Fuck tha Police
1988 single by N.W.A
"Fuck tha Police" is a protest song by American rap group N.W.A that appears on the 1989 album Straight Outta Compton as well as on the N.W.A's Greatest Hits compilation. The lyrics protest police brutality and racial profiling and the song was ranked number 425 on Rolling Stone's 2004 list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. In 2021, Rolling Stone re-ranked the song at number 190 in an updated list, and in 2025, the publication ranked the song at number 10 on its list of "The 100 Best Protest Songs of All Time."
Since its release in 1989, the "Fuck tha Police" slogan continues to influence popular culture in the form of T-shirts, artwork, political expression, and has transitioned into other genres as seen in the cover versions by Bone Thugs-n-Harmony, Dope, Rage Against the Machine, and Kottonmouth Kings.
Composition
Prior to the song being recorded, both Ice Cube and Dr. Dre were nervous about potentially doing so. Visiting his friend and fellow rapper Phoenix Phil in Phoenix, after showing him the lyrics and hearing his reaction, Cube decided to throw away the lyrics to the song, but his friend was excited about the song and retrieved it from the trash, and when he later showed it to Eazy-E, he expressed enthusiasm as well.
"Fuck tha Police" parodies court proceedings, inverting them by presenting Dr. Dre as a judge hearing a prosecution of the police department. Three members of the group, Ice Cube, MC Ren, and Eazy-E, take the stand to "testify" before the judge as prosecutors. Through the lyrics, the rappers criticize the local police force.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2533270. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1989, 2004, 2021 and 2025.
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This entry incorporates text from “Fuck tha Police” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.