The current nationwide uprising against police violence is changing everything. Protests in cities around the country, and the violent law enforcement and military response to all of it, have affected almost every aspect of American life, from laws about police disciplinary records to NASCAR. For the first time in years, many Americans are beginning to really reckon with what policing is and how it works.

While police violence against Black people is finally being debated and responded to in the halls of power, there is a related aspect of policing that, many feel, is due to be re-examined: how the police deal with hip-hop. And for one very big reason: for over two decades, the largest police force in the United States has had a unit dedicated to keeping tabs on rappers and the people around them.

The story of the New York Police Department’s so-called “hip-hop police”—now known as the Enterprise Operations Unit—begins with Derrick Parker. Parker was a detective in the NYPD who, in 1996, joined the department’s Cold Case Squad. He was also a longtime hip-hop aficionado who knew a lot of players in the industry. Following the Notorious B.I.G.’s murder in 1997, Parker says he caught up other members of the NYPD on rap’s major players, giving them a four-hour presentation about the East Coast/West Coast rivalry. (Interestingly, Parker claims that when Biggie went to L.A. for the trip that would get him killed, he was followed there by NYPD officers from the department’s Major Case Squad—he remembers only that it had to do with “some robberies or something.”)

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