Behind the Bastards - Behind the Police: How The Police Defeated Lynching Via Torture

Episode Date: June 25, 2020

Lynching was the sharpest blade in the arsenal of white supremacy for decades, until American police replaced it with the death penalty. In this episode, Prop and Robert trace the evolution of police torture, and how the legacy of 'the third degree' persists in law enforcement to this day. FOOTNOTES: History of the KKK in Oklahoma Tulsa, Oklahoma, Race Riot Tulsa Timeline The Color of the Third Degree: Racism, Police Torture, and Civil Rights in the American South, 1930–1955 ACCUSED TORTURER JON BURGE DIED LAST WEEK, BUT HIS LEGACY OF BRUTAL, RACIST POLICING LIVES ON IN CHICAGO CHICAGO POLICE TORTURE: EXPLAINED Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new

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Welcome to Behind the Police, a production of iHeart radio. Depressing shit! I mean, hello, I'm Robert Evans, and this is Behind the Police, the podcast that's normally behind the bastards, but is for this week, last week, and next week, giving a detailed history about the, you know, the cops and such. The systemic manifestation of... White supremacy. Oh, and bastards, for sure. And the voice that you heard that's not mine, Justin, is Jason Petty, better known as the hip hop artist propaganda. Jason, how are you continuing to do? Pulling a ham sandwich out the damn cabinet.

There we go. There we go. I'm sorry. No, no, it's been hours, guys. There hasn't been enough freestyling on this podcast because I can't. No one's wrapped on this podcast. Yeah, and I should not. Bro, let me ghost-write you something. That would be incredible. That would be very fun. You and, like, glue network astronomicalists like you guys just do a song and then just all of a sudden Robert Evans just raps. Oh, man, if I had any musical talent, that would be that would be cool. But yeah, yeah, we all have our gifts and my gift is reading things that are really depressing for, I don't know, another 90 minutes or so, which is a kind of music. But yeah, anyway,

we don't talk nearly enough about lynching today. And that's starting to change because of the recent, you know, lynchings. I think we're at six right now, possible lynchings. But lynching has a long and, well, proud's the wrong word. I shouldn't have put proud in there, but it is a long history in the United States. And the history of lynching in the U.S. is not entirely a racist one. I mentioned this before, but actually the term came out of, like, people hanging British tax collectors by their thumbs and stuff. Yeah. So like the first lynching victims were British people and kind of had it coming because they were they were being dicks, colonialist dicks. Obviously, nobody thinks of British people when they think about lynching

victims. It's also fair like worth noting that during the period where lynching was most common in the United States, like the late 1800s to the mid 1900s, not every person lynched was black, although the vast majority were. Lynching was used to enforce racial terror from whites against blacks. But it was also a really common method of what we'd call, you know, thinking back to our first episode, public spirit law enforcement, you know, communities dealing with people that they saw as problematic, some of whom were surely guilty, some of them probably who certainly weren't. I found one analysis of 4,467 lynching victims from 1883 to 1941. 4,027 victims were men, 99 were women and 341 were of unknown or more accurately, nobody wrote down what the gender was.

3,265 of these 4,467 victims were black, 1,082 were white, 71 were Mexican, and 38 were American Indian, while 10 were Chinese and one was Japanese. All of these numbers are, of course, likely somewhat low because we'll never know the total number of people who were lynching victims. Now historians who study lynching generally divided into three separate regimes. The Wild West, where lynching was mostly white people, lynching a lot of other white people in areas where there just wasn't law enforcement in a way, so like this was like how you dealt with people who were a problem. And then there was the slavery regime, which was found in former slave states where lynching existed as a form of social control against black people. And then a

smaller regime of lynching on the Texas-Mexican border where Latinos were lynched by white Texans. So there's a kind of the three broad areas that most lynchings during the lynching period in the US history kind of come down to. Now in all of these cases, law enforcement was about as likely to support any given lynching as it was to oppose it. There are many cases in the lynchings of white and black people alike where police officers would just hand over their keys to an angry mob to let them in the jail. Sometimes this was due to the officers supporting the crowd's efforts. A lot of times it was simple pragmatism because a ton of lynch mobs would burn down jails when the police resisted them. So some of this was just like, ah, well, I don't want to die.

Yeah. There's one of me and I got a real shitty six gun like, okay. Yeah, you're like, look man, this job ain't worth it. This job ain't worth it. Yeah, there was a lot of that. Yeah. Yeah. Now this was often the case police kind of backing away because they didn't want their jail to get burned down and to get killed themselves. This was often the case with lynchings in Oklahoma. Oklahomans fucking loved vigilante violence. Still kind of do, but like, oh man. Historians who study this are like fucking Oklahoma. Those are like this. They went, yo, he's losing their heart. Yeah. And this was particularly the case in Tulsa,

Oklahoma. Now the sooner state was in general a big lynching state. It was number 11 in the nation for lynchings. And Oklahoma was famous for having a public that loved taking justice into its own hands. We're going to talk about the Tulsa race riot of 1921 in a bit and the burning of Black Law Street. Yeah. Wall Street, not Law Street. Yeah. And obviously this is in the consciousness of a lot more white folks recently because the TV show Watchman featured it. But the year before that all happened, a mob of white Tulsans rushed the county courthouse to lynch a prisoner, a white prisoner. The local sheriff's department did nothing and the local police were supportive. The chief called the lynching of real benefit to Tulsa and the vicinity.

But the sheriff actually got fired for kind of, well, not fired like we're called, for standing down to this lynching. And again, historians will often note that prior to the race riot or racist riot of 1921, Tulsa had relatively minimal history of mass violence from white people against Black people, right? We're not going to say it was like congenial friendly relations between the races, but like the racist riot in 1921 was really, it was shocking to a lot of people because that hadn't happened before in Tulsa. Yeah. And if you think about it like it's logical because the Black community had time to develop infrastructure and flourish and stuff like that because they're relatively just like, look, you stay over there, we stay over here, we'll figure

this out. Yeah. And yeah, one of the kind of actually one of the precipitating factors of that is that like in the weeks before the racist riot, some like local white preachers and stuff had started getting very, very angry about the fact that white people were starting to hang out with Black people in parts of town and like developing friendships and like using each like, and that was like, they were like, this has to stop. Yeah. It's like the weird part of like the Venn diagram of like racism and capitalism and just normal friendship to where you're like, I don't know, this restaurant is just, it's good food. So I came down here. Yeah, they're way better at cooking than my mom. Yeah. Yeah. Food's better. Turns out, contrary to what my uncle Dave told me,

that's a nice lady. This is a nice dude that works here. I don't know. It's kind of cool. It's good food. It's good company. I don't understand the problem. Yeah. You know, I'm starting to think racism might not be the right call. I'm starting to think maybe we benefit from having these folks in our community. Oh, no, no, no, now we're okay. Never mind. Time to shoot. I guess so. Yeah. So in the years after World War II, large numbers of veterans of both races had come back to Tulsa and armed themselves in fear of escalating interracial tensions. In Muskogee in 1916, an armed black crowd had stopped a lynching. In May of 1921, prior to the big racist riot, an armed group of black citizens had again stopped the lynching of a black man

for an alleged rape. Now, about 25% of lynchings of black men nationwide were justified because the the crowd accused the black man of rape or sexual assault in some way. Now, only about 2% of incarcerated black people nationwide were actually convicted of rape. So we can assume that the vast majority of these lynchings were unjust, right? Yeah. Because the yeah. Anyway, what occurred in Tulsa later in May 1921 reinforces the suggestion on Monday, May 30th, a young black man named Dick Roland got into an elevator that also contained a young white woman. We will never know exactly what happened. The most common story we hear is that he likely tripped and bumped into her and she freaked out and the police were called. There's a bunch of different

stories around this. Nobody knows what happened. But yeah, white black guy walks into an elevator with a white woman, white woman screams, black guy runs away. He gets tracked down and arrested by two officers, one of whom was black. And these men were sheriff's deputies. So Dick wound up in the care of the sheriff's office. And the sheriff was a guy named Williard McCullough. He'd gotten his job as a result of the lynching of that white guy a year earlier, which his predecessor had let happen. And Williard didn't want to make the same mistake. So a crowd of angry white folks formed outside the jail, which is pretty much standard procedure in Oklahoma when a black man was accused of this kind of crime. The police chief. And again, there's a police chief and there's a sheriff.

