“Cop Killer” is the last track on Body Count’s self-titled LP. In it, the protagonist takes matters of police brutality into his own hands by fighting fire with fire: killing police officers.

The song came about during a band rehearsal when Ice-T was singing the Talking Heads song “Psycho Killer” and original drummer Beatmaster V suggested writing about getting revenge for police brutality. Ice-T told Kerrang:

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.

The group began writing “Cop Killer” in 1991, inspired by several cases of police brutality in Los Angeles. Then in April 1992, after the infamous beating of Rodney King and the ensuing riots, references to King and LAPD chief Daryl Gates were incorporated into the final version of the song.

After a Dallas police officer heard about the song from his 14-year-old daughter, he wrote an article in the police association newsletter encouraging fellow officers to boycott Body Count’s record label Warner Brothers. When CBS and ET interviewed the officer, NRA activist Charlton Heston caught wind of it and began complaining to several conservative groups and speaking up at WB shareholder meetings, leading to nationwide coverage about the song’s controversy.

In a New York Times article published in 1992, Ice-T makes it clear that, although this song is written in a first-person narrative, the song is fiction, not fact.

At no point do I go out and say, “Let’s do it.” I’m singing in the first person as a character who is fed up with police brutality. I ain’t never killed no cop. I felt like it a lot of times. But I never did it.

At first BC fought back against the protests, once reading a letter from the San Diego police chief on stage before wiping his ass with it. But eventually they agreed to take the song off of the album once the controversy began to overshadow the music with even President George W Bush and his VP Dan Quayle speaking out against the track and WB execs receiving death threats. On subsequent pressings, “Cop Killer” was replaced with a metal version of Ice-T’s song “Freedom Of Speech”.

In his book The Ice Opinion, Ice-T compared the contents of this song to the film Unforgiven, which came out in the same year. Both are about somebody getting revenge against the police force for the unjust murder of his black friend. And yet one of them was condemned by the President, and the other won four Academy Awards.

Years later, Ice-T clarified that the violence in the song was directed at bad policemen, not all policemen:

I’m definitely not anti-cop, I play a cop on TV. But I hate bullies and racists and people who take advantage of their position. Whether that’s a cop or your boss at work or the guy on the block… whether they’ve got a badge on or not.

Even in 2020, “Cop Killer” is not available on streaming services, and Ice-T doesn’t even own a copy of the original pressing of the album with the song included on it. The only other place than the original pressings of the album where the song can be found is on a promotional radio-only CD titled The Radio EP, featuring versions of some songs edited for radio airplay – it contains an unedited version of “Cop Killer”.