Question 1

What does “jakes” mean?

Accepted Answer

The police — a New York Black vernacular term documented in print by the mid-1980s, carried worldwide by 1990s rap, and now naturalized in British drill.

Question 2

Where does “jakes” come from?

Accepted Answer

Boston does have a jake, but it means a firefighter, and it descends from that city's nineteenth-century telegraph fire-alarm system — a separate word with a separate history. The police sense is New York's. Green's Dictionary of Slang defines jake, n.4, sense 2 as a New York City police patrolman and dates its earliest citation to 1986, in Carsten Stroud's NYPD book Close Pursuit, where a squad car pulls up with a pair of jakes in it. Green's proposed etymology — that the patrolman drinks so much coffee, connecting to the same entry's older sense of jake meaning coffee — is offered with a question mark and should be treated as a guess rather than a finding. The word's real life is in Black New York. It surfaces in Queensbridge rap in the mid-1990s: Havoc uses it on Mobb Deep's Survival of the Fittest from The Infamous in 1995, and Nas uses the singular on If I Ruled the World in 1996, which is the citation Green's chose to anchor the sense. By 2000 an online Ebonics glossary was listing jakes as a headword with a plain gloss of cops, evidence that it had already moved beyond any one borough's rap scene. From there it traveled twice: to Chicago, where the sociologist Forrest Stuart recorded it in 2016 alongside twelve, and to London, where UK drill artists adopted it wholesale — 67 in 2015, Unknown T in 2018 — until British listeners took it for a homegrown word. It is not. It went out from Black New York and came back with an accent.