The police chief, a guy named Gustafson, warned the sheriff to take Roland out of town. The sheriff refused, arguing that the kid was safer in jail than in an open car. And he may have been right about that. The police chief felt that moving him out of town would disperse the crowd, and he may have been right about that. We don't know exactly how it started, but, you know, basically a black crowd with a lot of guns showed up next to the white crowd who had a lot of guns. And at some point there was a struggle between an armed black guy and a white guy, and the black fella's gun went off or he fired it. Again, we don't know, but it turned into a giant fucking mob of white rioters gunning down black people, black people shooting back in self defense. And yeah, it will

continue to talk about how it gets worse. This is not an episode about the burning of Black Wall Street. We will have to cover that in more detail one of these days. Oh, cool. Yeah. There are a couple of points I should make. Yeah, I will say this before you get to this point. Sure. Like there's an interesting thing that happened there all the way to Emmett Till and to like this particular moment is like just this idea of like weaponizing the white woman, you know, and in a just this weird mix of just how social and supremacy and stuff like that works where it's like you can use her fear, you know, that was implanted in her, you know what I'm saying, as an excuse to carry out violence towards black men, right, and play the whole damsel in

distress thing, you know, I'm saying, and then them being their own white women having their own versions of oppression, right, and misogyny being like, well, this is a way to get these men to do something for me like a position of power, which evolves into the Karens, you know, I'm saying, but it's just essentially like just your your it's almost like, yo, your oppressor has weaponized you, and now you've become that, you know what I'm saying, so just the like the awareness of just the the mind scramble that which is it's like I said, it's your own unique thing, just this idea like the voice of the white woman, you know, that is like there's there's history there like Karen don't come out of nowhere. And but Karen don't understand that you're being leveraged,

you know what I'm saying, to carry out voices of violence. And then now, it's almost like now you're participating in that same violence, you know what I'm saying, so like, I don't know, it's just such an interesting thing, like how interlocking systems of oppression work, you know what I mean, and like, and how it all like keeps power in the same place. Interlocking system, that's a really important term. Yeah, because I do think there is a tendency in a lot of groups to like, oh, no, racism is rooted in capitalism, racism is rooted in, you know, religion racism is rooted in class racism, this or that racism is rooted has a lot of roots. It's like, it's like a hedgerow. That's why it's so hard to remove like you have to dynamite like hedgerows with these

gigantic sometimes centuries old like huge fucking plant walls that existed in exist in budget places, specifically like in France during World War two, they were used as like to stop tanks. And the only way to get rid of a fucking hedgerow because there's so many roots and they're so deep and so tough is to fucking dynamite it. He's got to blow the whole thing up. Right. Yeah. So again, this is not an episode about the burning of Black Wall Street in Tulsa, but there are a couple of points I should make about Tulsa in this period. It was unusual for having a large organized black community that controlled a really sizable section of town, Greenwood, and that Black Wall Street, as it was called, had its own banks, its own theaters, a vibrant business

community, good schools. And this relative prosperity was really unusual for black communities in the south, which is why it was called Black Wall Street. Another thing I should note is what historian Carol Anderson wrote in her book, White Rage, quote, the trigger for white rage inevitably is black advancement. It is not the mere presence of black people that is the problem. Rather, it is blackness with ambition, with drive, with purpose, with aspirations, and with demands for full and equal citizenship. So powerful, man. Yeah. Good book. It's powerful. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The the the comedian clip that I forget homies name that was going around that were where he was just like, look, man, we're asking for the bare minimum, like even the civil rights movement.

That wasn't even equal rights. We were just like, just just civil. Yeah. You know, just just basic. I'm just saying black lives matter. Yeah. Like not like they're not I'm not saying they're important. I'm not saying they matter more than you or it just just matter, you know. Yeah. So like you said, like just and and and the ambition of black America sparked so much rage. Michael Michael Chase special. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that's yeah. So two large mobs gather at the courthouse again, one white, one black. The white mob clearly wanted to just murder Roland, who was the kid who, you know, got in trouble. And, you know, they were in the mood to burn down the courthouse if the cops tried to stop them. The black mob obviously wanted to save their guy.

And this was a tricky situation for the police, particularly since two weeks earlier, the state attorney general had finished an investigation that described the Tulsa police as corrupt, poorly led and so poorly equipped that they had to borrow cars from their civilian friends to get to crime scenes. They were hitching rides to cut like not a great police force. So so funny. The over when this all erupts into violence, the overall response of Tulsa's police to the massacre followed like kind of perfectly encapsulates the different ways US cops responded to lynching overall. Sheriff McCullough seems to have been probably kind of your best case scenario for a white cop in this period. He had black deputies, he seems to have listened to their advice,

and he basically spent the riot barricaded in the jail defending Roland, you know, his black prisoner. So hard to, I'm not going to call him a great dude or like particularly woke or anything, but like does broadly what you'd consider to be the right thing here. Meanwhile, the police chief Gustavson was pretty close to the worst case scenario. Before the riot even started, he looked out at a huge crowd of armed and angry white people and a much smaller crowd of armed black people. And he called the National Guard to ask for their help to quote, clear the streets of Negroes. So police chief, not the same as the sheriff here. No. Now, one of the first things that happened after the riot was that large numbers of angry white dudes gathered

outside of the National Guard armory to demand guns. The National Guard was like, that's not how this works. We do have some standards. We don't just hand out guns to crowds. Dude, why can't somebody be that guy? Like, why can't we interview that guy when they got to the door and him being like, nah, no, what are you talking about? What are you talking about? So this crowd, which included a number of uniformed police officers, went over to a local sporting goods store. This particular store sold ammunition to the police department. So the cops in the crowd knew that it was a good place to go to get guns and ammo. They broke in and looted it so that they could go murder black people. As the looting and killing worsened, the police chief called in his

entire department and began commissioning special deputies, some 400 random white dudes who were given guns and legal authority by the police to go commit acts of horrific violence. By dawn the next day, the black community of Tulsa had pulled back to defend Greenwood, their neighborhood, a massive army of angry white dudes described in media at the time as a force of citizens, police and members of the National Guard, numbering 1500, invaded Black Wall Street from two directions. They took unarmed black people into protective custody. They killed anyone who resisted. Once again, what had started as white violence had been portrayed by authorities as a Negro uprising, which is how like the local press covered it. And now this uprising was being

squashed. The last resistance in Greenwood happened at the newly built Mount Zion Baptist Church. When the armed black men barricaded inside refused to leave, the police and the guardsmen burned it down. The Tulsa Police Department also enlisted the help of six JN4 biplane aircraft. They claimed these were for reconnaissance purposes, but there is evidence that the planes were used to firebomb and strafe civilians in Greenwood. And yeah, I'm going to quote now from Tulsa World and a write up of the riot, quote, Tulsa police also seem to have been involved in the mayhem more than one witness identified officers usually out of a uniform among the arsonists. VB Bostick, a black deputy sheriff was rousted from his home by a white traffic officer named Pittman, who then

joined in setting fire to Bostick's house. IJ Buck, a white Greenwood property owner, said a policeman turned him aside when Buck tried to save one of his buildings. He said, you ain't got no business building buildings for Negroes buck testified in court. Some 300 black men, women and children were murdered during the Tulsa racist riot. We will never know. They are currently in the process of excavating what they think might be a mass grave in Tulsa. Yeah. But we'll never know how many people died. Probably. Yeah. Hopefully we'll get a better count soon. But yeah. And like just try to like try to get your brain around the humanity of the moment. Like you're just you're running barbershop. You at church and a U.S. military plane, your own country. You

know what I'm saying? Like civilian plane that the police that the police were had commandeered. Yeah. Okay. Yes. A billion plane at the police commandeered. Like it's just like you just bombed my church. Yeah. Like just try to like get your brain around that. You know. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yeah. It's pretty. Yeah. Like this is pretty bad. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I wonder how many listeners of all races have never heard this. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Like that's the part that blow my mind is black people that don't know this. You know. Yeah. It's pretty fucking wild. Yes. And you know, there are two cases that I'm aware of of air power bombing like of people on American soil being bombed by armed airplanes prior to December

7th, 1941, the attack on Pearl Harbor. And it is the attack on Black Wall Street and the attack on the White U. Well, no, actually not just white, largely white, but definitely mixed race union miners in Blair Mountain during the Union uprising there. Yeah. They were also bombed and had gas bombs dropped on them, too. So those are the two cases before fucking Pearl Harbor that air power was used to kill Americans. Yeah. Yeah. Buy Americans. Yeah. Yeah. Buy Americans. Sure. Yeah. So yeah. In the months that followed the racist riot in Tulsa, Tulsa became the nexus of KKK organizing in the state. There's a debate about how much role they played in in actually the racist riot. It was probably not super huge, but the Klan Tulsa becomes like the fucking headquarters

of the Oklahoma Ku Klux Klan in the wake of the racist riot. And before much longer, Tulsa got a new Klan backed sheriff, a Klan backed police chief, as did many cities in Oklahoma, Klan members of the city council. And of course, the Klan bought brought with it violence, not just against Black people, but against Catholic and Jewish Oklahomans. The governor of Oklahoma eventually had to bring the National Guard in again to deal with the Ku Klux Klan. So yeah, yeah, that's yeah, Tulsa. And again, like again, it goes to like the like, God, the Klan's all over the place. Like why? All of a sudden, why are we mad at Catholic and Jews? Like when did they become a part of the conversation? Like that even just even you hearing, even hearing you say, it makes sense to me that

the Klan is like, yo, it's cracking over here. We'll go over here and get it, get it, get it cracking. Let's take over the city. And while we're at it, you know, fuck the Catholics, like fuck the Catholics. Yeah. What the hell? That got to do with anything, you know? Yep. Yeah. Yep. So lynching. And again, I think really one of the ways to look at the racist right and told you is as a mass, a mass lynching, like yeah, they lynched the entirety of Black Wall Street because they were angry. You know, the the that young woman screaming was the excuse, but it was anger over Black success and organization. And there's stories of like Black or white people looting Greenwood after they, you know, arrested all of the Black people in

town and as they were burning it down and coming out of Black houses with like furniture and property and like angrily yelling like these inwards have nicer things than a lot of white people. Like that that was a big part of why they did this. Yeah. Yep. So it's like we want segregation. Okay, cool. We don't want you to use our money. Okay, cool. Damn, y'all segregated and using your own money. Guess we'll kill you. I guess I hate that. Like, man, what do you want? I think it's pretty clear what they want. I think it's clear what we want. Yeah, yeah. It's pretty clear. Yeah. Lynching's peak was probably in the 1890s, but it continued to be a massive problem. I mean, throughout the 1900s, the 1920s were a pretty bad time for lynching.

