On June 11, 1992, the Dallas Police Association and the Combined Law Enforcement Association of Texas called a press conference to announce the beginning of a campaign to force Warner Brothers Records to remove a song entitled "Cop Killer" from one of their current releases by the heavy metal band, Body Count. Within a week, the Texan groups had received the support of police organizations in California and New York. The governor of the state of Alabama, Guy Hunt, asked all record stores in his state to stop selling Body Count's album. The Vice President of the country, Dan Quayle, termed the song "obscene." Sixty members of Congress signed a letter addressed to Warner Brothers calling the recording "despicable" and "vile." Within two weeks, the California State Attorney General had sent a letter to record store chains operating in California, requesting that they no longer stock the recording. Over 1,500 stores across the country had already pulled the album from their shelves and refused to sell it. Within a month of the initial press conference, President George Bush publicly denounced any record company that would release such a product. At a Time Warner shareholder's meeting on July 16, actor Charlton Heston stood up, read the lyrics to two songs from the album and demanded that the nation's largest media corporation take some action. Then, on July 28, Ice-T, the leader of the band, Body Count, called a press conference to announce that he personally was removing the song, "Cop Killer," from all future copies of the album.

In less than two months, a protest against a pop song begun by a 1,000 member organization of police officers had forced one of the world's largest and most successful corporations not only to pull one of their still profitable products from the marketplace, but to go back on several carefully worded public statements supporting artistic freedom and freedom of speech. Finally, on January 27, 1993, Warner Bros. released both Ice-T (solo) and Body Count from their recording contracts, citing "creative differences."

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