. That’s especially the case when it’s teenage black dudes. The legal professionals genuinely believe that they’re the thin line keeping these animals from dragging us all down into savage anarchy. The presupposition is: We’ve got to teach these people a lesson.
The authorities have such pride in the fact that they’re doing “the right thing.” But does anyone really like a self-righteous person? Are self-righteous people ever really righteous? Right-wingers like to make fun of people who shop at Whole Foods (founded by a libertarian!) and listen to NPR, acting as though they’re the anointed ones making the world a better place for the uneducated and unenlightened masses. These officers of the law are the exact same phenomenon. Any attempt to treat black youth as people, in their view, is based on a fallacy and therefore doomed to fail. If the leftists think they’re sophisticated because they follow politics in foreign countries, the agents of the justice system think they’re insightful for a different reason. From their perspective, they’re the only ones seeing us savages as we really are. That may be a lot of things, but just isn’t one of them.
I Want You to Shut the F#ck Up Page 17