Most historians will tell you that lynching is best seen as a sort of non state of auxiliary to Jim Crow, the civilian side of the enforcement of white supremacist laws. When the law fell short in the eyes of racists, it was time for a massive mob spectacle. Lynching generally was not just about murder. Victims were usually tortured to extract confessions. And the crowd generally took souvenirs and posed with the body of the murdered black person. These were often family gatherings that were announced on the radio. Now, I'm going to quote next. Yeah, picnics. Very calm. Yeah, go ahead and finish in your brain. I'm not going to say it. Just finish what you think picnic. What the end of that, what that's probably a short for. Yeah. Okay, go on.

I'm going to quote next from a book that will be a major source for this part of the episode, The Color of the Third Degree by Sylvan Niedermeier. And he writes, quote, during the 1910s, and to a greater degree from 1920 onward, the white elite of the South voiced growing criticism of the practice of lynching. This changed attitude was the result of the economic modernization taking place in the region, which was accompanied by efforts to bolster the business and political ties between the southern and northern states along with an increasing orientation among the southern, white, middle and upper classes towards the cultural values of the north. This led in 1930 to the establishment of the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention

of Lynching, ASWPL, or ASWIPL. Under the leadership of Jesse Daniel Ames, these white women activists work primarily in church circles. In their tireless work against lynching, these women disputed the traditional rationalization of this form of violence as a means of protecting white women and argued that white men were using the code of chivalry merely as a pretext to justify violence against African Americans. So that's good. Good work, good allyship, or whatever you want to call it. 1920 was actually the first year in which more lynchings were averted by law enforcement than carried out. Between 1932 and 1942, 290 lynchings were stopped by police. The activism of groups like ASWIPL helped reduce lynching through the 1920s, and while it saw an upswing

during the Great Depression, the number of lynchings dropped precipitously by the end of the 1930s. And for most of the last few decades, the anti-lynching campaigns were seen as a major feather in the cap of US law enforcement, an example of both the police kind of modernizing and reforming and of southern cops rising to the occasion to protect black people from violence. This is wildly inaccurate. Niedermeyer argues, with exhaustive documentation, that rather than protecting black people from murder, quote, law enforcement authorities in the South were generally taking initiatives to protect black suspects from being seized by lynch mobs. Now, the way they did this was by loading suspects up into police cars, which were a new thing then,

and allowed for faster transport, and taking them away to distant jails. Law enforcement did sometimes use violence and even call out militias to disperse lynch mobs. But the anger that had spawned those mobs still had to be sated, and police sated it by making damn certain that black suspects got what those mobs thought they deserved, a swift and violent death, quote. In his study of the state of Kentucky, historian George Wright comes to the conclusion that the number of executions of blacks carried out during the first decades of the 20th century continually rose, while the number of lynchings steadily declined during the same period. Likewise, the findings of the political scientist James W. Clark show a clear correlation in the 1920s and

30s between the declining lynching violence and the growing number of convicted African American offenders who were executed by state authorities. The available statistical data on the number of executions carried out in the United States between 1930 and 1970 also suggests the dwindling number of lynchings was tied to the growing use of the death penalty. Although there is no conclusive evidence to support the theory that lynching violence was gradually replaced by the death penalty, it can be said that the legal system in the South increasingly assumed the function of maintaining social control over the black population during the early 20th century. See, that is dizzying. Yeah. I hope you all caught it. It's so dizzying. Yeah. It's like,

because to try to sort that out is to go, you're off kilter because like you said, you think, oh, it's cool, man, maybe they're maybe these people are evolving. And they're like, no, this is, they're just, you just want control of your county. And you just like, so the point is. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in

Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And on the gun badass way. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself

stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted

pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I can't be having these, I can't be having the city think they got more power than me because I'm the law. But they're like, but I feel you. You know what I'm saying? Like low key, I feel you. I'm just saying you don't get to tell me what to do. So from the

black perspective, can I make any distinction between that mob and this jail? No, because I still end up dead. You know what I'm saying? And then when we say, and then like you said, all the signs we're talking about are the other ones, that mass incarceration and the death penalty and the law for it, it's just, it's same Z's. This is what we're trying to say. And here it is right in your history. It's same Z's. This why we don't make no distinction. You know what I'm saying? This is why we keep saying the orchard's bad. The orchard's bad. You know what I'm saying? Get rid of the piss apples. Yes. They're piss apples. You don't want those. You keep throwing away individual piss apples hoping and then trying to point at one that ain't got piss.

And I'm going, what? It's the... Yes. Yeah. Oh. You know what's not an apple filled with urine? First of all, I've never heard of the term piss apple, but that's great. Anyway, but I hope these products and services are not because... They are not. They are not. That's our one line for advertisers. No apples filled with urine. This is Roxanne Gay, host of the Roxanne Gay Agenda, the bad feminist podcast of your dreams. Now, what is the Roxanne Gay Agenda, you might ask? Well, it's a podcast where I'm going to speak my mind about what's on my mind, and that could be anything. Every week, I will be in conversation with an interesting person who has something to say. We're going to talk about feminism, race, writing in books and art, food,

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Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. All right. Cool. All right. So when you really look at it through a gimlet eye, the inevitable conclusion one comes to in all of this is, you know, while police often enabled violence, you know, of the Klan in the late 1800s and the early 1900s and with the race riots in 1919, you know, Tulsa in 1921, while police often enabled such things on an individual level, collectively, they were more than anything else powerless to stop this violence. Although you could argue they didn't try all that hard, but they weren't really set up to stop that violence either. And to both the state and the kind of people who tend to become police officers,

that lack of control over the mob was worse for them than whatever violence the mob was committing. Often white sheriffs and police chiefs were absolutely fine with killing black people. What bugged them was the disorder. Because it's just power people. In 1933, a sociologist with the just tremendously unfortunate name of Arthur Raper, which, oh, that's a rough one to draw out of the name basket. Yeah. Arthur Raper published a study that suggested lynchings were most often permitted by making it clear to the mob that the alleged offender would be quickly convicted and punished. Southern politicians came to rely on the death penalty as an easy way to appease the mob and avoid uncivilized violence. Local journalists supported the state in its massively increased

rate of executions, seeing them as a victory for law and order. Yo, when I was so nice to teach high school, I saw high school for a couple years. I had ninth graders. And one time, we went on this field trip to LACMA, to the museum of, you know, the museum in on La Brea. And so it's four teachers to 150, 14 year olds, right? So I had me and another teacher had control of half of them. So I got 75 freshmen, right? We're walking by the park and there's a dude selling like inflatable toys. So like hammers and dolls and such like this. And at this point, it's 75 of y'all and two of us, they're gonna, the kids are going to beat each other with it. There's no, you're not going to stop these freshmen from hurting each other with these inflatable hammers. So my thought

was, okay, if they're going to do it, they're going to do it. You're your freshman and I'm not going to stop you at low key. It seems kind of fun. I'm not going to lie to you. Seems kind of fun. So what I did was I broke them up into their homerooms, right? And made them be feuding clans. So I made them send gladiators from their homeroom to the middle for the purpose of, I was the greatest teacher ever, for the purpose of being able to make sure that no one gets actually injured, right? So because the point is the same thing that this sheriff is saying, I just need to maintain order, right? Of course, I don't want you to beat each other. And well, I just don't want to lose control. It's really the point. The point is I don't want to lose control because your mama going to kill

me if I lose one of y'all, right? And I'm probably going to lose my job. So I don't want to lose control, but y'all going to beat each other. So in my mind, I'm like, at least I can make sure that everyone's engaged and then it's not everybody beating each other, but you all sent gladiators. One of the funnest days. I really got reprimanded by the vice principal, but then the principal was like, you're brilliant. Yeah. It's like that, again, still pretty problematic cop in England who was like, well, they were going to throw the statue in the river and we could either pull it out of the river later and put it back or we could beat a bunch of our citizens for throwing a statue in the river. And that seemed like the wrong call.

