"Don't Take Me With You."

The "snitching" conversation is toxic. I don't care for it. If you care about rap and prefer to see fewer people die, neither should you.

A video has begun to circulate of Kenneth Copeland, “Lil Woody” of YSL fame, being interrogated after his arrest in October 2021 on weapons charges. Copeland is speaking to Fulton County investigators, apparently discussing a planned hit on one of his “ops.”

The full video — at least until Judge Ural Glanville decides to go after it — is more than three hours long. It speaks to the nature of the eight-year-running investigation Atlanta police had leading up to the arrest of Jeffery Williams — the rapper Young Thug — and of the internal dynamics of the gang war between YSL and YFN.

When earlier documentation of Copeland’s interviews with police surfaced in August, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis stressed that the revelations put his life in danger. If this video was not already widely circulating, I probably would have refrained from commenting on it. I’ve reached out to the DA’s office for comment.

I’ve also reached out to the original poster to better understand the source. If I had to guess, I’d bet this recording was a leak by one of the defendants. The 28 people charged with racketeering and gang crimes in the YSL trial would have had access to this recording and others in their discovery documentation, which is part of the reason I suspect so many were ready to take a plea.

That said, two days after this discussion was recorded, Copeland’s girlfriend — a South Fulton cop — was arrested and charged with attempting to get Copeland’s phone out of evidence and delete his social media pages. Law enforcement corruption is a factor in this case.

Here’s one of the snippets as uploaded to YouTube.

The video is a case study in police interactions. Copeland is as nervous as a cat on a road trip. He appears physically ill at times. His legs are restless. He checks his pulse. He rests his head on the table when alone. He spends most of his time pleading for a break, trying to be coy about what he knows but plainly desperate.

On the other side of the table is a sedate police investigator. She’s been a regular presence in the courthouse during the trial, and a semi-regular appearance in Copeland’s life for years.

She knows she can’t make a promise of any kind to him, because a straight trade of leniency for information creates a massive legal problem in court. Even if she could, Woody doesn’t have counsel present to negotiate with.

(As an aside: it is continually mystifying to me — all stupid questions about snitching aside — that people choose speak to the police at all while under suspicion of a crime without a lawyer, especially in an interrogation room. Woody had a lawyer. Repeat after me. “I am invoking my right to refuse to discuss this without the benefit of legal counsel. Until then, do not ask me questions. Thank you.” Then shut the fuck up.)

She repeatedly reminds Copeland that all she can do is take whatever he says back to the DAs office and can promise nothing. But she also keeps him talking, never allowing him to withdraw completely from the conversation. She’s calm and reassuring. “I’ve never lied to you,” she says, more than once.

It becomes clear in the conversation that police had been watching Copeland carefully for months, perhaps years. They discuss how often places he has been recently have been sprayed by gunfire. They are following his social media. The two discuss how a few days before this arrest, Copeland had called out Kelvin Watts in an Instagram Live stream, which led to a shooting at an apartment complex. He seemed surprised that she had seen it.

Lil’ Woody is at the heart of the YSL case. According to an affidavit for a search warrant, Shel Kel — Kelvin Watts — robbed Copeland in a brawl at Club Crucial on January 5, 2015. Crucial, now closed, was a notorious hangout for street rappers, owned by T.I. and his family.

Five days later, Copeland and Young Thug allegedly rented a car used in the drive-by shooting that killed Donovan “Nut” Thomas, setting off months of drive-by shootings.

Anyone close to one of the gang members was considered fair game. The first of those shootings happened shortly after Nut’s murder: the house of the parents of Copeland’s girlfriend took fire on the same night.

Copeland served five years in federal prison on a weapons charge from April 2015 at the height of the YFN-YSL gang war, when he was caught with a Diamond Back .223 rifle, shortened to the size of a submachine gun and stuffed in an H&M bag, at a basketball game at Dunbar Recreational Center in Atlanta.

Watts was arrested in November 2015 and charged with gang and weapons charges in a drive-by shooting that targeted Shannon Stillwell, who stands accused of the Thomas murder. YFN gang members spotted Stillwell at a restaurant in south Atlanta and shot up the car he was in on Milton Avenue.

Stillwell survived. The driver, Tiana Bogan Jones, a 25-year-old mother of two, died from a headshot in the barrage instead.

Watts got out of state prison in 2019. Copeland got out of the federal pen in 2020.

Copeland was arrested in a traffic stop on October 27, 2021, after swerving in traffic. In retrospect, that looks like a pretext to get him off the street. Police probably knew he had a suspended license; one must wonder if they were also aware that he might have a gun on him at the time, which would have been a both a state and federal crime. Even though there were other people in the car with the gun, Copeland had a magazine in his pocket; good enough for a federal weapons charge worth up to 10 years.

