The Trials of Kendrick Lamar

Once his mom found a bloody hospital gown, from a trip he took to the ER with “one of his little homeys who got smoked.” Another time she found him curled up crying in the front yard. She thought he was sad because his grandmother had just died: “I didn’t know somebody had shot at him.” One night, the police knocked on their door and said he was involved in an incident in their neighborhood, and his parents, in a bout of tough love, kicked him out for two days. “And that’s a scary thing,” Lamar says, “because you might not come back.”

After a couple of hours, the mood on Rosecrans starts to shift. An ambulance roars by, sirens blaring. In the middle of the street, a homeless man is shouting at passing cars. Lamar starts to grow uneasy, his eyes glancing at the corners. I ask if everything’s OK. “It’s the temperature,” he says. “It’s, uh, raising a little bit.” A few minutes later, one of his friends — who’s been cruising back and forth on his bicycle all afternoon, “patrolling the perimeter” — calls out, “Rollers!” and a few seconds later, two L.A. County sheriff cruisers round the corner. “There they go,” Lamar says, as they hit their lights and take off.

As a teenager, “the majority of my interactions with police were not good,” Lamar says. “There were a few good ones who were actually protecting the community. But then you have ones from the Valley. They never met me in their life, but since I’m a kid in basketball shorts and a white T-shirt, they wanna slam me on the hood of the car. Sixteen years old,” he says, nodding toward the street. “Right there by that bus stop. Even if he’s not a good kid, that don’t give you the right to slam a minor on the ground, or pull a pistol on him.”

Lamar says he’s had police pull guns on him on two occasions. The first was when he was 17, cruising around Compton with his friend Moose. He says a cop spotted their flashy green Camaro and pulled them over, and when Moose couldn’t find his license fast enough, the cop pulled a gun. “He literally put the beam on my boy’s head,” Lamar recalls. “I remember driving off in silence, feeling violated, and him being so angry a tear dropped from his eye.” The story of the second time is murkier: Lamar won’t say what he and his friends were up to, only that a cop drew his gun and they ran. “We was in the wrong,” he admits. “But we just kids. It’s not worth pulling your gun out over. Especially when we
running away.”