Behind the Bastards - Part One: The Worst Police Union In History

Episode Date: December 1, 2020

Robert is joined by Tuck Woodstock to discuss the worst Police Department in the Country. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/06/10/police-unions-violence-research-george-floyd/  https://www.amazon.com/Pickets-Pistols-Politics-Portland-Association/dp/B0043SVC3E https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds/4434/ https://college.lclark.edu/programs/political_economy/student_resources/past/ https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-police-union-power-helped-increase-abuses  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? 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. 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 podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space. With no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm okay. Thank you so much for having me with such a generous introduction. Not bad. I'll take it. Yeah, I'm going for it. Tuck, you are a Portland-area journalist and podcaster and someone who I got tear-gassed with a bunch during, you know, the whole year, really? Yeah. How are you doing today, Tuck? I'm okay. I'm all right. The sun is shining, which helps.

I think that there's been this weird gift where, yes, we do have to just cower inside because there is a pandemic, but we're getting like a little bit of extra sun out of it. So I'm just trying to take it where I can get it, you know? Yeah, take it where you can get it is a good motto for 2020. I just also feel like I didn't get the sun in the summer because we were both working like 9pm to 5am, which is conveniently the only time it's dark in the summer. And so I was like, well, I was just out the entire night all summer, so I get some sun now. You would wake up about an hour and a half before dusk and go out to get tear-gassed again.

Yeah, the number of times that we all went to bed, like as the sun was rising, I had to like invest in some like eye masks, you know, it was ridiculous. Yeah, it was a, in other words, a very healthy summer. And it was a healthy summer because of our friends in the Portland Police Bureau, our good buddies. And, you know, when you're talking about the Portland Police Bureau, you're also talking about the Portland Police Association, which is the Portland Police Union. And oddly enough, one of the most important unions, if not the most important police unions in the entire country, do you know much about the PPA?

You know, I know what I've heard while I was standing outside their union building and people were chanting at them. And I know that they don't love any effort to defund the PPP. And that's about as much as I know. I know the guy in charge doesn't love the protests, which, you know, shocking personally. But no, I don't know that much. I'm excited to learn more about the people who's building we've been standing outside of all year. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that's what we're going to do today.

And because this is a, this is actually a subject, you know, we're focusing on Portland today. But the PPA is a subject that I think everyone, at least in the United States, should have some interest in. Because as it turns out, they kind of, the Portland Police Union kind of set the tone for every police union in the United States. Because it was the first. It was the first successful police union in the country. So I want to start by talking a little bit about police unions in general. So we can contextualize why they're a problem. So a 2018 Oxford University study of police unions in the 100 largest US cities found that police protections in union contracts are directly and positively correlated with police violence and abuse towards citizens.

This includes protections like contractual guarantees that officers found engaging in misconduct should not be publicly shamed. That they shouldn't be questioned within two days of a shooting or another act of fatal violence. And that they shouldn't be publicly identified after assaulting citizens. Shockingly, this causes police to hurt more people. Really surprising stuff. That's why I love unions, right? It's like all the cool worker protections. Like you get to just kill people without any sort of repercussion or notice whatsoever.

That's why I love a union. Go ahead. I remember when the steel workers union went on strike because they weren't getting to murder enough people. And we were all like, yeah, you should get to murder more people. Yeah. A 2019 study by the University of Chicago found that when Florida sheriff's deputies received collective bargaining rights, the main power imparted by unions, incidents of violent police conduct in Florida increased by 40% across the state. This is not a subtle correlation.

Now, Professor Rob Gilzo's research, which will be published in an upcoming study, found that nationwide police ability to collectively bargain led to a significant rise in police killings of civilians. And of course, people of color were subject to an outsized number of those killings. This may have something to do with the fact that police unions regularly sue to reinstate officers who are fired for killing innocent people. Nationwide, they succeed about 25% of the time, but in some cities, the number is north of 70%. In San Antonio would be one example. In Minneapolis, it's like 50% or so. Now, WBEZ, a Chicago radio station, found that between 2007 and 2015, Chicago's independent police review authority, which the union fought for because they only wanted cops to judge as the cops rather than civilians to be able to fire cops.

This body investigated 400 police shootings and found officers were justified in 398 of 400 incidents. You know, I'm surprised about this too. That's really generous of them. Yeah. I'm glad they found those two bad cops. They're like, see, we're a legit organization. We're real. We're real. Yeah. In Minneapolis, the police union also succeeded in replacing its civilian review board with an office of police conduct review. And over eight years, the public filed more than 2,600 misconduct complaints. 12 of those resulted in punishment.

Again, a perfectly legitimate organization. They found the 12 bad ones. It's one of those things. I interviewed a cop years and years ago about police misconduct. One of the statements he made to me is like, well, when journalists get accused of bad behavior, do you tend to assume that they were in the right or the wrong to make the case that that's why cops back other cops? I was like, I get what you're saying, but also if I were to hear that out of 2,600 complaints of misconduct by journalists, only 12 were found valid, I'd say, no, it's got to be at least 1,300, right? Like, I know journalists.

Also, are the complaints the journalists murdered people? Because I would take those more seriously personally. It does. It does have something to do with what the complaints are about, right? Yeah. So yeah, that's just a little bit about unions. Because today, again, we're going to be talking about the union that started it all. Because every statistic I've just cited here and all the murders and beatings that those statistics represent, all the crimes against actual human beings, can be tied in some ways back to a single specific police union,

the Portland Police Association. Now, the Portland Police were not always unionized, but they were always kind of shit. Like most police agencies in the United States, their story goes back further than the concept of police unions. From 1851 to 1870, the city of Portland was policed by a marshal, who was elected or appointed to a two-year term. He could hire deputies, and these were basically just like freelance guys with guns and badges until the 1860s. It wasn't until 1870 that Portland was enough of a real city to merit its own police force, initially called the Portland Metropolitan Police Force. At the time, the city had about 9,000 residents, and the police force was seven people,

which seems like a good number for a police force to be compared to the current number. And I would take it, for sure. Yeah, seven cops. I think they'd be nicer. Things grew rapidly from there, and in 1908, Portland became the first city anywhere in the USA to hire a female officer. So that's good. More woman cops. Yeah. The bureau was also the first to use radios.

