NYPD’s Hip-Hop police have been the subject of rumors and testimonials within the rap music scene for the past 10 years.

And after an associate of Fabolous’ Street Family was killed in a club in November of last year, and Mobb Deeps’ Prodigy was convicted on weapons charges for which he is about to start serving a 3 1/2 year sentence, the two rappers have increasingly been involved in the ongoing debate.

With two cover stories and the headline “Cops Vs. Rappers,” Weekly New York Paper The Village Voice has followed and profiled the lives of the two aforementioned artists with the aim of gaining a clearer understanding their problems with the law.

Check out brief excerpts from both of the stories below:

“Prodigy’s 25th Hour” By Laura Checkoway:

After the gun was discovered, Prodigy and Alchemist were arrested and interrogated, though each claims he was barely questioned about the weapon. ” ‘We’ll let you go right now if you help us get a bust on 50 Cent,’ ” Prodigy says the police urged him. (50, another Queens product, was famously shot nine times in 2000, rose to superstardom three years later with his multi-platinum debut Get Rich or Die Tryin’, and is believed to be the NYPD’s top hip-hop target because he’s basking in the limelight while linked to several unsolved murders.) ” ‘Help us set him up. Get him to buy some drugs from you. Plant something in his car.’ I was sitting there bugging. They want to bring 50 down because he’s filthy rich, and they’re pissed off because he used to be involved in all kinds of street shit.”

“They asked me all kinds of crazy questions and knew all types of stuff about rap,” Alchemist says. “They were like, ‘Do you know anything about who shot Fabolous? Do you know anything about 50?’ It was just ridiculous.” (Nine days earlier, the Brooklyn rapper Fabolous had been shot in the leg, then stopped by the police for running a red light en route to the hospital and arrested when two unlicensed, loaded guns were found in his Dodge Magnum.)

During an interview last year, New Orleans rapper Lil’ Wayne, the most prolific and productive MC of 2007, concurred, launching unsolicited into the story of his own highly publicized arrest after his first-ever show in New York, held in July at the Beacon Theater, wherein both he and Queens rapper (and 50 Cent rival) Ja Rule were pulled over separately and taken in upon leaving the performance. “When they locked me up in New York, they asked me about 50 Cent, G-Unit, and no fucking gun or weed like they made it look like on TV,” a heated Weezy explained during an interview for Vibe magazine. Reports claimed that both rappers were in possession of .40-caliber pistols, and that one of Wayne’s associates was found flushing half a pound of marijuana down the toilet. But at the time, Wayne says the cops didn’t consider that important. “They ain’t ask me a damn thing about no gun or no weed. That could have been the gun that shot Kennedy, they didn’t give a fuck! All they wanted to know was, ‘So what’s the beef with you and 50 Cent? You and Jay-Z?’ “

Read the full story on Prodigy by Clicking Here.

“The Fabolous Life” By Chloé A. Hilliard:

“Without my name, [Shamel's death] would have never been a newsworthy story,” he says as he cruises around the Flatiron in his Bentley Coupe. “It would have just been another New York City murder. For my sake, I’m not trying to let them devalue me as this so-called head of an organized-crime family that they have accused me and a few friends of. If somebody steals a cookie right now and it’s across the street from my old neighborhood, the headline would read: ‘Street Family Robs Cookie Store.’ “

Fabolous slips into a booth at the Palms, the famous Times Square steakhouse. He’s without an entourage of any sort, but he is adorned in yellow diamonds. The businessmen ripping into their lunches don’t appear to recognize him. There’s no one to interrupt as he begins to tell the story of taking a bullet in his left thigh on a night in October 2006.

“We were exiting Justin’s [Sean 'Diddy' Combs's restaurant, named after his son, which happens to be just a few doors down from Duvet, where McKinney was killed a year later] and were across the street in the parking lot,” he remembers. “There was an argument going on, and—I’m not sure if it was spiteful or randomly—someone got out of a car and shot me.”

Read the full story on Fabolous by Clicking Here.