You know, like, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This also dovetails into I won't go on to a long rant about my ideas for school reform, but why all children should be forced to carry claw hammers at all times in public schools and private schools for that matter. And I'll teach everybody should have a real big hammer. That's very important to me for a variety of reasons. Wow. Yeah. All right. I'm very pro hammer. Man, I don't get into that. I just found I just found the first thing we disagree on. There'd be a lot less statues, all kinds of fairies, but a lot less of them. Yeah. It'd be a great lesson on like pulleys and physics, though. I'll tell you that. Like, yeah, we was like, all right, guys, this was this. This is the freshman second semester project

is come up with the best pulley system to tear down a Confederate statue. Yeah. Yeah. The person that could do it with the where the smallest little person in my room is able to pull down this whole statue. That person get the A. Yeah. You you have the little kids pulled on the statue and then you're like, and this is why aliens didn't build the pyramids. Yes. You figured this out and so did the Egyptians. Yeah. So did the Egyptians. Yeah. All right. All right. All right. All right. We got to get back to the subject. So yeah, in 1933, yeah, Arthur Raper published a study again, like, yeah, basically that the southern politicians came to rely on the death penalties, a way to appease the mob and avoid uncivilized violence. Now, you can't easily get

a swift conviction if you have a real trial, obviously. Remember the data we have suggest that the vast majority of black people targeted by lynch mobs were innocent of any serious crime. If this shit went to court, even a crooked court, it would take time. And during that time, like, if it if you were if you were doing this the way police are supposed to handle cases like this, it would take a lot of time. And it might be off. Yeah, it might be off. And it's way easier if you go into court with a confession, because then you're like, well, he confessed. So police in this time focused on securing confessions because a suspect who confesses isn't really a suspect anymore. During the early 1900s, the NAACP documented 51 cases of forced confessions in southern states.

These were a tiny fraction of the total number of cases, which numbered in the hundreds of the thousands. The NAACP's resources were limited, and they were picking out specific cases that they were challenging in court. So these were a percent of what was going on. In three fourths of the cases they documented, the black defendants alleged that they had been tortured into confessing by the police. The vast majority of these cases were either alleged murders or rapes. The color of the third degree goes into significant detail about a number of cases that illustrate this transition. One I want to highlight to you all is the case of the murder of Raymond Stewart in 1934. Stewart was a prominent white farmer and landowner, and he was found dead in his home in Kemper County,

Mississippi. There were signs of a struggle. Almost as soon as the news got out, 200 people gathered in front of his home to look for the officers. Three young black men were eventually arrested. A lynch mob formed to go and murder them, which prompted the local sheriff to call an extra deputies and fortify the jail with machine guns and tear gas grenades. The National Guard was almost called in, and a state of emergency was declared. In order to preempt white mob violence, the sheriff's department immediately set to torturing the absolute shit out of these three kids. Confessions were quickly obtained, but when the case actually went to court, one of the young defendants began to complain that his confession had been forced out of him. Nieudermeyer writes,

quote, Brown, who is this one of these kids, testified that after his arrest he had been subjected to violent treatment, above all by deputy sheriff Cliff Dial to force him to admit the crime. He told me to come on out here that he had heard I told I killed Mr. Raymond. I come out of the jailhouse and I said, I declare I didn't kill Mr. Raymond. He said, come on in here and pull your clothes off. I'm going to get you. I said to the last that I didn't kill him. There was two more fellows about like that there and they was whipping me. They had me behind the cross chairs, kind of like that. I said I didn't kill him. They said to put him on again and they hit me so hard I had to say, yes, sir. Mr. Cliff Dial said, give the strap to me. I will get it. He took it and he

had two buckles on the end. They stripped me naked and bit me over a chair and I just had to say it. I couldn't help it. As the court transcript shows, Brown supported his testimony by pointing to the injuries from the blows to his body. Question. They whipped you hard there. Answer. Yes, sir. I will show you. There are places all the way up. Question. Did you bleed any answer? Did I bleed? I sure did. Brown testified that after Dial had forced him to confess, he threatened him with additional beatings if he recanted his statement. Furthermore, he emphatically maintained that he did not kill Raymond Stewart. If I die right now, I am going to say it. I ain't never harmed Mr. Raymond in my life. If they want, they can kill me because I said that, but I ain't never harmed Mr. Raymond.

Afterward, Henry Shields was called to the next to the witness stand. He was another one of the boys arrested. He testified that after his arrest, he had been whipped by Deputy Sheriff Cliff Dial in the Meridian Jail. Shields said that due to the relentless whipping, he eventually gave a false confession and declared that he had a hand in Stewart's murder. Mr. Cliff Dial and them come back that evening and whipped me. First, I tried to tell the truth, but he wouldn't let me. He said, no, you ain't told the truth. And I tried to stick to it. He whipped me so hard I had to tell him something. Ellington, who was the third boy, who was forced subsequently to the stand, also testified that he was innocent and had been

forced to confess. He stated that shortly after word of Stewart's murder started making the rounds, he was seized by a mob of roughly 20 people, several of whom were employees of the sheriff, including the previously mentioned Cliff Dial. He said that the men had tied him to a tree and whipped him. He went on to say that a rope which had been thrown over a tree limb was then tied around his neck and members of the mob pulled him up in the air twice to force him to divulge information about the murder. Wow. Yeah. It's pretty bad. It's real, real fucking bad. Especially like, yeah, you know, from a practical standpoint, like, hey, you know, you know, rocket scientist sheriff, you know, if you beat me, there's evidence. Yeah. So I can go, yeah, this right here, that's

his buckle. That's where that came from. Sprocket science. And then secondly, I think remember that the to catch a murderer, the little series on Netflix, remember how like when they finally showed that interrogation of the little dude that clearly was autistic, you know, and Lord, yeah, when they bullied him into saying something just so he bullied him in to say it. Yeah. So we can leave and we'll talk about that in a bit because that there's yeah, that ties into this actually rather directly. Yeah. Yeah. Like this. So yeah, all that to say, like, this isn't this is a normal practice. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If you treated your domestic partner the way that police routinely treat people in interrogations, they would have easy legal standing to get a restraining order

against you and take your guns away if you own guns. Yeah. Yes. It's emotional abuse. Yeah. So it's worth noting that further on in their testimony, these boys made statements to the effect that a great deal of the local white population knew they were being tortured at the jail. Now they'd been specifically taken to a separate geographically isolated jail on the other side of the state line in order to hide the fact that they were being tortured. This was common behavior for police around the country. But at the same time, it was important to the police that enough white people knew these black prisoners were being tortured to stop mobs from burning down one of the jails. Under questioning, Officer Dial did eventually admit to having beaten

the boys. He said that it was not too much for a Negro, not as much as I would have done if it was left to me. There's a lot in that statements. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And again, it's really black people can handle a lot. That's exactly what I'm getting into. This is part of a very long standing trend in not just law enforcement, but white racism, the idea that black people feel less pain than white people. It's for one thing documented that black men and women are prescribed lower doses of painkillers by doctors for the exact same ailments as white people are prescribed higher doses. And this is like a large black doctors do this. This is a largely unconscious thing. It's so deeply woven into the fabric of our society, the idea that black people feel pain

somehow less than white people. Yep. Yeah, I don't even have no pithy comment there. Yeah. Yeah. Might have something to do with police officers, for example, putting a knee on one of their necks for eight minutes and 46 seconds because you assume we're fine. Yeah. Yeah. And you can draw a direct line from the whipping of slaves in the prewar South and like justifications for why that wasn't cruel. It was the only way they would learn, you know, they don't feel pain the same. This is what you have to do. You can draw a direct line from that to Officer Dial's abuse to the fact that, for example, today, black and Hispanic people are 50 percent likelier in the United States to experience non-lethal use of force from police. Yeah. Yep.

All tied together by a string of poop. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Dial and his fellow officers insisted that despite the force used, all three black boys made free and open confessions to the murder. And this convinced the all white jury. Part of why it convinced the all white jury is that a reverend who had been in the jail at the time testified that they had given free confessions, by the way, that reverend repeatedly referred to all of the boys as darkies. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Real unbiased religious official there. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And again, I'm highlighting a single case because it is important for you to know, but also this happened in every state, particularly in the south and a lot of parts of the north on a regular basis.

Most police officers, particularly in the south, had similar, participated in similar things. This was the norm. Yeah. This was a common occurrence. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If they didn't participate like Officer Dial, they were aware of other officers doing it. That's probably more common than doing it just because most people aren't comfortable with carrying out random physical violence, even most police officers. But they let it happen and broadly supported it. Yeah. Yeah. The fear that's already striking in somebody that's like, obviously the person you're talking to is a sociopath. You know what I'm saying? So like, the fear of being like, well, I'm not going to get in his way because he won't turn it on me.

You know what I'm saying? This guy's crazy. Look at him. Yeah. This is full crazy. I mean, yeah. And of course, he's not crazy. Officer Dial, I have no doubt, was completely in possession of his right mind and not in any way mentally ill. He was enforcing white supremacy through violence in a way that was not effective and rational. Yeah. So the white jury, after a day and a half of proceedings, voted to convict all three boys of murder and have them executed. And thankfully, this was a case where the NAACP managed to get involved in time. They appealed and the lives of all three young men were saved. So as happy and ending as the story of torture can happen. Yeah. There's a, there's a trial like right before Brown versus Board of Education that

missed all the, missed all the fame because of Brown versus Board of Education when, yeah, about the white jurors, like the law of saying like, I have a right to be, you know, tried in front of a jury of my peers. But it wasn't until after this case, because our documents only recognized two races. So, so if this is the Latino dude, and that's, that's what the case was. It was a Latino dude who got in a bar fight with a Latino dude, right? But according to the eyes of the constitution, Latinos are white until this case, right? So if you got an all white jury, they're like, but they still looking at a Mexican dude. And he's like, dude, like, these are not my peers. Like, and then they're going, what are you talking about? You guys are both white people.

It's like, well, no, we're, you can't, you can't play it both ways, man. Like, you know what I'm saying? So, so what's interesting about this case, like you said is like, there's clear evidence. There's obvious evidence. They, the dude that did it said he did it. And then the jury acquitted them. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And the case that I just related to you is only exceptional because some version of justice was eventually done thanks to the hard work of the NAACP. Unknowable numbers of black men and boys were tortured and executed without the NAACP ever coming to their aid. Just because, you know, that's not a criticism of the NAACP. The resources were limited. Playing whack-a-mole, man. Like, it can't be everywhere, you know. Yeah. And the FBI did not

start to really look into the problem of torture and forced confessions by U.S. law enforcement until 1942. And the bureau does, again, get a little bit of credit for intervening to try and protect black Americans faster than any other wing of the U.S. government. But as Nierdermeyer notes, their efforts were limited in scope and saw very limited success and absolutely did not stop the problem or really arrest it in any major way. Some of this has to do with the history of police torture. And this is where we get into stuff that's both white and black history, you know, in a, in a, in a way, or a history of at least police abuse of both white and black people. For all of the 1800s in the first half of the 20th century, it was not illegal for the

police in the United States to torture people. Charges could be brought against the cops if they committed assault or battery and breach of their regulations, but that was as hard to prove as you might suspect. Some states had laws to prohibit the use of violence to force confessions, but that was not an across-the-board sort of thing. Nierdermeyer notes, quote, as investigative reports from that date from this period reveal, however, penalties were rarely imposed because district attorneys, judges, and jury members were highly reluctant to limit the power and authority of law enforcement officials. While the white press in the South generally avoided using the term torture in its reporting on cases of police violence during interrogations,

the term was purposefully used by the black press to expose and announce the violent abuse of African-American suspects, often in a bid to gain public support for the fledgling civil rights struggle. A more common and prevalent term was the third degree, which was adopted as police jargon in the late 19th century and entered the general American vocabulary in the early 20th century. And I'm going to guess most people know this term, right? Yeah. Yeah. I was going to say from the TV, from the gum shoes. Yeah, from the gum, the third degree. And what that means is I'm going to torture the shit out of some people. That's what he's saying. Yeah. Yeah. It's bad. Yeah. So yeah. And it is like it is a term that was used to justify police to dress up police

torture or something else. Torture sounds like a crime. Giving them the third degree is something that like a hard-bitten but good-hearted drag net type cop has to do. He doesn't like it, but I got to keep the city safe, you know? Yes. Yeah. The term really took off in the 1930s, right alongside a massive increase in police use of torture. In 1931, President Herbert Hoover established the National Commission on Law, Observance and Enforcement, better known as the Wickersham Commission. It reported that the third degree was used throughout the country, most often in big cities like New York, Chicago, Detroit and Los Angeles. In the south, torture was used to control black bodies and white mobs, but in the urban north it was just used to make

cop lives easier by guaranteeing them quick convictions. People at the time were rightly angry at this and initiatives were enacted after the Wickersham Commission to reduce the use of the third degree. Police, for their part, denied that the third degree existed and warned that any additional legal restrictions on cops would cause crime to rise. That's day one. Yeah. That's day one. Yeah. They have one tool and they use it real well, you know? Yes. Well, you know, if you do this, then who you're going to call is going to do more crime. And as you hear props say that imagining it's coming from the voice of a police officer actively pulling a man's fingernails off. Yes. Yes. So, for a long time, historians thought that government scrutiny successfully

reduced the use of police torture and maybe it did reduce it, but it did not eliminate it. And modern scholarship suggests that it just caused cops to get cageeer and a little bit more clever with how they tortured people. One way to do this was to transition to methods of torture that left no physical marks on the victims. In 1930, a New York legal aid organization listed 298 cases of suspects who were brutalized by police during interrogations. Most of the torture victims were uneducated whites under the age of 30. A large number of those white boys were immigrants. While black people were a minority of torture victims in the north, they were a disproportionate percentage of the victims. 36 percent of New York police department

torture victims were black men and black people made up only 5 percent of New York's population. So that's... Follow me now. That's pretty bad. Follow me now. Yeah. This is just... Yeah, that ain't good. Dog. When you think of like, so when I think of like just, just statistics of like, yeah, okay, uh, some like, some like three times, three... During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you gotta grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation.

In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark, and not in the good badass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country,

the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put

forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Sometimes more likely if you're a black minor boy to be tried as an adult. And then, and given the harshest, like the harshest possible sentence, it's like, I used to wonder, like, okay, when, like when did, how did y'all pull this off? Like how, like, I just, I couldn't, I couldn't do the math. Like, okay, so like, why, why, why try us as adults?

Like, I don't, I don't understand why you think and why us more than anyone else. And then you hear stories like this to where you're like, well, yeah, I mean, they, you know, they routinely just, you know, we could take a lot of pain. And then they, you know, I mean, they've been torturing us for a while, you know, so like, and now, you know, you go, you get to a time where, you know, post civil rights where, like you say, like, you can't, you can't just leave physical marks and like, kind of like actually torture fools. We've got to figure out other ways to do it. You know, we just got to get cunning about it. Yeah. Yeah. It's got to, so you're continuing the process. So it's like them getting cunning. That's what I'm trying to get to. Yeah. Them being cunning

is the tradition. Yeah. Yes. Yes. And then saying also this thing that you have extensive documentation of happening never happens and you're a liar. Yes. Believe us, we're the cops. Yes. And it gets, it gets, it gets worse. I'm going to quote again from Niedermeyer. The report by the Wickership Commission highlighted numerous cases from southern states in which police officers and sheriffs use batons, fists and whips to extort confessions from black suspects. The report also documented the use of the so-called water cure on black suspects, a forerunner to water boarding that U.S. soldiers used during the Philippine-American War 1899-1902. The water cure consisted of tying suspects flat on their backs and using a hose to force water

into their mouths or noses until they provided the requested information and made a confession. Furthermore, the report mentioned torture methods on African-Americans that included the use of electricity. One of these involved an improvised electric chair which was used until 1929 by the sheriff's office in Helena, Arkansas to extract confessions. The report also pointed to individual cases of police torture of people of Mexican origin and white suspects. The cases collected by the Wickership Commission indicate that the vast majority of the victims in the South were African-Americans, primarily men but also women. Moreover, they showed that police torture of African-Americans in the South was already commonplace before 1930. Diverse historical

studies confirm that this practice can be traced to the days of slavery. It never ended. They just got cunning. Yes. There it is. Yes. And I love how you're bringing out the idea that we're not historical revisionists in the sense to say that this is a uniquely Black experience. No. That's not to say that Blacks have had a unique experience in this. This is not a unique experience. No. This is a this is a continual abuse of power and a protection of wealth, resources, and supremacy. Yes. And nobody is safe. Nobody is safe. That's part of the that's part of the thing people have started to realize. A lot of liberals who have been broadly pro-police have started to realize since getting tear gassed and shot with rubber bullets by the cops. Yes. It's just like

nobody's safe. If you give them the right to violently oppress one group of people, they will start fucking with you. Yes. It's the whole first they came for the communists. And I was not a communist. So I didn't like that's how it works. It's fascism. Robert, you know what isn't hopefully fascism? Oh God, that was bad. The products and services that support this podcast? Yeah. Yep. Not fascism. All legally antifa. Hopefully. Let's go. Yeah. I call the union hall. I say it's a matter of life and death. I think these people are planning to kill Dr. King. On April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King was shot and killed in Memphis. A petty criminal named James Earl Ray was arrested. He pled guilty to the crime and spent the rest

of his life in prison. Case closed, right? James Earl Ray was a pawn for the official story. The authorities would parade over. We found a gun that James Earl Ray bought in Birmingham that killed Dr. King, except it wasn't the gun that killed Dr. King. One of the problems that came out when I got the Ray case was that some of the evidence, as far as I was concerned, did not match the circumstances. This is the MLK tapes. The first episodes are available now. Listen on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Gangster Chronicles podcast is a weekly conversation that revolves around the underworld. From criminals and entertainers to victims of crime and law enforcement, we cover all facets of the game. The Gangster Chronicles

podcast doesn't glorify or promote illicit activities. We just discuss the ramifications and repercussions of these activities, because after all, if you play games to games, you are ultimately rewarded with gangster prizes. Our heart radio is number one for podcasts, but don't take our word for it. Find the Gangster Chronicles podcast on the iHeart radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Eve Rodzky, author of the New York Times bestseller, Fair Play and Find Your Unicorn Space. Activist on the Gender Division of Labor, Attorney and Family Mediator. And I'm Dr. Adityna Rukar, a Harvard physician and medical correspondent with an expertise in the science of stress, resilience, mental health, and burnout. We're so excited to

share our podcast, Time Out, a production of iHeart podcasts and Hello Sunshine. We're uncovering why society makes it so hard for women to treat their time with the value it deserves. So take this time out with us. Listen to Time Out, a fair play podcast on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. Okay. So the through line, the direct line you can draw from the use of force to suppress black people during slavery through the KKK and lynching to the third degree, that through line is critical because what ties all of this together is a desire by white people, and particularly not just white people, but white moneyed people in terms of who's organizing this to fight against the establishment of

black autonomy and equality and sort of weaponizing the rage that white poor people feel over being poor and turning that in a racist direction. Anyway, there's a lot that goes into this. Historian William Brundage, cited by Niedermeyer, sees white supremacy as continually contested terrain. And when black people would fight back and gain the upper hand, however briefly in this struggle, police were the most reliable tool whiteness had to fight back. This has been obvious to serious researchers for a very long time. Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrtle wrote in a 1944 study titled An American Dilemma, quote, the policeman stands not only for civic order as defined in formal laws and regulations, but also for white supremacy and

the whole set of social customs associated with this concept. It is demanded that even minor transgressions of caste etiquette should be punished and the policeman is delegated to carry out this function. 1944. Gunnar saw it. Yeah. Don't say you weren't warned. Yeah. Yeah. People tried. Yes. Yes. I love the idea that it's a Scandinavian country. Yeah, the whitest dude in the world comes over here and is like, oh, fuck. What are y'all doing? This is a problem. Yeah. The federal government and federal law enforcement made attempts in the 1940s and 1950s to push back against the torture and murder of black people by police. There were numerous investigations into different sheriffs and police departments. Some of these investigations even led to punishments.

But as we saw in the red summer of 1919, at the end of the day, black Americans had to rely on themselves in order to fight back. They did this in large part through the NAACP. These cases helped to drum up both public awareness of the problem and public support for changes to the system. You can draw an electric line between the NAACP spending decades fighting these cases and why the murder of Emmett Till caused a massive nationwide reaction even among a lot of white people. It's because they had laid the groundwork and you can make a similar case for not just the NAACP at this point, but like why specifically the murder of George Floyd finally caused what we're seeing now. Yes. Because you got to go back from Rodney King all the way to Mike Brown,

all of this. Yeah. It's a continual like, oh my God, enough's enough. Yeah. You got to really prepare the white majority to give a shit about the murder of a black person is the, I guess, negative way of looking at this. Lesson learned. About 20 years. They're about 20 years to get away from here. Yeah. So, yeah. And again, the NAACP eventually was successful through a number of cases in getting a series of Supreme Court decisions that significantly regulated and reduced the admissibility of forced confessions. And that helped. But again, regulation of the police in this regard, while it was a good thing, it did not cure the problem of confessions obtained under the third degree. It, again, just inspired the police to get subtler. Yes. In 1989, Gary

Dotson became the first wrongfully convicted person to be proven innocent by DNA testing. And Gary was white if you're curious. In the decades since, more than 200 people have been exonerated by DNA testing. In 15 to 20 percent of these cases, police-induced false confessions were involved. Overall, 12 percent of overturned wrongful convictions in the last 30 years have involved a false confession, which we don't call a forced confession anymore, but probably ought to. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Because no one falsely confesses. Yeah. They are forced to. Nobody's like, you know, it's like you have a fender bender in traffic. Like, I confess to rape. I'm so sorry. That was my, like, totally. You're just like, wait, you know what, my bad? Did I say, did I say

I killed that guy? No, no, I mean, I didn't kill that guy. My bad. Oh, geez. You know, I thought, wait, was that Tuesday? Yeah. I thought you saw my Tuesday. Yeah. No, nobody. No, no, I didn't say I admit to murder. I said I liked Fox Mulder. I've been rewatching the X files recently. This is my bad. You know what I'm saying? Like, it's just I fumbled my words. Yeah. The most shocking example of this might be the case of the Central Park Five also in 1989. In this case, a white female jogger was beaten and raped. Five black and Hispanic children, all between 14 and 16 years old, were taken into custody. All five confessed. And then all five recanted their confessions, claiming they had only confessed after hours of terrifying and stressful

police interrogation. They claimed that they had only admitted to committing the crime because officers had heavily insinuated they would get to go home if they did. All five were convicted and sent to prison. Donald Trump, then a prominent con man, repeatedly urged that the boy should be executed. In 2002, the real rapist confessed and DNA evidence confirmed his guilt in the innocence of all five boys. They were released. The case of the Central Park Five sounds remarkably similar to the case of those three boys in Mississippi, doesn't it? Yes. And it should seem very familiar with you because a certain elected official was invested in making sure that they stayed in prison. Yes. Yes. And the case of the Central Park Five, yeah. In this case, the boys, in the case that

we read earlier in Mississippi, those boys were straight up physically tortured. What the Central Park Five endured is much subtler, but some people might call it torture. And this brings me to discussion of the read technique. The read technique is an interrogation tactic invented in 1962 by a former cop and a polygraph expert. You may recognize that 1962 is just right around the same time the Supreme Court said y'all got to stop forcing people to confess to crimes they didn't commit via torture. John Reed, the techniques creator, had a reputation for being the kind of guy who used psychology to get confessions rather than violence. The origin of his technique came from a 1955 case when a guy named Daryl Parker came home to find his wife raped and murdered.

Parker was interrogated and, according to the New Yorker, quote, Reed hooked Parker up to the polygraph and started asking questions. Parker couldn't see the movement of the needles, but each time he answered a question about the murder, Reed told him that he was lying. As the hours wore on, Reed began to introduce a story. Contrary to appearances, he said, the Parker's marriage wasn't a happy one. Nancy refused to give Parker the sex that he required, and she flirted with other men. One day in a rage, Parker took what was rightfully his. After nine hours of interrogation, Parker broke down and confessed. He recanted the next day, but a jury found him guilty of murder and sentenced him to life in prison.

Now, Reed was like, oh, this is the way we should always do interrogations. Yeah, and he refined his strategy into a technique which generally boils down to elaborately accusing the suspect of committing a detailed crime after hours and hours of interrogation. Reed opened a consulting company, which by 2013 trained more interrogators than any other company in the world, working for everything from local police to the FBI, the CIA, and the Secret Service. The company brags that the people at trains get their suspects to confess 80% of the time. Bro, just think about what we're telling you right now. You have to be a absolute, like Navy SEAL level, mental agility and fortitude to defend yourself when you're innocent.

When I actually didn't do the thing, I have to be this skilled. You have to say it. Which is why you wait for your lawyer, which is why you have a right to remain silent. Use it. Just shut the fuck up. Yep. The Reed technique was used on the Central Park five and numerous other people who have confessed to crimes. They did not commit. Now, the Reed company and its president will say that that is not accurate, that they were not using the Reed technique. And it's largely because they didn't do it right. That's what they'll claim is that like false confessions are only the result of abuse or misuse of the technique because the technique has safeguards in it to make sure that no false confessions are obtained by it.

So when people who are trained in the Reed technique get confessions from innocent people, it's not because of the Reed technique. It's because they were wrongly using the Reed technique. That makes it cool. The pretzel you just put your body in. Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah. Would it be great to be able to just like, to be able to just with a straight face and no like soul conviction, your soul is so dead inside that you could make that sentence and be okay with it. Yeah, it's like if I have a school that trains people to fire over the heads of crowds with assault rifles, and then some people fire into the crowds with assault rifles, clearly none of that's my, like I have nothing to do with that. I sent over the heads. I put fire over the heads. I told

you, shoot over the head. Yeah. There's a safeguard to make sure no one did it. Wow. Yeah. So the Reed technique has started to fall out of favor in the last, really in the last few years. And 17 was when like one big agency stopped sending interrogators into be trained in it. And this seems to have like, you mentioned earlier, I think it was to catch a predator, right? Yeah. The fact that a lot of interrogations are videotaped and that some of those came out in documentaries and people got to see, oh my God, is this what cops are doing to people? Yeah, yeah, yeah. This isn't okay. So it is still very common, still widely in use, but the tide might, it seems to be turning on the Reed technique. We'll see. Yeah. It is not legal for

police to beat the shit out of suspects to force a confession, not anymore. And I guess you could see even the Reed technique as an improvement over literal physical torture. But it is legal for police to lie about evidence to withhold food and water from suspects for what I would consider to be long periods of time and to subject them to verbal abuse and psychologically torture them until they see confessing as the only way out. I can't say if the Reed technique is responsible for most false confessions in the modern United States, but I can tell you the police department that is responsible for more false confessions than any other. You want to guess? LAPD. No, Chicago. Chicago. It was going to be one of the two, right? Yeah. Dang. Yeah. Yeah. Now,

more than 30% of all exonerations that involve false confessions were people who confessed in Illinois state. And most of those were people who confessed to the Chicago PD. And the question to why is this happening has a lot to do with a dude named John Burge. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, like a little side note, especially about what you're talking about, like how some of these confessions happen and how slick they are. Because like say, for example, you hear on the news that somebody died on 4th Street, right? So then when you get picked up and then cops go, Hey, did you hear about the shooting on 4th Street? And you're like, yeah. And then he goes, yeah, that the, that the lady was coming out of the house and you're like, yeah, I heard that.

First of all, the story wasn't that there was a shooting. The story was somebody died. So when he said, did you hear about the shooting? What he's doing is making sure you just confessed to information. They say he had information about the crime. And because you, it's like, I didn't say shooting, you said shooting. Well, no, no, no, no, no, I just asked if you heard about, you said you heard about it. I didn't tell you the story isn't that there's a shooting. So like how slick that type of like practice is. And you listen, I'm telling you this stuff out of experience. You know what I'm saying? Like somebody saying, Hey, here at liquor store, got robbed. Hey, you heard about that liquor store Rob? Like I had to learn to be like, nah.

I ain't heard shit. I don't heard nothing. I mean, I don't know. You know what I'm saying? What do you mean? You don't know. You're not your square. You're not part of, you're not part of streets. You know, I've seen you with your friends and I'm like, Oh, sir, I don't live here. You know, just like you have to like be, yeah. Anyway, all that to say, the stuff is like, as like heinous as we're telling you, it's so subtle and it's so slick. You know what I'm saying? Like everybody swears, well, well, if I was in the situation, I'm like, nah, you would do exactly what everyone else does in the situation. Yeah. Yeah. Which is why you don't talk and you wait for your fucking lawyer. Yes. Yeah. John Burge, John motherfucking Burge. John Burge is proof that

the old tactics of the third degree still aren't as much a part of the past as some folks might like to believe. John Burge was a decorated Vietnam veteran who served as a military police officer, working for a time as a provost-martial investigator during that conflict. After the war, he returned to Chicago and became a cop. In 1972, he was promoted to detective. One year later in 1973, he tortured his first victim. According to the Marshall Project, quote, his officers had arrested a man named Anthony Holmes on suspicion of murder and wanted him to identify an accomplice. When Holmes refused, the officers left him handcuffed in an area two investigation room and went to find Burge. A few minutes later, Burge strolled into the interrogation

room with a mysterious box in a brown paper bag. The box had a hand crank on one end and two wires with alligator clamps coming out the other end. According to trial testimony, decades later, Burge then picked up the alligator clamps and barked inward. You're going to tell me what I want to know. He fastened the alligator clamps and pulled a plastic bag down over Holmes' head, warning him not to bite through it when the pain hit. Then he started turning the crank. He was electrocuting him. Sheesh. Over the next few years, Burge continued to be his department's go-to torture man. Department rumors stated that he had learned the techniques he employed during his time in Vietnam on the bodies of North Vietnamese POWs. We call this

Phucos boomerang, the tactics used in colonial wars overseas coming back to the United States. Burge denies that he tortured anyone in Vietnam. He also denied torturing people here, so maybe you don't take that super seriously. He quickly perfected what he called his inward box, which is what he named the box he used to electrocute black people, often electrocuting their testicles. I've talked to one of Burge's victims, and that's what Burge did to him as he electrocuted his testicles with his inward box. Yeah, which is a whole other story I want to get to, but there's this weird fascination with torturing. Yeah, black genitalia. It's very common in lynching, very common in lynching, that they would be severed and even taken as like

souvenirs. Yeah, and it's one of those like, my eternal question, how much detail do I go into? We could have done six episodes on lynching, and it deserves six episodes, but I'm trying to give a broader... No, I appreciated that not being mentioned. Yeah, it's a thing. Because of his high case clearance rate, because he... Boy, John's real good at getting criminals to confess. He's solving all these murders. Because of his high case clearance rate, John was promoted to sergeant and then to lieutenant and eventually to commander. John Burge's behavior was not hidden from other men in the Chicago police. He kept his inward box out on open display at a table in the police station. He trained dozens of other Chicago officers in his techniques, which expanded over

the years to include electric cattle prods, simulate and simulated executions. Burge's officers often beat subjects with telephone books, flashlights, batons and bats. They burned men with hot radiators and cigarettes. They put plastic bags over the heads of others and suffocated them. This went on for a very, very long time. The end began in 1982, when two police officers were murdered and Burge and his team tortured the shit out of a pair of black brothers until they confessed. The injuries, one of them suffered, were significant enough that a medical official reported on them, and that was the first crack in the Burge system. Allegations of torture by Burge and his men, though, didn't break through the blue wall of silence until a 1989 civil lawsuit by the people's

law office. One of the attorneys behind this case, who later represented many Burge victims, was Flint Taylor. He described the existence of Burge's unit as an unremitting official cover-up that has implicated a series of police superintendents, numerous prosecutors, more than 30 police detectives and supervisors, and most notably Richard M. Daly, the city's former longtime mayor and a previous state's attorney. The whole story came out in bits and pieces through a mix of victims coming forward and anonymous sources within the department. One of these anonymous sources was a cop who left, again, anonymous voice messages for Flint Taylor. Taylor and his fellows nicknamed this guy Deep Badge. So part of the lesson here is that after 17 years of torture that was enthusiastically

supported at every level of the Chicago PD, a couple of good cops did finally work up the courage to leave anonymous voicemails after a law year had figured out the basics of the case and publicized them. That's what good cops get you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's like three of them. And it takes 17 years to do anything. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Burge was eventually accused of torturing more than 100 people, virtually all of whom were black between 1972 and 1991. That means recent. Yeah. At this point, we know that there's probably over 200 victims. We will never know the true number of Burge victims. Yeah. A lot of these guys were executed. A lot of them died in prison. In 1993, the Chicago police board voted to fire John Burge. This interrupted plans. The local

fraternal order of police had made that same year to honor Burge and for their officers with a parade float. All of the other four officers were also accused of torturing people. By the time he was fired, Burge had risen to the rank of commander. He was not charged criminally until 2008 and not sent to prison until 2011. He got out of prison in 2014. Chicago has paid out millions of dollars in reparations to victims, but an unknown number of Burge's victims still remain in prison. Multiple people were released from death row as a result of all of this coming to life, but we will again never know how many innocent men were executed. Burge died in 2018, four years after he was released from prison. Chicago's police union issued a statement on their Facebook page

offering condolences to the Burge family and insisting it does not believe the full story about the Burge cases has ever been told. Dean Angelo, former head of the Chicago fraternal order of police, told reporters, I don't know that John Burge got a fair shake based on all the years and years of service that he gave the city. He insisted that Burge put a lot of bad guys in prison. 2018. The cops who believe this are still on the force. Just guys. They're most of the force. Yeah. Guys. Yeah. You're asking, you're asking us to respect you. And it's like, I would love to. I would love to respect you. Just do respectable things.

Yeah. Yeah. You know who I respect? My neighbor across the street who has never tortured several hundred. I respect that guy. I respect him. Yeah. He's he's earned my respect by virtue of being a human being who doesn't commit random acts of violence and defend those that do. Yeah. Yeah. It's not hard to earn respect. You just have to not. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm sure that Burge did go to his grave believing that like what he did had been worth it because he again put a lot of bad guys in prison. I talked to one of Burge's victims and this guy had an extensive violent criminal record when he wound up in Burge's hands. He had done bad things and John probably figured we've got a crime. This guy's a scumbag. Fuck it.

He's got to be guilty. And oddly enough, that thinking, the thinking that John Burge probably used to justify his crimes, the thinking that the Chicago Police Department and the fraternal order of police in Chicago certainly uses to justify Burge's crimes even today. That thinking, these guys were guilty. That thinking puts them all right in line with the law-abiding interrogators who use the read technique. Yeah. Richard Leo, a law professor from the University of San Francisco spent nine months sitting in an almost 200 interrogations in Oakland during the mid-1990s. He learned that most officers who, again, these guys were all trained in the read technique. He learned that most officers were skipping a critical aspect of the proper read

technique. That aspect is having an initial interview with the suspect. You're supposed to like interview them, have like a normal conversation with them, and kind of decide if you think they're guilty before you move on to the interrogation. I'm going to quote from The New Yorker again. The read interrogation technique is predicated upon an accurate determination during behavioral analysis of whether the suspect is lying. Here, too, social scientists find reason for concern. Three decades of research have shown that nonverbal signals so prized by the read trainers bear no relation to deception. In fact, people have little more than coin-flipping odds of guessing if someone is telling the truth, and numerous surveys have shown that police do know

better. Aldert Wrigge, a professor of psychology at the University of Portsmouth in England, found that law enforcement experience does not necessarily improve the ability to detect lies. Among police officers, those who said they paid close attention to nonverbal cues did the worst. Similarly, an experiment by Cason shows that both students and police officers were better at telling true confessions from false ones when they listened to an audio recording of an interview rather than watch it on video. In the experiment, the police officers who performed less well than the students but expressed greater confidence in their ability to tell who was lying. Cops will always tell you they know how to spot a liar. They are lying. Wow. Yeah, you can't really, there's no way to know.

Yeah, there's no way to know. And I feel like in all my police interactions, and I'm saying this as someone with like, I don't think I have a criminal record, maybe, you know what I'm saying? But in all of the interactions I've had, whether it was overtly racist or very aggressive, or the guy was being a nice guy, or you just meet like, like a guy's playing a nice guy, or you just meet like a, you just like, this is like really a good dude that really doesn't care. He's just, he's just doing his job. You know, I feel like I've had all of those, you know what I'm saying? But in the ones, invariably, you know, you're being sized up. Yeah. You know, and it's like, so even then,

like, it's just, sometimes I'm like, why are we playing this game right now? Like, this is, this is, you're, you're horrible actors. I know what you're doing. You know what I'm saying? Like, and then when you, when I hear you say like, they were supposed to train, train to do an initial interview. And I noticed dudes trying to build rapport with me, you know what I'm saying? And I'm like, I know this is, okay, I know, I know what you're doing. Like, I know what you're doing. Okay. What time of day was it? All right, word. How tall was the guy? Okay, cool. So I'm just like, just get to it, man. Just get to it. Let me tell you, you want to know where I was? You want to know where I live? Okay, here's where I live. Here's what I was doing at this time.

Tell me what time it was. I fit. What description can we just get to that rather than artists, rig them a row? Yeah, I'm ranting. Yeah. So I talked earlier about how police torture to force confessions didn't stop. It just got subtler under pressure. And the same is true with the impact of racism and law enforcement. After Jim Crow ended, the most obvious justification for bigoted policing was gone. But the bigotry remained as it a system that was built almost completely during a period of time where either slavery, black codes or Jim Crow laws were the rule. In Minneapolis, where black people make up 19% of the population, they are subjected to 58% of use of force cases by the city's police. A May 2020 study showed that out of 95 million

traffic stops nationwide between 2011 and 2018, black people were vastly more likely to be pulled over than white people, except at night when the gap shrinks considerably. Black people, because again, the cops can't tell what race you are as easily. So they're not they're not able to judge this is a guilty person before the interaction. Black people are also more likely to be searched during a stop, even though white people are more likely to actually have contraband on them. I could go on and on, but the basic point is the same. All of these cops from Officer Dial to John Burge to current police officers who are today two and a half times likely to shoot a black man than a white one, all of these cops are making at a certain level the same decision. They are judging

black people as guilty before they know anything more than their skin color. And this is persistent through every single level of law enforcement in our country. Over the decades, activists and good lawyers and Supreme Court justices and even a few decent cops here and there have worked to make forced confessions in admissible in court. They have worked to report and charge police for torture. They have worked to tear down the Jim Crow laws that provided legal justification for a lot of police aggression. And yet the aggression is still there. We have learned to channel it and probably to make it less fatal. We've gotten better at punishing the most blatant expressions of it, but we have not stopped it. And American police today are still doing the same thing they have

been doing since the 1800s. They are enforcing white supremacy through violence. Period. Yep. Period. I'll say this in like, period. Yeah. I'll say this like on a personal note. So my little brother, you know, not by blood, but we just grew up together and I lived in our house, whatever, just, you know, our family's work. My little brother's is a California highway patrolman. So confession, I got law enforcement in my family. My brother's worked there for 10, 15 years. He's never pulled a gun ever in his life, right? Never has he ever pulled a weapon out. He is one of those ones, like you said, that is like reporting dudes. That's like building community liaison. He does it after school. He's in the valley does after school programs, runs a basketball

league, like the people know him. So like, so, so there's that my father, you know, we talked about my father, my father was a Black Panther after he left the Black Panther party because they killed it, right? He moved in the FBI. Yeah. They be in the FBI. My father was a LA County probation officer. He worked with like underage defenders retired from there, right? So worked in a special handling unit. He wanted to deal with the violentest of young offenders, 30 years, 30 years, never once recommended jail time. Never, right? Because of what he's talking about, the systems designed to destroy these young Black and brown men. So his answer was, let me have them. I remember as a child, like going to King Sinyaras and GED, GED, like graduations and stuff like that. But all these

like random kids that I didn't know, turns out they were kids on his caseload. Yeah. Because he was shielding them from the system. He told me stories of like looking at the judge, telling the judge full well, do not send this kid to prison. Do not send him to prison. The cop, doing the same thing. The cops arrested this guy showing them, showing them the transcript and being like, this is a false confession. This kid is innocent. He shouldn't be on my caseload. And then watching that fool go to prison. You know what I'm saying? So when you, when you, when you even in us, bring all those things up to say this is that even if you find good men and good women, the system is flawed. Yeah. And this is what we're trying to get to. Yeah. The

structure is wrong. Yes. The, the, the statement all cops are bastards, I think has been tradition, like historically kind of unproductive in terms of actually getting people to, to confront the real issues of law enforcement. But what people mean by it is actually very accurate, which is that it is, it is impossible to be like, even if you are a good person, a nice person who is a police officer and is legitimately aware of the problems in policing and trying to do your best. You are also partaking in helping to, in helping to maintain and, and further a system that is fundamentally abusive and, and enforces supremacy. Period. And period. We are not, what we're not saying is that all cops should never have a job in that, that, that,

like there's, there's homicide detectives who are good at solving murders. Yes. When we get rid of the police and replace them with something, I want those people to still be solving murders because it's good to solve murders. They should still murder. Yeah. Yes. You know, there are, if you know a police officer who is a great person and is, is an asset to the community, that person should probably still be doing a broadly similar, a lot of the same things they're doing, but there shouldn't be. I talk to cops a lot. I've talked to a lot of cops who talk about like being forced to arrest people for simple possession of drugs, even though they personally agree with ending the drug war. And like that's the problem that you're forced to do it. And

that's the, we don't, we decided as a, as a species that just following orders is not a justification for violating people's civil rights. Yes. Yes. Think about when we decided that and why. Yes. And where it led and where it started. Yeah. Yes. You are hearing the cries of both my father and my brother who both were like, I don't know if I could do this much longer. Yes. And even in me trying, right? I'm trying to do the right thing. I'm trying to be an advocate for these young people. Like I'm doing my best. Like at least they got somebody on their side. You know what I'm saying? And you're, but you're still like, I'm still, I'm still throwing you to the wolves. I'm just giving you, you know, a protective jacket. But the point is I'm still

throwing you to the wolves because the, it's the, the whole, like it's what you're trying to say. It's like the whole thing needs a grenade. Yeah. Because again, like you said, I want to be able to call somebody if my house is being broken into. Sure. Of course I want to be able to call somebody, but most likely who's breaking into my house is a meth head, just trying to steal a PS4 because he wants a hit. Don't kill the guy. Like just, I just want him out of my house. And you know what? I could probably, you know what? I probably won't call him because I could get him out of my house because he's high. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's this. I mean, and again, when you actually, we'll talk about this some next week, but when you look at, for

example, homelessness, you find out that it costs the state less money to give homeless people homes than it costs to police and incarcerate them. It costs less money to give drug addicts drugs than to police them and to deal with the results of them stealing shit for drugs. They found that like Denmark where they give heroin addicts heroin and it saves them huge amounts of money. Totally Toronto too. Yeah. They have like safe injection zones. You don't have to police this shit. And in fact, most things shouldn't be policed. Maybe only violence should be policed. Exactly. If you don't like, I try to like as simple as we can make it if my daughter comes in and she don't do her chores because she's got a cold and I ground her rather than say, here's some

Tylenol. Like you would be like, that's ridiculous. You're going to ground her because she got a cold? That's stupid. Okay. That's putting an addict in prison. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? It's like, this is ridiculous. What are you, what are you grounding? That doesn't make sense. We're ranting. Yeah, we're ranting and it's it's time for some pluggables to get plugged. Yes. Word. Yeah. All my Instagrams and socials are prop hip hop. Go to prophiphop.com for poetry, rap, for some podcasts, for some sustainable merch, some cups, some coffee. If you want to, you want to support non corporate coffee, I'm a coffee head. Hit me up. Let's talk about like Jeff Tweedy and Cigaros because I am the most unicorny black dude you'd ever meet that I can

talk to you about. Cigaros. And I am. I'm going to keep reading and writing about police for another week or so. Yeah. And I don't know. We'll talk about Bill Cooper or something at some point. Yeah. Yeah. We'll talk about we'll have you all for some like for some light, like a like a dictator. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We'll talk about somebody somebody fun. You know, we'll somebody not connected to my own safety and we'll we'll do we'll talk about Chairman Mao or somebody. Somebody loves a good Chairman Mao story. Oh my god, or maybe Tito. Oh, Tito. Yeah. Give me some Tito. Tito was cool as hell. I mean, he was a monster, but he was a cool monster. We're still talking about bastards. But the point is. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we'll do something more lighthearted.

But you can find us online at BehindTheBastards.com where there will be sources for this episode, including the really important book, The Color of the Third Degree and all the other really important book, The End of Policing, both of which are important, if not easy reading. Well, actually, the end of policing is very easy reading. The color of the third degree is is some rough shit. Yeah. Yeah. And you can find me on Twitter at IWriteOK and go be a good person and disband the American system of policing. I'll do both of those things. Ideally today. Amen. Shall we collect offering? Behind the Police is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,

visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. .org. Brought to you by the United States Forest Service and the Ad Council. After 30 years, it's time to return to the halls of West Beverly High and hang out at the Peach Pit on the podcast 90210MG. Visit Jenny Garth and Tori Spelling for a rewatch of the hit series Beverly Hills 90210 from the very beginning. We get to tell the fans all of the behind the scenes stories that actually happen. So they know what happened on camera, obviously, but we can tell them all the good stuff that happened off camera. Listen to 90210MG on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful

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