In the early 1910s, they joined the proud tradition of U.S. law enforcement, cracking the skulls of left-wing labor organizers. And that's going to bring me briefly to the tail of Portland's red squad. Have you ever heard of the red squad? No, I'm so excited. We still have one, but they don't call it that anymore. Is it for communists? Yeah, it's for beating the shit out of communists.

Well, leftists in general, anarchists, too. They don't like the wobblies. So the red squad started to ramp up as a unit during the Roaring 20s, which as a decade of increasing wealth and equality and ballooning fortunes for the rich, was also a decade when a lot of people were like, communism seems like maybe something we could try. And, you know, Portland's always had a left-wing radical tradition. More than a dozen of its citizens went off to fight fascism in the Spanish Civil War,

and the labor movement had a strong home here, and that was really the crux of it. Leftists kept organizing workers into unions, and business owners wanted those people identified and punished before they could mess up people's profit margins. So while some of the red squad was funded by the city, most of its money came from business owners in Portland who wanted to know which of their employees were considering joining a union so that they could fire them. I'm obsessed with this. Do any of those businesses still exist? I need to know. That is a great question and should be looked into.

I do not have that research in front of me, but it wouldn't be hard to do, I don't think. People were reporting on it. The Oregonian reported on it in the 30s. Gotta love them. Yeah, well, they have a mixed story in this episode, too. So, yeah, the 1930s Portland kind of sounds a lot like Portland today. For example, in 1934, their May Day celebration, demonstrators hung a red revolutionary flag over city hall,

and a malfunctioning pole mechanism stopped the city from taking it down. The Portland Communist Party held a parade against hunger, fascism, and war, and for the first time in Portland's history, the protesters had a functional PA system. Demonstrators were called to meet at 3 p.m. to march to Plaza Park for unemployment insurance, social security, free milk for children, and a release of class war prisoners. And that really scared rich people in the town and the cops. The red squad started sending in officers to infiltrate left-wing groups after this. They hired agent provocateurs to suggest acts of violence during planning meetings

so that the police could then crack down violently before protests, claiming that they had intelligence about violence from protesters. Yeah, it's some good shit. Yeah, were they threatened by the unemployment or the milk for children? That's what I really need to know what they're concerned about here. I would say equal parts. Equal parts, milk for little kids, and unemployment insurance. The real problems in society. Yeah, and I'm gonna quote now from a 2000 write-up for Lewis and Clark College by Michael Monk.

Throughout the decade, its undercover agents and provocateurs made desperate efforts to suppress and destabilize radical political groups and union organizing, including pressuring Lincoln High School students, artists, and anti-fascist organizers. And again, he's writing this in 2000, so before Rosedi Antifa exists, before Antifa is like a buzzword, like just kind of to note that the Portland police's antipathy towards anti-fascists goes back quite a ways. And there's a reason Portland police were sympathetic to fascism. During the 1920s, when the second KKK arose, it was something of a cross between like an MLM scheme and a hate group.

Oregon was one of its centers of recruitment. It was one of the states with the most Klansmen. And there were a number of times where huge numbers of KKK guys would march through the streets of Portland. And of course, many of the Klansmen who marched through Portland were also cops. In 1923, a Portland Telegram article reported that the police bureau was, quote, full to the brink with Klansmen. The Portland police bureau actually deputized a hundred Klansmen handpicked by the local Grand Dragon and designated them Portland police vigilantes. They got badges.

I love it. It's so cool and good. Yeah, it fucking rules. It makes sense, you know, there's all the chants in the street of like cops and clan go hand in hand. And it's like, no, literally they are just like the one hand to the other hand on the same human body. Yeah, it's not a euphemism. Yeah. Now, as you might expect, a police bureau that consisted mostly of white supremacists and fascist sympathizers did not react kindly to the cause of organized labor. On July 11th, 1934, Portland's Longshoremen went on strike, blocking the Union Pacific train line

from delivering freight out of the port that gives Portland its name. The Portland police loaded up onto a train with a bunch of strike breakers and attempted to drive through the Union lines. When Longshoremen threw rocks at them, the police drew shotguns and revolvers and fired wildly into the crowd from a moving train. They wounded four and killed one. So that's good. Yeah, you know, I guess the protests today could be worse.

Just firing live rounds at us from a moving vehicle. They did ram us a couple of times with police cars, but not with a train. Right. It's getting smaller. We've reformed them. In 1936, a German naval vessel sailed into Portland's harbor. And of course, because it was 1936, the German Navy was, you know, a bunch of Nazis. And yeah, this vessel bore the Swastika flag, which marked the very first time that the Swastika was flown in the city of Portland, but of course not the last time.

The evening Herald, a Klamath Falls newspaper, noted, thousands of citizens who lined the West Harbor wall and city officials gave the Emden, which was the ship and its men, an enthusiastic welcome. So thousands of Portlanders showed up to cheer for the first Nazis to come into town. They got to march. Like the actual Nazi sailors got to march through the streets of Portland. It doesn't sound wrong to me. No, no.

Now those literal Nazis were of course protected by the police and they were opposed by a small number of brave anti-fascist demonstrators. Eleven of them were arrested, quote, on a charge of parading banners without permits by members of the Red Squad. Yeah. That's good. This is the danger. The Nazis are here.

I mean, honestly, this sounds exactly like what would happen to you today. Like it is not different. No, it's not at all like Nazis continue to march in town and the police continue to arrest the people who show up to oppose them. It's the same. It's the same. It's great. These Nazis had a boat, which I guess is a change.

You know, I think there's like the Trump boat, things that were sinking the other boat. Do you know what I'm talking about? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was in like a budget. Yeah. Yeah. It's not the same, but I feel like it's like a similar energy

if we could kind of combine those two things together. I think we can make some progress. The sinking boat was one of my favorite things to see on Twitter all year. It's just like. No, the sinking Trump boat, because there were a lot of like Trump vessels that sunk non-Trump vessels just trying to have a good time. Yeah, that I don't like as much.

No. Yeah. It's all great. So. Go ahead. The anti-fascist who protested, again, actual Nazis marching through the streets of Portland, carried banners denouncing Hitler and demanding that the U.S.

send no athletes to the Berlin Olympics. Nobody listened to them. And again, 11 of them were arrested. The newspaper notes that three of them were Reed College students. So congratulations, Reed. You had a strong reaction to that, Tuck. Yeah. I know a lot of people from Reed College and it just tracks there.

