Did the Justice Dept. Help Fund This Gangsta Rap Protest Video About Killing Cops?

Screen shot from “Hands Up,” World Star Hip Hop

With all the provocateuring and race baiting on the part of Eric Holder and his Justice Department in the wake of the Michael Brown and Eric Garner killings, this shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, and yet somehow it still does.

A legal defense group funded by millions in Justice Department grants called Bronx Defenders is prominently featured in the rap video below which includes verses like, “Time to start killing these coppers,” “For Mike Brown and Sean Bell, a cop gotta get killed,” and “by any means necessary, let’s make ’em respect us.”

The video, by “Uncle Murda” and Maino, is called “Hands Up” (Eric Garner Tribute). In it, amidst all the dramatized police violence against the people including a close range shooting of a black man holding his hands up by a white cop, the two rappers are shown holding guns to the front and back of the head of a white police officer.

The financial ties were first reported on by The Daily Signal and expanded upon in The New American:

It was not immediately clear whether the Bronx Defenders group, which is featured in the video, along with staff attorneys for the organization, played a role in financing the violent film. In addition to DOJ funding offered under a program ironically named after a murdered NYPD officer, the organization has also received upwards of $40 million from city taxpayers just in the last two years. So far, the Bronx Defenders has largely remained silent about the full extent of its involvement in the production, according to media reports…

The deeply controversial rap clip, posted on Youtube and viewed well over 150,000 times so far, shows the Bronx Defenders, too, on multiple occasions. In one scene, a grieving mother walks into the organization’s taxpayer-funded office. There, a Bronx Defenders lawyer, reportedly a managing director, comforts her over the apparent fictional loss of her son at the hands of police. At the end of the video, a banner advertisement for the Bronx Defenders is shown, along with the group’s website and Twitter account. Since 2007, the organization has received over $100 million in taxpayer funding from the city, in addition to at least $1.5 million in federal grants of U.S. taxpayer funds since 2009 by Obama’s DOJ under the “Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Grant Program.” [emphasis added]

The group was prominently featured through the video, almost as if the film is partially a commercial for their services.

Ironically, Edward Byrne was an NYPD officer killed in the line of duty; he was shot in the head five times with a .38 caliber pistol.

The legal-aid group gave a statement claiming no one had informed them that the video would depict a police officer being held at gunpoint, and that they asked for the video to be pulled back in December. That remains to be seen, however, as the video is still up and the group has not released any further comment.

No one is debating that all of us, regardless of skin color, are living in a police state here in modern America; this, however, is obvious propaganda aimed at stoking further racial divide and provoking more violence between police and the people they are supposed to be serving and protecting.

Meanwhile, who is pointing the fingers at the puppet masters orchestrating a lot of this chaos to begin with? Training our police departments that America is a war zone? Outfitting our police with weapons of war? Spending millions to fund and train protesters? Saturating our establishment media with agenda-driven, obviously slanted coverage of these events to stoke the racially divisive flames into full-blown fires?

The links between Justice Department grant funds and this inflammatory video should raise serious questions about who is wagging the dog amid all the growing tensions between cops and the citizenry in our country today.

The video is below. Full lyrics can be found here.

Further Reading

Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces