Lil Wayne has been catching some flack for his recent comments about police brutality in response to George Floyd's murder, and he's been doing some damage control on Young Money Radio ever since. In the wake of the police killing of Floyd in Minneapolis last month, Wayne made some remarks that did not sit well with some people. "We have to stop viewing it with such a broad view, meaning we have to stop placing the blame on the whole force and the whole everybody or a certain race or everybody with a badge." Wayne told Fat Joe. "We have to actually get into who that person is. And if we want to place the blame on anybody, it should be ourselves for not doing more than what we think we're doing."
He has since attempted to explain his stance by speaking on his own upbringing in New Orleans where he used to see Black people get brutalized by police all the time. However, he also used a famous encounter with a white officer in his youth to further justify why he feels the way he does about the issue of police brutality.
"My life was saved when I was young," Wayne recalled on Friday's episode of Young Money Radio. "I was 12 or something, I think. Shot myself. I was saved by a white cop, Uncle Bob. So you have to understand...you have to understand the way I view police, period. I was saved by a white cop. There was a bunch of black cops that jumped over me when they saw me at that door, laying on the floor with that hole in my chest. He refused to. Those black cops jumped over me, and ran through the crib, and said, 'We found the gun, we found this, we found that.' He said, 'I found this baby on this floor I need to get to a hospital.' He didn’t wait for an ambulance. He took his car. He made somebody drive it, and he made sure that I lived."
Wayne has spoken about "Uncle Bob," AKA Deputy Robert Hoobler, on a few occasions in the past, most memorably during his I Am Hip Hop Award acceptance speech at the 2018 BET Hip-Hop Awards. It's worth noting that Hoobler was fired from the Jefferson Parish Sheriff Department in 2012 after repeatedly tasing a man while calling him racial slurs, including the N-word. Sheriff Newell Normand even considered filing criminal charges against Hoobler for the incident.
While Wayne fails to mention this detail, he does recall several other instances in which the police were blatantly racist towards him while he was growing up. All of these encounters, good and bad, he explains, have contributed to his current position on police. "So before you want to speculate about anything, understand that I go through situations, too, and we all got our situations, so don’t judge no one for no reason," he said. "Do you. Help out in any kind of way you want to help out, any kind of way you can."