What is their slogan? Their slogan is like communism, anarchy free love. What is it? It's something like that. It's really powerful. Good for them. Well, I'm proud of Reed College. The newspaper also notes that five of them were women,

which says something about the times, I guess, that that was a worthwhile statement to make. Yeah. And I think before we move on, I want to read the names of the arrested people because I think it's probably good to remember that while thousands of Portlanders showed up to be like, yay, Nazis, 11 people were like, fuck you guys.

And those people ruled. John Hammond, Robert Lewis, William Wood, Esther Layton, who was the secretary of the American League against the war and fascism, Mary Gould of the International Labor Defense League, Seth Nordling, Earl Steward, Frank Weber, Mrs. Violet Olson, and Mrs. Levina Hinnett, and Lillian Foster.

So good on all of them. All right. I did some research while you did read that list because I too am a journalist, and I just want to read to you. An unofficial motto of Reed is communism, atheism, free love, and can be found in the Reed College bookstore. It was a label that the Reed community claimed from critics during the 1920s.

So here we are. Hell yeah. This period. Good on you, Reed. So when World War II started, the Portland police contained a number of officers who were members of fascist and Nazi sympathetic organizations. They put their heads down and whistled loudly

as their nation went to war against fascism. It was rather ironically this war that would finally convince the Portland police that all those labor organizers they'd beaten and shot over the years might have had a point. The cause of this was police chief Niles, a forward-thinking cop who'd established one of the nation's first police academies in Portland in 1940. Prior to this, Portland police had been trained on the job,

which means they were not trained at all. The book Pickets, Pistols, and Politics, which is a complete history of the Portland police union, and I can send you a copy if you want it. It's fun reading. Notes that, quote, fresh recruits were given a star and a whistle and shoved out the door. Good.

That's great. Why would you need to train anyone? I feel like that's better, though, than what they're doing now. Yeah, our cops are highly trained, and it has not helped. Yeah. Let's go back to the whistle star days.

I put the whistle star over Killology, okay. I do love a whistle, yeah. You know who else loves whistles? Everybody loves whistles. Yeah. Yeah, and let's hear from our... Do you want to finish your plug there? I was going to go to ads and say that our sponsors all love whistles.

Why are we not sponsored by a whistle company? Yeah, well, Big Whistle is actually heavily in bed with the police union, so I don't think we're going to get any of that money. Fair enough. Another sponsor spoiled. 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 not on the good-bad-ass 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. 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 Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. We're talking about Harry Niles, the police chief, who's a big modernizer, also establishes Portland's or Oregon's first police science school forms a discipline board for his cops.

He gives his cops modern uniforms, which at this point they did still have to pay for themselves. Niles had some problems that got in the way of him modernizing the Portland police. One of them was the fact that a lot of Portland cops were old as hell. The pension was bad in those days, so people would hang on to the job

and barely walk anymore. Because again, it would be that or starve on the streets. Old cops had never been forced to pass a civil service exam, which was required of new recruits, and that was also a problem for Harry, because again, he wants police to be professional. To make his dreams of a young, sexy modern Portland police bureau a reality,

Niles had to find a bunch of extra money in what was at that point a very limited budget. So he decided to put all of the old cops on what he called park patrol, which would force them to spend 12-hour shifts on their feet at a much lower rate of pay. Reducing their pay opened up funds for new cops, and basically he was kind of hoping

that making them walk all day would make a lot of them quit or die on the job and free up more money. Die on the job. Yeah, you kind of get that. He didn't say it, but he's giving the old guys a job that makes them walk 12 hours a day. You know. I mean, on the one hand, disrespectful.

On the other hand, they are cops. They are cops. I'm just gonna let this one even out. I'm still distracted by you calling it police science. Yeah, yeah. Like, like, like fingerprinting and shit. Yeah, like, like the idea that there should be some rigor applied to how you determine

whether or not a crime was committed by someone, as opposed to just being like, grab the nearest person who wasn't white and throw them in prison. No, that was my point is like, maybe like do science and stop with crimes. Yeah, that was the idea. Cop walking, like, you know, the vandalism that sometimes you'll see

that says like, you know, kill a cop or whatever. But like, they should like have a subtitle that's like, by making them walk 12 hours a day in a park. Like, we're not bad people. We just want them to walk more, see what happens. We agree with Portland's old police chief. Exactly, look at the book out. Harry Niles, the leader of Antifa.

Didn't you say he created like discipline, like the first discipline? Yeah, there we go. Yeah, which again, he was very unpopular with the rank and file cops as a rule that people the cops hate most in Portland police history is their police chief. Although there's some debate,

we'll talk about that a little bit later too. So yeah, Harry has all this plan to make a bunch of old cops walk until they die or quit and the city council is like, this is a great idea. And in September of 1941, they basically back legally his plan to do park patrol. But then in December of 1941, Japan attacks Pearl Harbor and the US winds up in, you know, a thing,

like a big kerfuffle, I think would be the best way to describe it. That is what they call a world kerfuffle. Yeah, the big world kerfuffle. Yeah, and this was a problem for officers, even officers who hadn't been Nazi sympathizers because people went kind of bug fuck at the start of the war and assumed that Oregon and California were going to be invaded by Japan.

And this wasn't entirely irrational because the Empire of Japan did kill several Oregonians with bombs tied to balloons. So like, yeah, we don't talk about that much, but there were some attacks on Oregon. I think it was Oregon and Washington had like some minor strikes on their soil. It's like a thing that happened. Yeah, it rings a bell, but the balloon part,

I was just like, wait, pardon, that's a thing that people can do. They tried some wacky stuff. So a more direct problem for the police was that number one, they suddenly had a whole new type of patrol duty to do because again, people were afraid of being invaded. And number two, there were a whole bunch of young fit cops that got drafted, and that meant that they couldn't really afford to get rid of all the old ones. So to make up for this, Niles put the entire bureau on full-time service

with no days off. Portland police were expected to work 12-hour shifts, seven days a week, and remember, they didn't get overtime yet. So this is like, again, no sympathy for them, but kind of a shit gig. Like you can see why they would be unhappy with this. This state of affairs was originally supposed to last just three weeks, but once it became clear that this, you know, World Curfuffle thing was going to last more than a month,

Niles extended the new schedule indefinitely. As you might expect, officers were not wild about this new state of affairs. Enter John Hayes. He was a young, fresh-faced and popular officer whose previous job had been as a pinball machine repairman. Shockingly, pinball machine repairman did not get paid well, so at age 22, John had created a labor union for pinball mechanics. In pursuit of this goal, he'd met members of the Multnomah County

Central Labor Committee, and they helped him learn how to organize a bunch of pinball guys into a union that could bargain for better wages. I'm so mad that this is going to get bad soon because I'm obsessed with pinball union, and I would wear their t-shirts all day long. Yeah, the pinball union. Unfortunately, the pinball union is irrevocably tainted by their relationship to the Portland Police Association.

