Kill Cops

For almost two decades, the outspoken punk front man has been trying to get people to pay attention to police brutality. Now they're finally ready to listen.

Scott Sturgeon is skillfully cracking open a lobster claw as he launches into another tirade about killing cops.

"I'm not so militant that I think every cop should be killed," he says, with a bit of butter dripping down to the tattoos on his chin. "But I think that in order to affect change, you have to have extremist art and extremist positions in art, like people talking about killing cops."

This is the public persona he has built for himself over the last two decades. He is Stza Crack, as his fans know him, the outspoken, antagonistic punk provocateur. At 40, with his greased back hair and slender frame, he is the unmistakable frontman of the controversial and divisive bands Choking Victim, Star Fucking Hipsters, and, most notably, Leftöver Crack. He is the Lower East Side fixture who, just five blocks from this Manhattan restaurant where he is indulging in a seafood lunch, was arrested in 2008 for whipping donuts at officers from the NYPD's 9th precinct who were monitoring his performance outside Tompkins Square Park.

"People make a choice to become police officers," he continues, "but then if they get hurt in the line of duty, it's this huge tragedy when they've actually signed up for this job—the job where you might get shot at. Whereas a citizen that gets murdered by a police officer never signed up to be in a position where they might get killed. To not say that's a bigger tragedy, that's ridiculous."

When he is in this mode, talking about his favorite subject, police brutality and corruption, there is fire in his voice. His eyes light up to a cartoonish width, steel blue and wily in this afternoon light, almost possessed. He goes off on long, passionate diatribes that race out of his brain faster than his mouth can catch up. At points, he gets himself so worked up that his outrage pushes him to the verge of tears.

"The only way to have a successful revolution is to fight back," he says, jabbing his fork into the air. "If police keep murdering innocent people, and citizens don't fight back, then it'll just get worse and worse. They'll kill with more impunity and will be less accountable, and, at some point, we'll be in a complete police state."

This is his passion. He is obsessive about it. It consumes him. It seems like nothing can break his focus when he's on a tear like this. Until he is asked a question about his personal life. Then he reverts to his natural state. His voice quickly grows soft and shaky, and his eyes shrink back to near-human size as they gaze down, towards the various insignia tattooed on his wrists and forearms. His index and middle fingers are adorned with the fading words KILL COPS. Suddenly, Stza Crack is gone, and he is once again Scott Sturgeon, a man looking sheepishly at his hands.

The earliest memory Scott Sturgeon has of dealing with the police is from when he was 12 years old and came home from school to find several officers in his apartment after his stepfather committed suicide.

"My first reaction was: Why the fuck are there police here? How is this their business? This is a personal thing, this is private, this is upsetting. They don't belong here," he remembers. "To this day, I don't think that's appropriate. I think that put it in my head that they weren't welcome in my life."

Sturgeon lived with his mother and older brother after that, and had a lonely childhood in Manhattan. He only ever had one friend at a time and never belonged to a group. It wasn't until he was in high school and discovered punk rock that he met people he connected with. But even then, his mother, who he describes as an overprotective Jewish mom, forbade him from walking across town to CBGB to catch punk shows at night. "I'm 16 and I gotta be home by midnight? I'm just starting to make friends!" he remembers. He soon realized he couldn't live under her roof anymore.

He left home for California under the guise that he would live with his biological father in Marin County. He spent one night with his dad, who he says was a photographer who didn't get much work and was on welfare, before leaving. He took a bus to San Rafael and spent his first night there sleeping on the roof of a McDonald's and fell in with other street punks and homeless people in the area, passing time by getting drunk, graffiting, and sleeping in public parks. He started splitting his time between squats on both coasts, hopping freight trains between them, and eventually picked up a drug habit, doing crack and heroin, which he cites as having a positive impact on his social life.

"You find new people and you go on these missions that are hours long sometimes, and at the end, you're rewarded with drugs, and you get high with them," he says. "Those are some of my best friends to this day, people I met through drugs. Overall, I think drug use was a positive thing in my life, because I was very lonely and suicidal. If I didn't have drugs, I would've killed myself, for sure."

In 1992, a song was released that changed Sturgeon's life, Body Count's "Cop Killer." The song saw frontman Ice T fantasizing about murdering members of the LAPD in response to their gross misconduct that came into the public eye after the Rodney King beatings. But it wasn't the music or the lyrics of the song that sparked Sturgeon's interest so much as the reaction to it.

A full-on war was waged against Ice T and his record label, Warner Bros. The New York Patrolmen's Benevolent Association led a powerful boycott against the label, threatening to cost it millions. The NRA took out ads promising to "deploy its full legal and financial resources against Time Warner and its marketing accomplices on behalf of the interests of any police officer shot or killed by someone shown to be influenced by this incitement and provocation." Tipper Gore and the Parental Music Resource Center brought the issue to the national forefront, leading then President George H.W. Bush to criticize the label's judgment in releasing it. Death threats poured into the Warner Bros. offices from angry citizens. Ultimately, Ice T conceded to have the song removed from the album on which it appeared and left the label soon after. His musical career was effectively derailed and would never regain the same momentum.

"It was so ridiculous. They made Ice T apologize and say it was a fantasy," says Sturgeon. "Well, I'm not apologizing."

In the late 90s, after the dissolution of his first band, No Commercial Value, Sturgeon formed a group called Choking Victim, and carried the spirit of Body Count with him, writing songs that pushed the boundaries of the First Amendment. They advocated shoplifting, smoking crack, and committing suicide, while vehemently denouncing world trade, and of course, the police. The band didn't last, technically breaking up on the first day of recording their only album, 1999's No Gods, No Managers. But Sturgeon's peculiar songwriting style helped the record find an audience and established him as an unlikely figurehead.

The multi-instrumentalist is something of a punk virtuoso. He likens himself to "Prince, if Prince were shitty." He is a student of all genres of music and has a particular fondness for hip-hop, especially Tupac, whose face adorns a velvet poster that hangs above his bed in C-Squat, the famed NYC punk house on Avenue C. Sturgeon also pays homage to Pac's THUG LIFE abdomen tattoo with his own crustpunk version: BUG LIFE.

Sturgeon essentially invented a type of music, dubbed "crack rock steady," which fuses elements of punk, ska, thrash, and black metal, and is peppered with themes of Satanica and classical interludes. It is so distinct that it could never be justly replicated. His singing voice is wholly unique as well, a demonic growl which he can turn on and off like a lightswitch. He pushes words out with it as fast as he can, fitting as much information into the songs' spaces as possible. It's a relentless style that he cites Operation Ivy singer Jesse Michaels as the inspiration for.

"He's got this wild energy where he combines pop punk with black metal or something. I don't even know how to describe it," says Michaels. "There's a certain type of person in music—the big personality, creative force of nature-type. Sturgeon is definitely that type."

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