He’s the father of two young girls, a point the investigator raises repeatedly.

Copeland sounds bitter about how he has been treated by Young Thug and the crew. He said he wasn’t being financially supported by YSL, while exposed to all the risks of gang life. Copeland gets shot at a lot.

Cop: Thug doesn’t care about you. We’ve had this talk a hundred times.

Woody: Do you think I care about him?

Cop: But you keep putting yourself in these bad situations.

Woody: So what can I tell you to help me out? Because I’m not trying to waste y’alls time. … I’ve been put in bad situations trying to help people out, trying to stop this shit. He’s not going to stop until Kel’s dead. … He don’t give a fuck. He don’t care who he hits.

Cop: How many times are you going to keep scraping by and dodging bullets"? You’ve got to stop at some point.

Woody: Man, this on God. I come around Thug, and tell him this is stupid. They’re going to get you … I said the police are going to get you.

Cop: And what did he say?

Woody: Hee hee hee. “I know.”

Cop: He don’t care?

Woody: No, he don’t. He’s ready. … I said you’re going to fuck around with the cops and they don’t like it, and they’re going to get you. They’re going to watch for five, six, seven, eight years …

Cop: … and pay $2 million for a lawyer for all the killings and all that stuff.

Woody: It’s going to be like Florida. Somebody is going to call and say all the feds outside lined up. And he’s “I know.” Kna’a’mean? And it’s just like, well, make sure you don’t take me with you because at the end of the day, I don’t have nothing to do with the shit you’ve got going on. And he’s like “Bitch, fuck you.”

Two other investigators joined Copeland in the interrogation room. The first is an APD detective. The second and perhaps more interesting person is an investigator from the Fulton County Sheriff’s Office.

Copeland expressed concern that if he tried to cooperate with the police while county jail, he would be discovered and murdered. He specifically cited the day shift contingent, who he described as nosy and talkative. Pandemic rules remain in place, which prevent face-to-face meetings with attorneys in jail. (A correction: attorneys could visit. Woody apparently believed they could not.) Woody said there would be no safe way to talk there.

“You know what? I do truly believe that stuff is going on there,” the officer replied. “I’m not doubting that. And I don’t want you to get all fucked up because of something like that. It’s the last thing I want to do. If you’re willing to help out with something like that, I would certainly not want to put your life in danger.”

Given the recent arrest of a sheriff’s deputy, who is accused of facilitating a gang stabbing attack on an inmate — and given that stabbings are a daily occurrence at Rice Street — they may have had a point. The matter of fact way the sheriff’s department officer describes conditions is one more sign of serious problems in the department.

It’s not clear what happened to Copeland after this conversation. State charges were dropped in April, about a month before the RICO case landed on Young Thug. The cops discussed federal charges for Woody. If he has been charged by the feds, it’s sealed: there’s nothing in the formal record. Nonetheless, one has to presume the feds have him on ice somewhere.

The rap commentariat has fixated on Lil’ Woody’s eagerness to describe crimes past and future, going as far as offering to set up Young Thug for a criminal confession.

There’s a meaningful conversation to be had about prosecutors bringing the coercive power of the state to bear on potential witnesses. We can talk about how Black people in overpoliced communities often view the cops as a source of oppression and won’t interact with them on principle.

That’s not what’s going on here.

Atlanta rap has increasingly adopted the criminal street code as an anthem. Toxic elements of hip-hop fandom have decided that this “authenticity” is somehow integral to the music, even while arguing that the crimes artists rap about are musical fabrications. That cognitive dissonance hasn’t quite caught up to people yet.

It is one thing for people in this thing of theirs to uphold omerta as a virtue. It is quite another for people who do not live that life — and who are far more likely to be victimized by street violence than to profit from it — to do so. As a friend who is close to this case told me a few weeks ago, the snitching conversation is “street shit.” Listening to gangsta rap does not make you a gangster.

There’s something unseemly about listening to the peanut gallery, whose only stake in the case is their music fandom, hoot and holler “snitch!” as real people make very real and very difficult decisions about how to move on with their lives. Hundreds of people have holes in their bodies or their lives because of a gang war started over a music industry argument. There’s no redemption without acknowledging how pain has been inflicted. Stigmatizing testimony trivializes the cost of those lost lives, and interferes with that redemption.

And as long as murderers believe their partners are more likely to stay quiet out of fear of being called a snitch, the noise from the sidelines also incrementally increases the chance that people will die.