It's really tragic, yeah. So nationally, there'd been a couple of attempts at police unions by the 40s, but none of them had worked out. The Boston police had unionized in the 19 teens and then gone on strike for better wages, which had resulted in a mass riot through the streets of Boston, as citizens looted everything they could possibly find. President Woodrow Wilson had called the police strike

a crime against civilization and told the American Federation of Labor President, there is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, anytime. Every single striking Boston officer was fired and the union died a painful death, and the AFL revoked all police union charters after this point. So cops had tried to unionize,

and it had gone very badly for them, and there were not police unions when John Hayes was like, what if I unionized the Portland Police? So they're not the first, but they are the first that will succeed at unionizing. So obviously this was a dangerous thing to try to do, and a lot of people felt that the police should not be able to organize under any circumstances.

Those people would of course prove to be right. Officer Hayes reached out to AFSCME, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, which is the largest trade union for public employees in the company, and he was like, you know that thing that ended really badly last time? What if we do that again? It's good stuff.

It's just so interesting to me because I have a friend who helped organize the union for AFSCME in Portland, and there's literally a no-cop AFSCME movement to get rid of the... And I had no idea, and I don't know if they knew either, that this actually happened in Portland itself. I didn't know this until... It was actually Alan Kessler, who's a local lawyer, that informed us of this book,

and I did not know the Portland... I just thought they were another cop union, but they are like the cop union. So that's good. Explain something. Yeah. So AFSCME agreed to back the Portland police as long as they included a clause in their charter

that they could never strike under any circumstances, and Hayes said, of course we'll never strike. We would never strike. That'll never happen. I promise the Portland police will never go on strike. And then AFSCME was like, okay, and they made a deal. And to make a long, boring story short, Hayes gradually succeeded in signing most of his fellow cops up under the chief's nose.

The Portland police association went public in April of 1942, and the initial reaction was less than positive. The Oregonian, on April 16th, wrote an editorial about what a bad idea it would be to allow cops to unionize. The editorial writer noted that if police unionized, no matter what, those cops would always be suspected of, quote, greater loyalty to union than to official duty.

I always wanted to congratulate the Oregonian editorial board for getting something right at some point in its long and storied history. It doesn't last long. Don't worry. This was the one time. I'm sure they fired that guy immediately. So, yeah, public suspicion was not enough to stop the Portland police association

from getting off the ground. On an April 28th, 1942, the PPA held its first official meeting and voted for its first president. Now, Hayes, as the founder of the union, had acted as interim president during this early period. But his fellow officers felt that he was too young and inexperienced to represent them at the negotiating table.

Instead, they picked a literal Nazi. Oh, great. They're like, let's do ageism and fascism all in one. Did the Nazis have a union? Because if not, I guess it could have been worse. They had the National Socialist German Workers Party. Yeah, Otto Meiners was the first president of the PPA, and he's described this way in the PPA's weird biography

of itself, which is very positive. He was an outspoken man. Some would say loudmouth, whose accent revealed his German upbringing. Earlier, he had been an active member of the German-American Bund, though for self-preservation in a nation at war with Germany, he later played down his interest

in the land of his ancestors. Now, that's fun to me, because they say that, like, well, he was a German man and he was a member of the Bund because he was interested in his German ancestry. That's not what the German-American Bund was. The German-American Bund was a literal Nazi organization in the United States that was funded

by the Nazi Party in Germany. The Bund waved swastika banners at mass rallies. They gave the fascist salute in Maas to giant portraits of Hitler. Their initial funding, again, came from the Nazi government. Fritz Kuhn, the leader of the Bund, summed up the group's ideology in a speech he gave at Madison Square Garden in 1939.

If you ask what we are actively fighting for under our charter, first, a socially just, white, gentile-ruled United States. Second, gentile-controlled labor unions, free from Jewish-Moscow-directed dominance. So... This is what Otto... Sorry, just making faces that you doesn't work for podcasting, but I'm just like...

The first president of the Portland Police Association, a literal Nazi. Yeah, it's good stuff. Bund rallies featured banners with catchy slogans like, stop Jewish domination of Christian-Americans, and wake up America, smash Jewish communism. Oh, my God. Dear God.

It's good stuff. It's not subtle. No, no. You have to love that the Portland Police Association's biography of itself just says, like, he was interested in his German heritage. No, dude was a Nazi. Oh, my God.

The branding of that is just... Yeah, it's great. Good stuff. It's rude to Germany, because it, like, conflates the two. It's like, if you have German heritage, it just means you love, like, to be a Nazi, you know? It's like, we can separate those two things. We can separate those two.

The PPA cannot. The PPA can't. I can. I enjoy the aspects of German heritage that are, for example, creative sausages. Yeah. Laterhosen. Laterhosen, fine. Yeah.

No one has any issues with that part. Yeah, so it would be fair to call miners a Nazi. Now, there were some German-Americans who joined the Bund, not really knowing what it was, but those folks tended to leave pretty quickly once they saw the Swastika banners and heard all the talk about the Jews. Miners remained in the Bund until it was forcibly disbanded after the outbreak of U.S. involvement in World War II,

which would, you know, suggest he was pretty fucking committed. And now he was the first president of the Portland Police Association. Good stuff. Good guy. So the PPA's first big victory came that October, when it succeeded in getting its officers time-and-a-half pay for working on Halloween. It also got officers overtime pay for working security at ball games, which they'd previously done on a volunteer basis.

I'm not sure if this was the first time police anywhere in the nation got overtime pay. It might have been. But it was the first time that a police union succeeded in getting a blanket overtime agreement out of a city in the United States. This is like the start of police overtime. Thanks, Portland. Yeah, and now it is like bankrupting the city of Portland. You love it.

Yeah, it's so good. So President Miners, the Nazi, learned in 1943 that some of his officers were still working at ball games for free as actual volunteers out of, I don't know, some sense of civic responsibility or something. And ball games are fun. Yeah, and ball games are nice. He was disgusted by this.

