Songfacts®:

• "Bad Boys" by the Jamaican reggae group Inner Circle is best known as the theme song for the reality TV series Cops, which followed American police officers on the job as they brought justice to various criminals and miscreants that were often shirtless for some reason. The song, though, predates the show. It appeared on Inner Circle's 1987 album One Way, which had been out for two years when the show debuted in 1989.
  
  Cops was an immediate hit, a surprising look behind the scenes at what the men and women in blue have to deal with on a regular basis, from the extremely dangerous to the merely dumb. The show also shed a light on the human desire for notoriety - many of the criminals signed waivers allowing the show to use unblurred footage of their arrests, proving that for a good number of people (particularly those with criminal intent), the fame outweighed the shame.
  
  Cops stayed on the air for an amazing 32 years before getting cancelled in 2020 amid widespread protests against police brutality and racism following the death of George Floyd. A year later, Cops was revived by the Fox Nation streaming service with various spin-offs like Cops: Spring Break. "Bad Boys" remains the theme song - it's hard to imaging the show without it.
• "Bad Boys" is a full-length song, running 3:48, but on Cops it's compressed to 25 seconds, with a quick bit from the first verse ("Whatcha gonna do when Sheriff John Brown come for you?") edited to the chorus:
  
  Bad boys, bad boys
  Whatcha gonna do?
  Whatcha gonna do when they come for you?
• The song was written by Inner Circle's bass player Ian Lewis, who wants you to know there's more to the song than what you hear on Cops.
  
  "What is not understood is the essence of the song," he told Rolling Stone. "Everybody just knows the hook. They don't listen to the words of the song where it's talking about a person who was coming into crime and adversarial towards their parents."
  
  He's referring to the verse lyrics, which tell the story of a rambunctious young boy who gets into trouble at school and buts heads with his teachers and parents. Instead of heeding their advice, he stays on this contentious path and ends up, predictably, in trouble with the law. Lewis says this kid "wants to be a man but doesn't understand that it's the family that you should springboard from," adding, "I think it was slightly misunderstood, but worldwide, we never got a negative connotation."
• Inner Circle had been around for 20 years when they finally had their international breakthrough thanks to this song's use on Cops. They were well-known in their native Jamaica and in the '70s hoped to break through to the rest of the world like Bob Marley did. They even tried disco, as heard on their 1979 album Everything Is Great, to no avail. During this time they were fronted by Jacob Miller, known as a rotund ladies' man with a huge personality and very distinctive voice. He died in 1980 at 27 in a car accident. They went through various lineup changes, with Carlton Coffie fronting the group in their "Bad Boys" era, which was their most fruitful.
• When Cops went on the air in 1989, "Bad Boys" was released as a single in the United States but Inner Circle was on a small label called Vision Records that couldn't promote it effectively. A few years later, Atlantic Records signed the group and in 1993 re-released "Bad Boys" with the weight of their promotional machine behind it. This time, the song was a hit, going to #8. Inner Circle made an album to go along with it that was also called Bad Boys, and it went Platinum and won the Grammy Award for Best Reggae Album. That album includes another single called "Sweat (A La La La La Long)," also written by Ian Lewis. That one went to #16.
  
  Inner Circle hung around with a few more chart appearances:
  
  "Rock With You" (#98 in 1993)
  "Games People Play" (#84 in 1994)
  "Not About Romance" (#92 in 1998)
  
  Their international success trailed off in the '00s but they remained very popular in Jamaica.
• In America, a "bad boy" is an archetype of a rebel who makes his own rules. It has a different meaning in Jamaica, though, where a "bad boy" (sometimes spelled "bad bwoy" or "bad bwai") is someone who commits crimes, often in the poor areas of the country. Another Jamaican term that means something different in America is "rude boy," which is a streetwise young man.
• According to John Langley, co-creator of Cops, a field producer on the show brought him Inner Circle's One Way album, which is how he discovered the song. He knew as soon as he heard it that it was the song he wanted for the theme.
• When Cops was syndicated in Sweden at the turn of the decade, the song was released as a single there in 1990 and quickly reached #1. Soon it was a hit in many other European countries.
• In 1995 the movie Bad Boys, starring Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, hit theaters. This song was featured in the film and its subsequent sequels.
  
  The song has been used in a number of other movies and also some TV shows, often for comic effect. They include the movies:
  
  Top Dog (1995)
  Ready to Rumble (2000)
  Minority Report (2002)
  Terminator Genisys (2015)
  Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 (2015)
  
  And episodes of:
  Parker Lewis Can't Lose
  In Living Color
  Bill Nye the Science Guy
  The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air
  Married... with Children
  The X-Files
  Lizzie McGuire
  Elementary
  Fresh Off the Boat
  Magnum P.I.
  This Fool
• "Sheriff John Brown" makes an appearance in this song with the line, "Whatcha gonna do when Sheriff John Brown come for you?"
  
  You'll recognize him from Bob Marley's 1973 classic "I Shot The Sheriff," where he sings:
  
  Sheriff John Brown always hated me
  For what, I don't know
• Reggae music was having a moment around the time this song charted in 1993 thanks to ""Close To You" by Maxi Priest, "Mr. Loverman" by Shabba Ranks, "Oh Carolina" by Shaggy and "Informer" by Snow.
• This wasn't the first song called "Bad Boys" to hit the Hot 100. In 1983, a very different song with that title by George Michael's group Wham! reached #60. In 2009, Alexandra Burke had a #1 UK hit with her "Bad Boys."