187 Is California Police Code for One of the Most Serious Criminal Offenses

If you've been on the internet long enough, you're likely aware that slang can come from basically anywhere. 187 is a term that is used in many places across the internet, but it started out as a police code.

More precisely, the slang originates in the California penal code, and if you've heard it being used either by police or by people in you're life, you might be wondering exactly what it might mean. Here's what we know.

Section 187 of the California penal code defines the crime of murder, and it's become a shorthand for murder in places across the country. 187 is particularly common in gangs and in a variety of hip-hop tracks, and it stands in for the word murder itself.

If you've ever heard or seen the term used, there's a good chance that it's being used in reference to murder, even if that is never explicitly stated.

The slang seems to have spread from California, as it is not the case that Section 187 of every state's criminal code is about murder. Instead, then, people started using the language in California in reference to a specific law, and then people in other states across the country started to pick up the term, even though it didn't mean anything for their criminal code in the same way it had in California.

Section 187 of the California Penal Code defines murder as "the unlawful killing of a human being, or a fetus, with malice aforethought." It goes on to explain that the killing of a fetus is not a crime if it's done in the case of an abortion by a registered physician and with the approval of the fetus's mother. Basically, then, it defines murder the way most criminal codes define the crime under state law.

The term has been in use in various pieces of popular culture for more than 30 years, and in that time, its meaning has remained relatively constant.

This term, in particular, comes largely from the complicated relationship that Black Americans have with the police. It makes sense that they would adopt police language in response to things like the war on drugs, which brought Black Americans into closer contact with police.

While the exact origins of the term have never been fully explained, the word itself has been part of the American lexicon for decades now. Police codes are usually just references to specific laws or statutes, so it's not as if the word's popular usage has caused any issues for police in terms of their communication.

It does mean, though, that anyone with a particularly attuned ear can hear figure out what police are taking about if they listen to a police scanner. 187 means murder, at least in California, and it's come to mean that in much of the country as a result.