He told the union that these men were playing into the hands of the opposition. And I have to credit him for not saying the Jews there. He actually read the badge numbers of these men allowed to the union so that like people would know who were the, I guess the traitors within their midst, which they get really mad at us when we read their badge numbers. That's a great point. Nobody's allowed to read bad numbers anymore.

Yeah. Yeah, it was kind of a dick move from the president of the union. But, you know, in fairness to him, 1943 was kind of a rough year for Nazis. So maybe Miners was just in a mood. Now, at this time, the police were not the only force providing law and order type services to the city of Portland.

There was also the veterans guard and patrol. Now, this was a group of World War One vets who had formed to defend their homeland while younger men fought fascism abroad. 3,500 of these guys worked for free, protecting their neighborhoods and guarding their community with skills honed in deadly battle. Now, some people might consider this kind of a win-win

because it didn't cost anyone anything and these guys clearly knew what they were doing. I'm sure they were as racist as everyone else back then, but I haven't heard anything that would suggest they were worse than the police and they were probably broadly speaking more competent. Yeah, but Miners hated this because, again, the veterans guard were not getting paid,

and he was all about getting more money for cops. As Pickett's Pistols and Politics notes, in the view of the police union, the veteran guard and patrol simply made it more difficult for professional police to get their demands met by the city. After all, many police services were being performed for free by these patriotic veterans. We gotta shut that shit down.

Now, the police union succeeded in pushing down any attempt to form like a civic safety patrol, not made up of a tiny cadre of unaccountable men paid increasingly vast sums of money to do violence. That task accomplished. In 1945, Miners set himself to the job of fighting another scourge to civic order, Hollywood. See, the end of World War II

was the start of a gangster revolution in Hollywood films. The gangster era of the 20s and 30s was distant enough that people could make good movies about it now, and police around the country were horrified to see their mortal enemies turned into heroes on the silver screen. Now, at this point, unionization was still very rare for police officers. It was not just Portland, but they were one of the few.

So the cause of opposing gangster movies on behalf of lawmen everywhere fell upon the Portland Police Association. The Portland Police publicized the release of a resolution stating that the United States and foreign nations were quote, to be flooded with a series of gangster motion pictures. Now, the PPA was concerned with the influence of such pictures on the impressionable adolescent mind and argued that Hollywood producers,

and again, got to credit Miners for not just saying Jews there, were responsible for any harms that this caused. Such films can be motivated only by greed and can feel no concern for the welfare of our country or its youth. Wait, I'm obsessed with them being like, this is motivated by greed when they are the ones that are like, everyone has to get paid all the time. No volunteering at the baseball game.

It is funny that he accuses them of being greedy. Yeah. Now, I don't want to lean too much on the Nazi stuff, but it is telling that one of the things this literal Nazi president of the PPA makes, one of his first priorities is to attack Hollywood producers. A little bit of a tell. A little bit of a tell.

Yeah, anyway, the resolution concluded by proposing an investigation of Hollywood producers by the House Un-American Activities Committee, which absolutely did happen and culminated in the second red square. Now, a lot went into that. I'm not going to give the PPA credit for all of it, but they were a force in sparking the second red scare.

You know, that's cool. Okay, it is scary. The first time he said square, I'm like, the red square. Okay, cool. No, that's just like a communist who wears a suit. Well, anyway, good job, PPA, for doing the red scare. Yeah, thanks, guys. Thanks for starting the ball rolling

and winning the lives of people in Hollywood who happen to think that socialism might be a good idea. Ahead of the curve. Trailblazers. That's where the basketball team gets its name. Yeah, yeah, from the PPA's hatred of people having opinions. Now, in Portland Police Association terms, most of the late 1940s and 1950s

were a set of labor rights improvements. Police won a 40-hour work week, they won expanded sick days, and they won better and more comfortable uniforms than they were before. This is mostly stuff that, if you assume police should exist, is not really that problematic. Pretty basic, like, workers' rights.

The PPA pooled its bargaining power with the firefighters union to get a proper pension system set up. And actually, the firefighters were critical in allowing the PPA to survive, because in the early days, again, there was a lot of resistance, and they weren't recognized for years

by the city of Portland itself. It was the firefighters who first gave them legitimacy and said, we will bargain with you, and that way they'll have to deal with you, because they have to deal with firefighters. The PPA's biography says something about this that I think is very telling.

Quote, they were, after all, the good guys in the public's view, the ones who saved people instead of bossing them around. Wow. It's fun that cops recognize that. Yes, we do like firefighters better than you, because they're only job is to save people.

Yeah, they're actually helping people. Yeah, their job is undebatably necessary, whereas you are cops. So, there was initially consensus among union leadership that the PPA should not donate to directly or back

directly political candidates. That it would be wrong for them to get political. Getting involved in partisan politics would be unseemly for a group of men and women who were supposed to be civil servants protecting all citizens. This would last until the 70s, but we'll talk about that story a little bit later. For right now, we need to turn away from

Pickett's Pistols and Politics, which has been the source for everything, but the stuff about the red squad and the boond, and turn to a slightly better source. Because, shockingly, for a book written at the behest of a police union, Pickett's Pistols and Politics says almost nothing about race relations in Portland or police behavior towards black

Portlanders. It does occasionally mention that civil rights groups had problems with Portland police, but it'll make statements like, black activists believe that police showed a racial bias, and that's kind of the most that you'll get out of the book. For this next bit of the episode,

I'm going to turn to a dissertation written by Katherine Nelson at Portland State University. Its title is, On the Murder of Ricky Johnson, the Portland Police Bureau, Deadly Force, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Oregon. It's a really good read. I would recommend it

above the union's propaganda book. Although they both have some interesting stuff in them. Legally, Oregon didn't have segregation in the 1940s or 50s or 60s. If you google maps of states that had segregation, Oregon's right there with California

as like discrimination for race or color forbidden by law state. But that's not really true. There wasn't legal segregation. It did absolutely happen. As historian Elizabeth McLagan notes, black people in Portland were regularly

refused admission to restaurants, theaters, and hotels. Medical care was difficult to obtain, unions barred blacks from membership, employment practices confined them to certain jobs, and integrated housing was resisted. According to a longtime black resident, Oregon was a clan state, a hell hole.

