The Detroit rap group Insane Clown Posse filed suit on Wednesday against the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, saying that the United States government had made the “unwarranted and unlawful decision” to classify fans of the band as criminal gang members, leading to their harassment by law enforcement and causing them “significant harm.”
The lawsuit was filed in Federal District Court in Michigan by lawyers for the band and for the Detroit office of the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan. Plaintiffs include the Insane Clown Posse founders Joseph Bruce and Joseph Utsler, who perform under the stage names Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope, and whose fans call themselves Juggalos.
Also listed as plaintiffs are four Juggalos from Nevada, California, North Carolina and Iowa, who offered details of incidents in which they said they had been subjected to police harassment or other punishments because of their identification with Insane Clown Posse.
According to The New York Times, seeds of this suit were sown in 2011, when a report from the FBI’s National Gang Intelligence Center described Juggalos as “a loosely organized hybrid gang” whose members were “expanding into many U.S. communities.”
The report, titled “National Gang Threat Assessment: Emerging Trends,” cited a 2011 incident in which “two suspected Juggalo associates were charged with beating and robbing an elderly homeless man,” and another in 2010 in which “a suspected Juggalo member” shot and wounded two other people.
The report also included a photograph of a woman described as a “Juggalo member,” wearing face paint similar to the kind used by Insane Clown Posse and pointing a gun at the camera.
In its lawsuit, Insane Clown Posse said that, even more than other hip-hop artists whose music “uses very harsh language to tell nightmarelike stories with an underlying message that horrible things happen to people who choose evil over good,” the band’s own songs offered “hopeful, life-affirming themes about the wonders of life and the support that Juggalos give to one another.”
