Songfacts®:

• In this song, Ice-T takes the persona of a 17-year-old from South-Central Los Angeles who kills another kid in a random altercation. Now he's the "hunted child," wanted for murder and at risk for retaliation.
  
  Ice-T was in his 30s when the song was released. He grew up among gangs in Los Angeles, but had a keen sense of survival and stayed sober. This song lays out the fate of many young men who grew up in that environment.
• Ice-T was a gangsta rap pioneer, releasing his first album in 1987, a year before N.W.A's debut Straight Outta Compton. The genre took off a few years later; Ice-T's biggest album came in 1991 with OG Original Gangster.
• Ice-T wrote this song with his producer, Afrika Islam, who built the track on a swirling siren-like sample from "King of the Beats" by Mantronix (1988). Islam studied under Afrika Bambaataa and incorporated electo sounds, giving his tracks a propulsive high-end energy. He and Ice would chop up samples and put them through what they called their "electronic microwave."
• In a Songfacts interview with Ice-T, he named this as the most innovative of his early songs. "That used a crazy bass track," he said. "It was wild - it had a PE feel."
  
  The song incorporates some lyrics from the 1987 Public Enemy flamethrower "Bring The Noise," notably the line, "death row, what a brother know."
• This song is punctuated by Ice-T imitating news reports about the child. These breaks are another device innovated by Public Enemy - you can hear an example on their track "One Million Bottle Bags."