It's not, it was not a, not nice. I think is a good way to sum that up. Henry Stevenson was a black world war two veteran who moved to Portland in 1960. Here's how he described his experience. Living in Portland at that time was almost like living in Alabama. Black folks had it rough. The system,

especially the police, had a whole lot of feet on black people's necks. It was nothing for a cop to just shoot a brother. When this did happen, there was no consequences. The cops weren't afraid of being reprimanded in any way. Well, that hasn't changed. No. No, not really.

The Portland police did have a disciplinary board, but officer reprimands were complaint driven. And the Portland police didn't listen to complaints if they weren't made by white people. The traditionally black neighborhood of Albina received way more policing than any other neighborhood in the city. And again, that hasn't really changed.

No, I'm here right now. I can tell you it has not changed. Yay. This is a bad time to go into an ad break. It's like you're really going to choose now. This is what you're choosing. You know, I'm not even going to Don't even try it.

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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,

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trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We've returned. So yeah, Portland Police is pretty bad on race relations and such.

Lee Anderson, a black Portlander, commented in 1925 that we are surrounded by a prejudice that you do not find in our neighboring states. 45 years later in 1967, a young black man commented to a local newspaper, where else but Albina do cops

hang around streets and parks all day like plantation overseers. Which is a pretty strong statement. In her dissertation she wrote a book titled The Portland Police Bureau and noted that throughout its history

it had acted as a quote colonial force that acted as agents to enforce the status quo and protect the property of the colonizers who live outside black communities. Hell yeah. Not hell yeah that it's good. It's just like a well-phrased answer.

Hell yeah for the accuracy of that hell yeah to colonialism. The Bureau quote the Bureau focused their effort and this is from Kathleen's paper. The Bureau focused their efforts on protecting property largely owned by whites within the black community and serving the white community while providing

few benefits and little protection to Portland's black community. The PPB rarely protected the rights of Portland's black citizens yet they routinely tolerated vigilanteism, union protection, organized crime and police brutality within the Bureau. Now this is another thing that the book tends to leave out it does note

a few occasions in which the police looked the other way while unions they were allied with committed crimes but it does not go into detail about how extensive this relationship was so we're going to go into detail about some of that stuff. Yeah it's it's

bad stuff but first we're going to go into detail about something else. In 1945 a black man named Irvin Jones was shot through the window of his house by a Portland police officer who assumed the victim was someone he had a warrant for. The fact that he suspected

someone might have a warrant out and then immediately opened fire should tell you something about the Bureau's use of force procedures during this time. A coroner's inquest was held and the jury decided that officers involved were not guilty and no one was charged. Again we're going to talk about this happening a lot.

This is kind of at least the first case of this I was able to find. Now throughout the 1940s Portland's black community increased from 2000 to more than 22,000 people and this again happened right at around the same time the 1940s that the PPB created the U.S.'s first

successful police union so as Portland's black population increased Portland's police force got more protections and became basically immune to being criticized by or at least to being punished by the city government. During the 1950s

Portland achieved a number of civil rights victories including the Public Accommodation Act of 1953 which illegalized public discrimination and at the same time the PPB furthered the reputation as a police force that was willing to turn a blind eye to organized crime. By the 1960s

the PPB had implemented a tough on crime mentality and this meant that they were mainly targeting Portland's black neighborhoods as areas of quote miscreant behavior. By adopting a tough on crime stance the PPB saw a rise in police related shootings and for those living in Portland's black community it seemed as if young men

were getting shot more often than basically any other group of people and the statistics kind of bear this out. Now at around the same time enterprising Portland police officers developed what was called the payoff system which is what it sounds like. Racketeers would run unlicensed bars, brothels

and casinos that all bribed officers for the right to exist. Since any complaints about and potential disciplinary actions had to go through the PPA no officers were punished for taking bribes to allow crime. The local government was fine with this as long as all the illegal activity was kept confined to North Portland a.k.a.

Albina. So you see what's happening here the Portland police are allowing criminals and gangs and what not often organized by the Teamsters which is a union that supported them and they supported the Teamsters running criminal rackets as long as those criminal enterprises were run in Albina and

at the same time they were increasing their patrols of Albina and justifying it by saying this is where all the crime happens. Yeah. It's pretty dark when you look at it like that. Don't worry they put salt and straws

in Albina now so it's all gentrified. That's good. Thank God. So up until 1946 the PPB had only hired two black officers in its entire history. This situation had improved by the 1960s but not by much. About one percent of the forces

720 officers were black. When people started to notice that this was maybe a problem the police personnel director asked Captain Bill Taylor if he could be listed as Native American. Taylor had a small fraction of indigenous ancestry although he did not quite identify as indigenous. Still the PPB

made the change to his identity in the paperwork and started bragging that Portland had hired its first Native American police captain. Yes this is literally like textbook pretendianism. It's like just exactly what every indigenous person is talking about when they talk about pretendians.

Nauseated. It's great. So the whole situation did eventually get bad enough that the Federal Bureau of Investigation looked into the PPB and the publicized nature of this whole case gave Portland a reputation as a city of vice and sin. The men of the PPA generally viewed their police chief

and appointee as the enemy of their ability to milk as much money out of the job as possible. Charles Prey was the chief from 1949 to 1951 and he had a mandate to clamp down on the outrageous corruption in the Bureau. Unfortunately he had no influence over the PPA because the chief is not a member of the union

and the PPA was kind of the nexus of police corruption. Prey complained that everybody at the police station seemed to know where gambling was conducted but that no one would talk to him. It turns out that even cops are too smart to talk to cops. That's so interesting. Just that

dynamic of the police chief being like what if we weren't so bad and then everyone's at the union hall being like we're gonna go gambling and we won't tell you where it is. What if we weren't actual criminals while arresting people? And the union was not cool with that.

In 1954 Perennial Bastards pod side character, the FBI, carried out a massive wiretapping operation on Portland's gambling dens, brothels and illegal bars, many of which were operated by Teamsters allied with the PPA. Their investigation revealed that by 1954

both the mayor and the police chief, Jim Purcell, were actively protecting criminal enterprises. Purcell was indicted for incompetence in criminal behavior. A grand jury was convened and from August 1956 to September of 1957 more than 115 indictments were issued against Portland police officers.

