In the city, a lot of crime happens, a lot of violence happens from time to time.
Coming up in the Bay Area and being African American in a city that has a history of complex issues of violent crime, interaction with the police is always intense. That's something you have to learn. My mom taught me at a young age that if ever a cop stops you, you put your hands up and freeze - don't move.
I think everybody from Philadelphia been shot at before.
Everybody has a gun in their car in Detroit.
Blacks commit murder eight times more per capita than any other group in our society. If I had put all of my police officers on Park Avenue and none in Harlem, thousands and thousands more blacks would've been killed during the eight years that I was mayor.
Crime is out of control in Baltimore City.
Gimmicks come and go; the cop show seems one genre that will never leave - not as long as people like to sit at home in the suburbs and see what awful things go on in the cities.
Look at New York and the number of crimes out there. Every big city has crime. Bombay is the biggest city of India. So, naturally, all crimes in Bombay get banner headlines.
I rap about Memphis and what a dangerous spot that is.
I'm from the inner city of Buffalo.
Every city in the world always has a gang, a street gang, or the so-called outcasts.
There was more violent crime among poor Irish immigrants in New York City 100 years ago than there is among blacks and Puerto Ricans today.
Let me say for the record, I am not a gangster and never have been. I'm not the thief who grabs your purse. I'm not the guy who jacks your car. I'm not down with the people who steal and hurt others. I'm just a brother who fight back.
The consensus is that no more than five to ten people in a hundred who die by gunfire in Los Angeles are any loss to society. These people fight small wars amongst themselves. It would seem a valid social service to keep them well-supplied with ammunition.
If it was up to me, frankly I would be hanging some of the gang leaders from our street lamps.
It's drones over Brooklyn, you blink, you could get tooken, And now you're understanding the definition of 'Crooklyn.' Pigs on parade, but bacon fryin' and cookin', Cause kids' tired of dyin' and walkin' round like they shooken.
Drugs bring in guns. They bring in all these black-on-black crimes.
I'm from Detroit. I was from a kind of violent neighbourhood.
Police work in major cities - and New York is no exception - has always been vulnerable to corruption. Teddy Roosevelt built his career on it.
It's pretty hard to get mugged in Manhattan.
Crime seems to change character when it crosses a bridge or a tunnel. In the city, crime is taken as emblematic of class and race. In the suburbs though, it's intimate and psychological, a mystery resist to generalization, a mystery of the individual soul.
Lagos was a city that had been turned against itself. There was a bridge that became the perfect trap for crimes, which began with nails being scattered to cause flat tyres. If the driver stopped, the car would be dismantled in 20 minutes and the parts thrown overboard [to people waiting below]. The system had turned into a kind of destructive device that could be used against people. That was the narrative.
We Die Young is about gang violence. That was something that was happening in Seattle, something that kinda opened our eyes. It just seemed like things were getting out of hand. Incidents where kids were getting shot, and getting their tennis shoes ripped off their dead bodies. It just seems like these kids are dying at younger and younger ages and getting involved in gang activity.
For a while, many years ago, my job was to get mugged. My job was to walk around Times Square trying to get a mugger to attack me so that someone else could come in and arrest the mugger.
Gang violence in America is not a sudden problem. It has been a part of urban life for years, offering an aggressive definition and identity to those seeking a place to belong in the chaos of large metropolitan areas.