It's good stuff. Wait, for what? For, you know, operating illegal gambling dens in brothels? There was 115 of those doing, wow, okay. At least 115 officers that were implicated in that sort of behavior. How many officers

did they have? Last time I heard there were seven. It's like a couple hundred. That's such a high percentage. It's a lot of them. That's so wild. Well, and the way that the text makes it seem, basically everyone was on the take to one extent or another. These were just the ones that the FBI,

like the FBI was not going to indict the entire police bureau. They had to pick the most egregious examples. And this is the last time the FBI will be the good guys in this story because it turns out they were fine. We'll get to that. By the 1960s, Portland's black population

had decreased to just 15,000. Remember, they hit their head at about 22,000 people in the 1940s, right? So all of this, both the police directly encouraging crime in the black neighborhood and also the police massively increasing

patrols in Albina led to about a 7,000 person decrease in the black population of Portland, 80% of whom lived in Albina, which was about two and a half square miles at that point in time. In 1968, Kenneth Gervais released a study on the Portland Police

Bureau. He interviewed a number of Portland police officers during this time and found that they believed political radicals, professional criminals, Negroes and civil rights groups all ought to be subjected to intense police surveillance. Interesting, the groups that he classifies as basically the same.

Yeah. Yeah. The Red Squad morphed into the Intelligence Unit, which mostly spied on black activists like the city's nascent Black Panthers chapter. And I'm going to quote from Catherine Nelson here. The Intelligence Unit spied on black activists and used the gathered information to spread rumors that were meant to

spark opposition from the community. Police often used irrelevant information to support their charges and many of the targets were previous victims of police brutality. Police perpetuated a false image of what black activists and citizens were advocating for by painting them as anti-government radicals or communists. The greater community

often aided in this surveillance work and would report seemingly innocent behavior as potentially malicious activist work. It's all different now. In the summer of 1967, a group of young black Portlanders threw rocks and bottles at nearby police officers. This eventually turned into a riot known as the Irving Park

Riot, where fires were set, windows broken and a local stereo store looted. Not one specific instance initiated the Irving Park riot. Instead, black citizens felt frustrated with unsolicited police presence in Albina. The Irving Park riot took place during the long hot summer, which witnessed urban rebellions

in African American neighborhoods in Boston, Chicago and Portland at the same time that a white middle-class hippie movement enjoyed what they termed the summer of love. Often these riots had no instigating factor, which left police and city officials puzzled. In Milwaukee's black community, heavy police surveillance of a school program caused the

youth to riot. Milwaukee police chief John Poulsen claimed that a hardcore group of young hoodlums was to blame. Again, very different. We're talking about the Milwaukee that's a suburb of Portland. That's what I was going to ask, yeah. Wisconsin. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the

Bureau used the Irving Park, the Portland Police Bureau, not the federal one, used the Irving Park riot as an excuse to intensify surveillance in Albina. This time they were aided by the FBI, who hated illegal gambling and prostitution, but loved them some disrupting a civil rights movement.

We talked about COINTELPRO, FBI director Hoover standing order to infiltrate, discredit, disrupt left-wing civil rights and civil rights organizations. The FBI sent COINTELPRO agents to Portland, and they encouraged the PPB to engage in fuckery. One sabotage effort involved FBI

agents subtly threatening local doctors to stop them from volunteering their time at the Portland Black Panthers free health clinic. It's just that kind of shit where I'm like, how do you do that? And you're like, I am the good guy in this scenario.

Preventing health care? This is going to be so popular in the future. Go home to your wife. What'd she do today? Threaten some doctors? Feeling great. They were going to help some poor children. Not anymore, they're not. Not after the bureau got on the case.

Just imagining Joe Friday threatening a doctor. It's so the FBI, COINTELPRO unit also got the PPB to lie about black nationalists who were police informants like pretending people, they actually would set

up meetings with people who were police informants and black nationalist leaders so that they could then discredit them within the community as police informants. At one point they even put out fake information about anti-Semitism from Portland's black nationalists to lower their support from the Jewish community

for the support of their causes. Good stuff. While the FBI was forced to disband their COINTELPRO teams after 1971, the PPB continued to carry out similar programs in order to harm black liberation organizations. One example of this would be the work of Detective Brown,

a leading member of the PPB's red squad. Brown also happened to be the American Legion's top red hunter, and he successfully badgered the school board into denying civil rights groups the use of high school auditoriums. I mean, yeah, again, like the phrase is civil rights. Anyone who's

like, this is objectively bad, rights? No, absolutely not. It's fun you say that, Tuck. Because in the 1960s, another study into the Portland Police Bureau noted that 86% of its officers felt that the civil rights movement was moving much too fast.

Mmm. Can't have too many rights. What will we do? We won't have anything to police because people will be allowed to do things. But who will we shoot? Ask the Portland Police. Don't worry, they figure it out. The study concluded that

quote, the feeling that the public does not respect the police officer or holds him in contempt will most certainly affect the officer's attitude and behavior towards the citizen. Officers, the report noted, wanted to emphasize to black people that complacent behavior was incredibly important if they wanted to

remain safe. Oh my god. I hate this. They didn't have masks back then. They don't have much of a mask now, but they didn't have any at all back then. Right. Oh my god. I was just thinking about, when you were talking about

Cointel Pro and spreading rumors about each other, it's so nice that they don't have to do that now because we just have Twitter. They're like, oh, we can just chill. They will just do it to each other. Yeah, they're very, very fun people in general. Yeah,

so throughout the 1960s, the PPA grew in influence, not just in Portland, but nationwide. They helped found a National Police Union, which provided some unity to all the different unions that had been spawned by the success of the PPA. In 1969, the PPA had voted, along with 30 other delegates,

that police strikes would remain banned under the National Union Charter. When Joillette Illinois officers had gone on strike in 1967, AFSCME had revoked their charter and the PPA had condemned them. But in late 1969, contract negotiations between the PPA and the city of Portland broke down.

In 1968, the Portland City Council finally declared the city a public employer and bargaining agent, and had voted to allow collective bargaining for city employees. The PPA was officially declared a chartered police union. And again, this was like its first official recognition from the city.

Now, the president at the time was a guy named David Callison, and he wound up becoming the first PPA president to sign a Portland Police contract. The PPA sat down to negotiate in the spring of 1968. The city wanted to establish a set of ground rules that all seven of the unions

recognized by the city would have to abide by. The PPA complained about this because they didn't think that the rules that bound everyone else should apply to them. Now, they did have some justification for this, mainly the fact that they had a no strike clause and other unions were allowed to strike. So if they're not allowed to strike,

why should they have to abide by the same conditions as every other union? Now, in the first round of negotiations, the other six employee groups, including the Firefighters Union, agreed to new contracts and signed with the city. The Portland Police did not, though. This was considered odd, since traditionally Portland's

firefighters and its police officers had drawn the same base pay. Since the Firefighters Union had backed the police union in establishing it in the first place, there was a sense that both groups ought to stand together. But the Portland Police felt they deserved more money than firefighters. So they left the firefighters behind and demanded

more money. The city refused this and negotiations ground on for months and well into 1969. I'm going to quote again from Pickett's Pistols and Politics. Callison decided to try to break the impasse in a more subtle fashion. He started waging psychological warfare.

In this way, Callison managed to scare away at least one member of the city's negotiating team. Callison ran the man's name through police, like databases and stuff, and found his criminal record. He called a friend who worked at the Oregonian and asked him to check the newspaper's library, and the friend sent along

a few clippings of articles about the man in question, news of promotion, social activities, and other innocent doings. The guy was apparently pure as snow, but Callison went ahead and put the information in a file folder. He neatly printed the man's name on the tab. At the beginning of the next negotiating session, he put the file in a prominent place as he spread

out his papers. The folder caught the man's eyes sometime during the session. He could not stop glancing nervously, they added, and it sat conspicuously within Callison's reach. Finally, he could not stand it any longer. What is this he demanded? Oh, Callison said, smiling, this is my file on you. Callison kept smiling

at him, while thinking craftily to himself that surely one of the joys of being a police officer was that he could make people feel guilty even when they were not. The man excused himself and never returned to the negotiations. The joys of policing. He could make innocent people feel guilty.

That's why I go to work every day personally, is to make innocent people feel bad. I love that that story involves him first illegally using the police record system to try to dig up dirt on somebody, and then when he couldn't find dirt on the person, he just lies and pretends that he has it.

It does seem like sort of a useful tactic just for us all to know. Like, oh, if you can't do the work, you just make a file and you label it the work, and you put it on the table. Yeah, the work. So, I'll try it. We could talk about how Alex Jones does his show. It is basically

the same strategy. That's a show. So, despite the psychological warfare, the city wouldn't budge. It became clear to the union that a strike was their only option. The PPA charter expressly banned strikes. They'd condemned the other departments for considering strikes. Like, so basically, previous

to this, the PPA had told other departments that you have to have no strike clauses in your union contracts, and they helped to form a national police union, and they forbade members of that union from striking, but now they needed to strike in order to get more money, so they strong-armed AFSCME into releasing

the PPA from its No Strike Clause, which was removed first from their contract and then from the International Brotherhood of Police Officers Constitution subsequently. The PPA has always been the bellwether of US police unions, and when they succeeded the rest of the nation's cops copied them. So, when they decided striking was

cool, suddenly police unions across the country were able to strike again. And strike the Portland Police did, marching around City Hall with signs that said crime pays, police work doesn't. No pay, no pigs, and other rib ticklers. Yeah, they called themselves pigs. What?

That was very... wow. Yeah, yeah, it's fun. Yeah, it's great. Through their crooked arrangements to look the other way at criminal enterprises run by Teamsters and Longshoremen over the years, they were able to get both unions to abide by the picket lines and refused to cross them. The police

then started picketing the docks, which effectively locked down all trade within the city of Portland. This cratered the local economy, and the city government was forced to come to the table and give the PPA the raise they thought they deserved. Not only did the Portland Police become the

highest paid civil servants in the city, they gained retroactive pay hikes for the previous 17 months that they'd worked without a contract. The whole process had taken nearly two years of negotiation, but as the PPA's own biography states, the result was a contract that would serve as the model for police groups around the country.

I don't have any, like, cute comments. I'm just, like, so mad. It's infuriated, right? Like, they're even fucking over other cops because for years they would, like, throw other cops under the bus when they tried to strike. But as soon as Portland cops want more money, like, striking's good now. It's amazing.

It's so craven. And they held the city hostage. They threatened to destroy the city's economy. Which is, like, seems sort of like what criminals would do. You know, just, like, blackmail a whole city for money. We're good here.

It does seem illegal. But I'm not a law knower guy. Not a law doer or knower, honestly. You do have basic common sense. Yeah, it seems, I don't know, super unethical what the Portland police did, but they're the police. Who's gonna arrest them?

Who's going to arrest them? They're the police and they're on strike, you know? Yeah. And the FBI's not gonna fuck with them now. They need them to help screw with the Black Panthers. Right. Gotta, like, interrupt those free breakfast programs. Can't have doctors helping people.

No. Look, we'd love to stop the police from holding the city hostage, but we've got a lot of doctors to threaten. Uh, Tuck. That is the end of part one. Do you have any pluggables that you'd like to plug? Oh, gosh, yeah.

I make a podcast called Gender Reveals about trans people. And while we're making the show, we also raise money to support trans people, specifically trans people of color. And we're recording this on Trans Day of Remembrance. So even though you're not listening to it then, you can retroactively commemorate

Trans Day of Remembrance by donating to the Gender Reveal Patreon at patreon.com. And then we take that money and give it to Black and Indigenous trans people and trans people of color. So, you know, almost as fun as funding cops for like hundreds of thousands

of dollars a year. You can give trans people like ten dollars. Which, yeah, might probably will not be used to tear gas you. I feel confident making that statement. What was that? What was that link again? That is patreon.com

slash gender. I got that handle. Apparently no one's ever done gender before. So patreon.com slash gender. Give some bucks if you've got some bucks. And that is, I think, the note that we're going to end episode one on.

When we come back, we'll talk about some real some real bleak shit, to be honest. I cannot wait to try to make that fun. Yeah. I actually completely forgot to plug the new podcast about Portland and the Portland Police

that this two-parter episode was made in part to promote. Because I'm a hack and a fraud. So check out Uprising, a guide from Portland on all of the podcast places. All the places, you know, where the pods and they're casted. All the different spots.

There's two episodes. It's called Uprising, a guide from Portland. There's a colon after the word uprising. Maybe not our best call, title-wise. Anyway. Yay! Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside

of our investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys

or creating them? 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 podcast. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows

like CSI isn't based on actual 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. Listen to

CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space

with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts.