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

Episode Date: December 3, 2020

Robert is joined again by Tuck Woodstock to continue to discuss the Portland Police Union. 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. We're back! And we're suing the cops. Tuck and I just had a conversation in between episodes about the fact that both of us and everyone we know is suing the Portland police in some way. It's fun. Yeah, and how it's just so much a part of life that I just forget about it. Every once in a while I remember that I am suing the city of Portland.

Good times. I don't love lawsuits, but they happen. Yeah, so, Tuck, how are you? Has life changed radically for you in the last five minutes? Yeah, I got a kombucha now. Oh, wow. So, everything's looking up. That is a huge improvement.

What flavor? Grapefruit. Ooh, nice. It's exciting. I just want to know all the information. You know, I haven't opened it yet, but I'll tell you. Yeah, I want some feedback. It's great.

Robert, what are you drinking? I have a diet orange crush, and actually, pretty recently, I waterboarded a friend of mine with diet orange crush as an experiment, and it turns out it's terrible. I am shocked that if you combine diet orange crush and waterboarding, it's bad. I know. Well, I can update this kombucha is good. That's great.

What are you drinking, Sophie? It's a bramble berry hibiscus tea. Oh, wow. Cold. Everyone's fancy today. It's a very, well, I don't know if orange crush is very fancy. Yeah, yeah. Okay, there's several words involved in describing it.

It's not like water, you know? It's like diet orange crush, bramble berry, ice, tea. A lot of consonants. Now that you guys are just hooked on this conversation. This is the whole podcast. I've decided that it's going to be too bleak to keep going with this conversation, and so I'm going to talk about beverages for an hour. Welcome to behind the beverages.

The podcast where we talk about things that you drink. No, this is a podcast about bad people, the worst people. And today we're talking again about the Portland Police Association, and kind of just about the Portland Police, which is shockingly one of the most influential police departments and unions in the entire country. Maybe the most. You could make a case.

The NYPD is the NYPD. So after single-handedly doing more damage to Portland's economy than the decades of protests that would follow, the Portland Police Association was in a pretty good position as 1970 dawned. Their first big test of the modern era came in May of that year, when students and faculty at Portland State University went on strike to protest the Kent State shootings and the Vietnam War. For days, the protesters struck an agreement with the city to end the strike.

So that's good, right? Protesters go on strike in solidarity over a shooting in another state. The city's like, we get what you're doing. Let's negotiate a way to bring this to an end, and then negotiate a way to bring this to an end. Sounds ideal and very democratic. But before the protesters could start to disassemble the structures they'd set up for the occupation,

the Portland Police riot control team showed up to take down a hospital tent. Protesters felt betrayed by this, since they had already worked out a plan to end the strike with the city. They walled off the tent with their bodies. This pissed off the riot cops, who are more or less the same as the riot cops we have today. The riot squad tear-gassed the students and professors and then charged into the gas cloud to beat them with batons.

Yep, sounds right. Sounds like what they do. One officer noted that the violence was not pretty, but the streets were cleared, which again would have happened if the cops hadn't shown up. Right. An activist who was present, Lester Lam, recalled his friend's head being split open like a pumpkin

by a riot cop's baton. 31 people went to the hospital for injuries sustained from police violence. The whole mess set off an avalanche of condemnation from local media, which had either ignored or been critical of the protests before the cops beat everybody up. After what became called the park block riots, the PPB faced some of the first mass criticism for violence to protesters in its history. This was largely due to the fact that its victims had been mostly white.

Go figure. The bad PR was enough that the Portland Police Bureau made a public statement where they agreed to never use force against nonviolent protesters again. Oh, cool. They made a promise. It's so nice how that paved the way for them just being so chill and cool today. Yeah, that's why, for example, when people sat in an intersection last May, they did not beat them in the face with sticks.

No, that would go against their promise. That would go against their promise. The controversy over the park block riots faded soon enough, and the Portland Police Association succeeded in winning another contract in 1972, and yet more money. They withdrew from the International Police Union they'd helped to start in March of that year. After deciding that it lacked focus and direction, the Portland Police Association was now an independent union,

because they also pulled out of AFSCME, with no ties to any national organization. It remains that way to this day. Loyal to no one but itself. Yeah, they don't want any influences that might give them like a conscience or something. No, no, no. They want to stay pure to their ideology. Not even influences that would lead them to support other cops who weren't Portland cops. Right.

Yeah, it's pretty good. So the PPA had ensured that its officers were highly paid and basically unaccountable. Now that the precedent had been set that Portland cops could go on strike if they were angry and crater the local economy, there was very little that the city government could hold over them. As you might expect, this emboldened the worst officers in the department to carry out acts of horrifying racial violence. On March 14th, 1975,

Portland police officer Kenneth Sanford shot 17-year-old Ricky Johnson in the back, killing him. Johnson was the fourth person of color shot and killed by Portland police in five months and his death ignited a city-wide outrage. The details of the killing were just sketchy enough that even the city's white majority couldn't all sit by and pretend it hadn't happened. In essence, two kids with an empty broken gun had been ordering Chinese food and then robbing cab drivers who dropped it off. One of those drivers called the cops and they set up a sting operation. Now, despite the fact that everything in the PPB's bylaws said that this kind of operation should only be conducted by multiple officers, they sent one guy in.

They dressed him as a cab driver and he had a gun hidden in an empty-to-go box of food. When he showed up at the house, the kids pulled a gun on him so he pulled his own gun. What happened next is debated. The cop claimed that Ricky knelt down and prepared to fire, so he shot the boy dead. Ricky's friend claimed that both boys ran like hell and dropped the gun immediately and then the officer shot Ricky in the back. The physical evidence supported the second version of events. Investigators found the broken gun ten feet away from Ricky's body and Ricky had been shot in the back of the head, which probably wouldn't have happened if he'd been facing the officer, just physics and such.

Many white Portlanders were able to see that. While armed robbery is, you know, not good, shooting a fleeing robber in the back of the head is worse. The rage was augmented by the fact that the PPB had murdered again three other black men over the course of the last several months. All of the cases had been sketchy in some way. Kenneth Allen, aged 27, was murdered in a prostitution sting. His death was ruled a justifiable homicide because he had a gun. But the gun was never found and introduced into evidence. The cops just said that he had one and also he was shot multiple times in the back.

Hmm. Yeah, it's just fucking me up a little bit how I guess this isn't PPA because it's right across the river or PPB, but like such a similar thing is happening like right now across the river in Vancouver. I'm just like, well, just just how it goes forever. Just how it goes forever. This is the song that never ends. Charles Minifree was killed after a 20 mile car chase which started when Canby, Oregon cops pulled him over without probable cause. Eyewitnesses report that Minifree had his hands in the air and was standing outside his car when he was shot to death.

None of the witnesses to his death or the witnesses to any of the other deaths of black men killed by Portland police during this period were called to testify in court. And again, all of these men were black men who lived in Albina. None of their deaths provoked any outcry until Officer Sanford shot Ricky Johnson in the back of the head. Everyone living in the year of the George Floyd uprising knows how this works. It's kind of impossible to predict when the violent death of a person of color at the hands of cops will provoke outrage and enough white people that the police actually have to address it. But it did here. And I should note here that in 1972 there were also plenty of back the blue types who defended the PPB from all of its murdering. I'm going to quote from Catherine Nelson again here.

One citizen even sent Officer Sanford who shot the 17 year old a $20 check for his vacation fund and offered to provide him with a babysitter. The donor Esther Nichols stated that the community cannot say or accept that black is bad. So it has to be the police that are wrong. What? Yeah, I'll read that again. Esther Nichols who gave money to the cop that killed that guy stated that the community cannot say or accept that black is bad. So it has to be the police that are wrong. Cool, Esther.

You seem chill. You seem rad, Esther. Fuck off, Esther. Thanks for being really openly racist as opposed to just claiming you support cops. That's at least honest. She's like the progenitor of all the cop go fund me's now, but it's just one person a master. Yeah. You seem cool.

Yeah. Johnson's death revealed that a large portion of Portland's white residents held racist views and respected the decision of the police to use extreme violence against black citizens. Meanwhile, Johnson's death inspired black Portlanders to create the Black Justice Committee. The BJC teamed up with several existing advocacy organizations to push the city to order an inquest into Johnson's death. A public inquest is essentially a trial that occurs after a suspicious death, and it was hoped that this would make it clear that criminal behavior had been, you know, evident on behalf of the officer involved. The Portland Black Student Union was another group that pushed for the same cause. Now, when awful lot of Portlanders were willing to support a public inquest, this was a very popular cause. It was, after all, a pretty basic thing to do and not exactly a revolutionary demand like we should investigate the suspicious killing is you can get most people on board that thing.

There were, however, some bootlickers who thought this went too far. Opponents of the inquest wrote into local papers complaining that Johnson's death was being turned into a race issue. Watford Reed of Portland wrote a letter to the police chief in which he complained that a public inquest would prove black people are privileged in Portland. Pardon? We investigate when they're murdered, they're privileged. Ugh, god, it's fucking gelical cat shit where everyone's just like, actually the most privileged thing would just be to descend to the heavens right now. Ugh. It would be fun if his argument was like, well, no, this planet is terrible and being able to ascend out of life is a privilege.

Mayor Neil Goldschmidt, who was basically the same as every other mayor Portland has ever had, knew that outrage over the Johnson shooting was too popular for him to come out against the inquest, but he was also terrified of the PPA, who were clearly more powerful than the city government. So Goldschmidt tried to thread the needle by supporting the inquest in order to appease the liberals and stating publicly that he expected Officer Sanford to be totally vindicated. He actually announced that he thought the inquest would be a good opportunity for black Portlanders to learn why it was totally okay to shoot a 17 year old in the back of the head. Great mayor. Solid maring. He does sound a bit like our current mayor. Yeah, I was gonna say what I love about Portland is all the good mayors.

All the great mayors that we have here. So the PPA is president at this point was a total dickbag named Stan Peters, which is a dickbag name like a name of a jerk. So he was Peters was enraged by even the mild support the mayor gave to the idea of an inquest. He was just like this is like the fact that you would even question one of my cops shooting somebody is offensive to me. The police chief was a little bit more reasonable and decided the benefits of having an inquest outweighed the risks. The inquest happened and it revealed some pretty damning stuff about the conduct of Portland police officers from Catherine Nelson. Witnesses who testified included Melva Thrower, a neighbor on North Gandon Bean. She testified that the officers used profanity and handled Zachary roughly upon his arrest.

That was the other kid who was with the kid who got shot to death. She stated that they threw Zachary on top of the police car before tossing him into the back seat. When Zachary asked about Johnson, they said that bitch is dead and asked, where does that motherfucker live? Instead of focusing on the treatment of Zachary, more questioned the officers about Thrower's testimony and asked if they used profanity. The officers admitted that profanity was used, but they couldn't remember what profanities. Another officer claimed that he heard loud language, but could not determine that they were profanities. After the assistant district attorney questioned Stanford, the six-person jury voted as to whether Sanford should be held accountable. The vote returned five to one that Sanford's actions were justifiable.

The only black jury member casted the sole vote against Sanford's innocence. So, lots going on there. One is that after hearing that they had said that bitch is dead and asked where he lived and all that sort of stuff and had abused an arrested person, the district attorney's concern was that they'd used profanity, which is fascinating. The real problem here. The real issue. Cops are cursing. You can murder people, but you can't call them a bitch afterwards. That's offensive. That's going to make people angry.

Yeah. And yeah, also that obviously all of the white people in the jury voted that the cop was right to shoot that kid and the only black jury member was the only vote against his innocence. I will state here that the story did not end happily for Officer Sanford. Despite being described as a model officer prior to the shooting, Sanford received increasing complaints about his performance after the inquest. He was suspended from duty in 1975 for accepting a gift from a citizen and in 1977 for the use of illegal drugs while off duty. Later that year, he was put on permanent disability for PTSD. And this next bit is interesting. Not that I expect people to have sympathy for this guy, but that it makes the point that the Portland Police Union is actually bad for officers in some ways too. The PPB's culture of resistance supported by the PPA negated Sanford's professional and moral accountability.

PPA President Stan Peters claimed Sanford would receive psychological help after Johnson's death, yet there is no evidence that he did. To so easily brush aside Johnson's death is justifiable, emphasized not only the inadequate services Portland police officers received from the Bureau, but also the unspoken norm that black lives did not matter. This obviously and ultimately disrespected the sacredness of black lives throughout Portland and questioned the worth of black people. Kind of like it's bad for everyone for white supremacy to be enshrined by institutions. Arguably, but does that stop it? No, not at all. This is bad for everyone. Should we stop it in the next 50 years? No, absolutely not.

Let's keep having the same fight. Why not? We don't have anything else to do in society. Everything else is good. Yeah, everything else is smooth and just chugging right along. Like that train the police used to shoot longshoremen from. So the rest of the early 70s continued the by now well-worn pattern of Portland police only suffering consequences when they offended the white majority with their actions. In 1975, the Bureau was rocked by a series of scandals in the Narcotics Division, most of which revolved around the fact that the entire Narcotics Division was addicted to illegal drugs. One PPB detective testified that narcotics officers frequently did huge amounts of cocaine before going out on drug rates. I mean, I'm going to be honest, I've seen them riding along in their riot vans and thought it would be fun to do a fuckload of blow and then like hang off the side of a Ford F-350 rolling around the streets. That does seem rad.

It's just like how not subtle it is that just like makes my brain explode where it's like, let us do drugs before busting people for drugs. For drugs. Because that way we'll have more drugs. Yeah, exactly. Which is actually what happened. We just used up all of our drugs getting ready to use. Oh my God. It's a perfect cycle. There is at least one clear case of the PPB murdering and then faking the suicide of a drug dealer in order to get his heroin.

Good. Good guys. Portland Narcotics Cops. And in fact, when that dead kid's mom pressed for an investigation into his death, she received a phone call from a white dude who was probably a Portland Narcotics Officer. He told her to back off on the investigation unless she wanted more family members dead. Oh. Yeah. That's good.

Good policing. That's fine police work. So the Detective DuPay, who is the, I guess, the best Portland cop we're going to talk about in this. He's the one who reported that Portland Narcotics Officers were doing a shitload of blow before going out on drug raids. He investigated the murder of this drug dealer and he submitted a report to the police chief with his findings, which were pretty damning to the Portland Police Bureau. Years later, when he attempted to get a copy of the report, I think to give to a reporter, but I'm not sure. A clerk told him that it had been shredded as soon as he filed it. Like almost immediately.

Oh, that's good stuff. Good stuff. If you're wondering, why didn't anyone do anything about these drug-addled out-of-control cops? The answer is PPA President Stan Peters, one of the worst people to ever live in the city of Portland. He was a potent negotiator, though. And when the city negotiators angered him during a contract dispute, like, this is the story that everyone tells about Stan Peters. He was negotiating with the city for more money and when they wouldn't play ball with him, he drew his gun and slammed it on the table and told them, these are my ground rules.

Oh my God. Sorry, I just sat here. They can see I just sat here with my mouth open for like 30 straight seconds. They just keep outdoing themselves. It's like a parody of themselves. And they keep doing shit that is, again, literal criminal stuff. Right. Like the cops are just a criminal.

Yeah, sorry. Yeah, it's a thing, no, it's just a thing where like, I feel like we get desensitized to it. Like I get desensitized to anything that they do because I'm just like, yeah, of course they're doing that. And then, you know, with the protest that we were at, like someone outside would be like, wait, they're, you know, snatching people up in our McVance. And I'm like, oh, is that not normal? And they're like, that's not, they're not supposed to do that. I'm like, oh, interesting. So like when they do that, I'm just like, oh yeah, I guess technically you're not supposed to do that.

It just seems like something they would do. There's a, there's a local cop that we all know, Brett Taylor, who is most famous in the city of Portland for kind of randomly stabbing car tires during riots. For no real purpose that I can see most of the time. I originally knew him as cop who won't stop pointing his gun at people's heads. That's what I was calling him. It was a long moniker, but he just went, everyone else would like point it at the ground. He would just be still habit at your head. But yeah, then he switched to just like really just hating car tires.

He's really fucking loves to stab car tires. You see the joy in his body language. Among other things, we had like a recent like city like testimony or whatever on police violence and somebody came on who he had shot in the groin. And Brett had to testify that he had never knowingly targeted the groin area. And in another point, he was talking about having addressed protesters and like he was stopped by the moderate and they said, by addressed, you mean you threw grenades at them? He said yes. Oh, fucking love the Portland police.

They're cool then. They're cool now. Start a conversation with a grenade. Oh, I love dialogue. So Stan, the guy who negotiates with a handgun, wound up having an influence that extended far, far beyond the bounds of the Rose City from Pickett's pistols and politics. Shortly after Peter's became the union president, he introduced a concept that was relatively new to police officers, political involvement. Peter's predecessor, David Callison, had dabbled lightly, even inviting controversy by offering a PPA endorsement in a few local races.

But Peter's scope was broader than that. He wanted the union to be a political force to be reckoned with. He was tired of the city and state officials writing roughshod over police with seemingly little interest in its rank and file concerns or causes. He wanted the police to be listened to. Better yet, he wanted politicians to quake in their boots if the police were not happy. Uh-huh. And so he pulled his handgun out. Yeah, I mean, yes, he did do that. He's also the start in a lot of ways of police nationwide getting directly involved in political races and having police unions directly endorse candidates and taking partisan stances.

We can also thank the PPA for a lot of that. Yeah, no, I, yeah. Uh-huh. And that showed up last month, this month. Gosh, every month is 100 years long. Yeah, I mean, every month. Showed up earlier this month. Yeah, every month of this year has lasted longer than all of the history we're covering in this podcast.

This is true. But you know what doesn't take long, Tuck? Goods and services. Yeah, it doesn't take long to develop an appreciation for the fine products and services that support this podcast. Can't wait. 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 this hearse were like a lot of goods. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way. And nasty sharks.

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 iHeartRadio 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 iHeartRadio 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 iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We are back. Okay, so the PPA had made history by becoming the first successful police union and it made history again here by setting a precedent that police unions would involve themselves directly in local and eventually national races. Stan was clear that his motivation for doing this was to make local elected leaders afraid of him. This he knew was the only way that the Bureau could protect itself from the dangers of democracy. Portland police were going to keep shooting people and engaging in rampant corruption.

That was going to continue to piss Portlanders off. If they wanted to avoid real consequences for this behavior, the PPA would have to insert themselves into politics. They started donating to city council candidates, paying to run ads attacking leaders who threatened to force any kind of accountability on them. Other police unions around the country paid attention and, true to form, followed suit. In 1979, one of those coke-addled narcotics cops we've been talking about, Officer David Crowther, was shot dead during a drug raid on a motorcycle gang. Since he was, I mean, I don't know specifically that he was a cokehead, but other Portland cops say the narcotics cops were all cokeheads. So one assumes, I am sorry if I unfairly slandered him as a cokehead just because he was in a unit of cokeheads. And there's nothing wrong with being a cokehead as long as you aren't also carrying out drug raids, you know?

No shame on cocaine. Weren't you wistfully tweeting about cocaine like yesterday? Yeah, it was mostly a joke. It's been a long time and happened in countries where it's legal. Let's just say that. So yeah, since he was, you know, possibly a cokehead cop who may very well have helped murder people, because again, his unit definitely murdered at least one person and staged it as a suicide, I'm not going to say it was a tremendous tragedy that David Crowther got shot busting another gang. But the hilariously pro-PPA book Pistols, Pickets, and Politics notes, the violent death of a fellow officer was a terrible blow to the members of the Portland Police Bureau and devastating to the drug unit.

But it was not the end of the nightmare. And what that book calls a nightmare was the fact that internal affairs had opened an investigation into the murders, drug dealing, and drug abuse by numerous members of the narcotics division. What a nightmare! Being held accountable for our actions, that's for other people. Yeah, I too have nightmares that I will get in trouble for doing a shitload of drugs and murdering people. Yeah, one of the most damning complaints against the drug unit was that they had planted drugs on suspects in order to charge innocent people with felony crimes they had not committed.

But that's not the nightmare. The nightmare is them getting caught. The nightmare is them getting caught, yes. Now, I should note that police planting fake drugs or drugs that they stole from other people and then planting them on people who didn't have those drugs. This happens constantly, all around the country. Google the Dallas fake drug scandal if you want another example of huge numbers of officers being involved in the planting of fake drugs on people. Anyway, law and order is important. So, the internal affairs investigation was completed in the summer of 1980 and it led to the resignations of two officers who'd been assigned to the narcotics unit.

One of those officers was later arrested on charges of illegally obtaining narcotics from a drug dealer with the intent to deal. He was convicted and the PPA did not sue to get this cop back his job. So that's... we found a line! The investigation revealed at least 59 cases where people had been convicted due to falsified evidence from Portland cops. And 35 more cases that were in the process of being argued out based on the same bogus evidence. And all of these cases, nearly 100, were overturned. Even Officer Crowther's Killer was released from prison after it was proven that the cops who testified at his trial had lied on the stand. Okay, that's very funny actually.

That's extremely funny because he's absolutely a murderer and they just couldn't stop themselves from lying. So make sure you know he's an extra murderer. Yeah, I won't say you're shooting yourself in the foot, but maybe you're shooting your friend in the back. Wow. Yeah, so by the time 1981 rolled around, the Portland police were not doing particularly well in the winning hearts and minds department. And things got worse for them on March 12th. The Burger Barn was at the time one of very few black-owned businesses in Portland. It was, of course, in Albina.

The cops claimed that the Burger Barn was a major gathering place for criminal activity. Gangsters and drug dealers and pimps would meet there all the time. And I have no idea if this was true. Considering the fact that the PPB's whole drug unit was a bunch of cokehead murderers who planted fake drugs on people, I'm going to take what they say with a grain of salt here. Like, the PPA book just sort of goes like, well, criminals were gathering here and cops were just so angry that all these people they couldn't catch were always gathering at this restaurant. And that's where they did what they did. But it's like, they also lied all the time.

Right. Yeah, so as the story goes, two Portland police officers got fed up with all of the bad men hanging out at this restaurant. And they decided to get revenge with what the PPA's biographer describes as a prank. This prank involved gathering up four dead possums and dumping them at the doorway of the Burger Barn. Now, if you aren't aware, the word possum has been a derogatory slur for black people since the early 1800s. It has the same etymology as the use of, like, the term raccoon in the same sense. Like, they come from the same origin point. This was not a prank.

By dumping dead possums at the door of a black-owned business, these cops were making what amounted to a death threat. Right? Like, that's what that means. Now, I wouldn't call it a prank. The officers took no steps to be stealthy about what they were doing. And according to the POW family who owned the restaurant, this was just the latest in a long line of harassing actions from the Portland police. They believed this harassment was designed to scare away their customers and destroy the business. You should probably also keep in mind that while the Portland police claimed this restaurant was a famous haunt of drug dealers and pimps, for literal decades prostitution and drug dealing in Albino had been carried out under the approval and sometimes the direction of the Portland police.

Um, yeah. So an investigation was launched and the officers responsible admitted what they'd done immediately. They were not publicly identified because there was a clause in the PPA contract that said officers who were disciplined should not be disciplined publicly. In other words, the PPA contract guaranteed that officers who harmed people would not be publicly named or punished, which some might suggest means they probably wouldn't be punished at all. This is now the standard nationwide. So, yeah. That's frustrating and consistent.

It's not great. This reminds me of now when just for people who aren't aware, maybe everyone already is, they actually covered all the name badges and numbers on the Portland police and so there is actually no way to hold them accountable. And the only thing you can do is submit a description to PPP and they're like, oh yeah, we'll look into it privately, you know, you're not allowed to like name the person who shot you in the head because that would be going too far according to the PPA apparently. That would be, but whenever they arrest people, they will tweet out the names. All of their identifying information. Yeah, yeah.

All those people are getting doxed. It's fair. Fair is what it is. Fair. It's cool, good, just, law and order. Now, in this case, there was enough public outrage that the PPA couldn't just sweep things under the rugs and do an internal investigation. The officers responsible Craig Ward and Jim Galloway voluntarily appeared at a press conference before black community leaders. They identified themselves and apologized and I'm going to quote here from Pickett's Pistols and Politics.

Ward and Galloway claimed they had acted out of frustration, not racial hatred when they made their late night deposit of the possums at the restaurant's door, but the black community already incensed over incidents of alleged discrimination by police, labeled the possum dumping as more evidence of racism and deliberate targeting of blacks by police. Just a month and a half earlier, Black United Front co-chairman Ron Herndon and neighborhood activist Vessia Loving had called on the United Nations to investigate human rights violations in the Oregon because of the high percentage of blacks that they said had been killed by police over the previous 10 years. Yeah, I didn't realize that people had called on the UN to investigate Oregon police for racism. Probably not the last time, but yeah, that's wild. Yeah, we could use another UN investigation, although that would probably just increase the conspiracy theories that Antifa is part of a UN scheme to take over the United States. Is that actually an already a conspiracy theory? Oh yeah, absolutely.

I missed that one with the UN. There's too many. Antifa's doing too much at once. It's hard to keep track. I wasn't going to throw out criticisms here, but I do think they're going a little bit broad. They're trying to provide respirators. They're making soup for my family and they're taking over the UN. So the Black United Front is one of the advocacy groups that I don't think they'd formed over the outrage in Ricky Johnson's death, but they had really like come together in a big way after that because a number of groups that formed after Johnson's death had been merged into the United Front. They gave a press conference themselves where they pointed out that the Possum incident was part of a pattern of police harassment of black Portlanders. The PPA's paid biographer writes begrudgingly, the people of Portland seem to agree. For the most part, public sympathy lay with the POW family in the black community, not with the police. Yes, I'm so proud of everybody.

They figured it out. Yeah. 200 protesters picketed City Hall and lo and behold, this forced the police chief and commissioner to fire officers Ward and Galloway. Great! Surely that's the end of the story. And no one ever did anything racist again. No, no, they immediately did something racist because Stan Peters was still the head of the Portland Police Association and he was pissed as hell. Quote, it appeared that no one was willing to stand up for Ward and Galloway, no one but Stan Peters. As president of the Portland Police Association, it was his duty to protect the rights of members. Once the executive board determined that Ward and Galloway had not committed a crime and that they had a legitimate grievance due to their summary dismissal from their jobs, the union led by Peters rose up to defend them.

That's good. It's so cool that they just like, I want to make sure that you have your legal right to be racist. Yeah, the PPA was saying that as long as Portland cops didn't break the law, it was okay for them to racially harass citizens. Right. That's the argument Peters is making. Peters was a rampaging racist and sexist, by the way. Yeah, I could tell from your intro. Is he this dude with the terrible mustache, Robert? Yes, you know he has a mustache by the name Stan Peters and the fact that he was a cop.

Like, he has to have had a mustache. The universe would have shattered into a thousand pieces if he had been a clean shaven man. I was like, this is a terrible face. I'm guessing this is the right guy. Yeah, no, he looks exactly, if you just picture an old timey cop in your head, it's Stan Peters, like 70s cop. Yeah. It just reminds me so much of, not Stan Peters and his face, I don't know about that, but it just reminds me so much about people who somehow conflate the Second Amendment with the right to say whatever the fuck you want and still keep your job. It's like that thing. It's like, oh, because you legally can threaten people's lives by leaving dead possums outside of their job, you also should be able to keep your job and still do that because those two things are the same. Also, I would guess that if protesters made an explicit death threat towards officers in a similar way to the officers had threatened to kill members of the POW family, they would probably be arrested.

Hmm. I don't know, some people made some death threats against me and all I get to do is say, hope they don't kill me. Well, yeah, but you know, you're not a cop, Tuck. No, I know. Made a mistake, just kidding. Should have been a cop, then your life would matter. Wow, I just opened the photo and it is truly everything I imagined and more. Yeah. He does kind of imagine him being bald. He does have some top hair. Wow, this mustache.

Yeah, I know. It is a cop's stash. It is a powerful cop's stash. He's like leaning against a desk. Yeah, it fucking rules. He's a stereotype, but he is cop ugly. Yeah, no, he looks like a cop. If you saw him on the street and you were a director and you were trying to cast a cop, you'd be like, hey, let me get your digits. This does more like the still from a Hollywood film about an old-timey cop than it does an actual old-timey cop. Yeah, he looks like the guy who yells at Dirty Harry for shooting too many people, but in reality, Stan Peters never yelled at anyone for shooting too many people. He was like, you didn't shoot enough people this month.

Why are there so many alive people in this town? Yeah. So, yeah, the Stan Peters makes the union rise up to defend these officers who are fired for making racist threats. And this was actually pretty groundbreaking. Thanks to the PPA, it was common for unions around the country to weigh in on disciplinary matters when cops did bad stuff and officers could appeal punishments for bad behaviors. But once a cop was fired, they tended to stay fired. Stan Peters set out to change that. First, he demanded the case go to binding arbitration, which the contract allowed him to do. Then he organized a petition drive to fire the police commissioner.

He sent ballots to the PPA members to get a vote of no confidence in both the chief and the police commissioner. And last but not least, he announced a protest march to compete with the Black United Front's march. This one would consist of off-duty cops, their family members, and local supporters. So this is just back the blue versus Black Lives Matter thing? Okay. What year is this? This is 1981. Okay.

Yep. Cool. The PPA's march gathered a staggering 850 people, waving signs that said, Re-instate the blue, too. Justice, not politics. And may the force be with you, Craig and Jim. Star Wars, pretty new at the time.

Fucking nerds. Many police elements, including sharpshooters, protected the march, which is interesting because it was a private organization doing a march being protected by public funds in a way that I'll guarantee you the Black United Front protesters weren't protected. Sure, I didn't. Not a thing that ever happened again, say repeatedly. So some brave counter protesters did show up with pigs heads on spikes, which infuriated Stan Peters. And kudos to those folks.

But on the whole, the march was a massive success for the PPA. All the pressure exercised by Peters eventually did its job. The arbitrator decided that termination of both officers had been too harsh a penalty. Both men were reinstated to their jobs. This would turn out to be quite possibly the most influential thing the Portland police ever did. From pickets, pistols, and politics. The city of Portland versus Ward and Galloway case is still the leading police discipline case in the United States. And in labor loss circles, it is the arbitration decision referred to most often.

Its legal nomenclature is simply City of Portland. So, you know, we started this by saying that 25% of all fired cops in some cities, more like 70, get reinstated by union appeals. Yeah. The legal underpinning of that is City of Portland. That is the name of the case that is most often referred to when police firings are appealed. What a cool city that I live in. So proud to be here.

We have a lot of roses too. You know, Robert, it's okay because as we were discussing right before this, there's a current lawsuit that I'm not allowed to talk about called Woodstock versus City of Portland. And we're just going to slide that one in and that's going to be the one everyone references now. Make the city, yeah. Fingers crossed, Tuck. Fingers crossed. So, I found an interesting interview with labor historian Norman Diamond on the website Street Roots. He was actually on the Portland Labor Board when all this was going on.

So, he's very familiar with how the PPA works because, again, like the PPA was part of the labor board at this point. He pointed out that initially the PPA's goal was, quote, if any of our members commits an act subject to discipline, we want them to have union representation. That's reasonable. Their claim was cops have to have the same rights as anybody else in society, and I do agree with that. But, he says, with successive contracts, they extended those rights beyond anything the rest of us have. Now, in the event of a shooting, you can't question a police officer until two days have passed. Their superiors can't. The district attorney's office can't. And that's part of the labor contract. So, they have a chance to meet with other officers involved in the shooting

to get their stories straight and go over everything with their lawyers. And then, after two days, they can bring back what becomes the official version. I'm sorry, what the fuck? Yeah, that's something that the Portland... Yeah, it's really just like, your union means that, or your union says you get to have this specified collusion time. And now, that's very common around the entire country because of the Portland police. They've been fully processed that because it's just so obviously corrupt. Right.

I mean, that's what we're saying this whole time, right? It's like, every single thing you do, it's like, you're not being subtle about it. You're just like, oh, here's like me being just like literally doing criminal things behind the cops. And so, I just get to do it. Yeah, you know, when the this year's big protest started up after George Floyd's murder, there was an element of me that was like, you know, Portland's not a big city. And our police department is not a big police department. And it's not a nationally... It wasn't at least...

Now, it's more famous. It was not a nationally famous police department. And it seems strange to me that this city would become the nexus of so much resistance to the police. And it makes more sense now because the Portland police are the center nationwide of a lot of our problems with police violence and brutality. Like... I wish it worked in reverse where like, oh, Portland started all of it. And so if something happened to Portland police, like every other police station, like by something happened, I mean, like contractually, like legally, like something got taken away. Then it's like, oh, that actually just ripples out to everywhere, but I have a feeling it doesn't work in reverse.

No, it would not. It's going to require an agonizing and probably decades-long process of, yeah, good times. In 1985, Portland police responded to a shoplifting incident at a 7-Eleven. They noticed a fight happening in the store's parking lot, and the PPA's biographer describes it tellingly as, between two white men and a tall black man. It's interesting to me that they didn't feel the need to describe any of the physical attributes of the white men. Nope, gotta know he's tall. So the cops decided that this tall black man must be responsible for whatever was happening, and they put him in a sleeper hold, which killed him.

It turned out that the victim, Lloyd Stevenson, was a former Marine and a father of five, as well as a security guard at Fred Meyer. More outrage swept through the city. The city government acted quickly, banning the police from using chokeholds. Seems kind of familiar. I think we've heard this story before. Of course, the police complained. Portland police were trained to use force in gradually escalating levels from one to six. Level one is the presence of a cop.

Level two is voice commands. Level three is physical restraint. Level four is the carotid artery hold that killed Lloyd. And level five is the use of a night stick or mace. And six is of course deadly force. But of course, really so was four because the carotid hold killed people. Yeah. Now the Portland police complained that taking their chokehold away would escalate things dangerously,

leaving them with less non-lethal options to respond to crime with. Because most cops didn't like to carry night sticks because they were heavy and thought carrying mace was a hassle. So just all they would have is a gun. Oh my God. This will give us basically, this will say that this will make our only option be shooting people. Right. Now, yeah. If you don't let us kill them this way, we'll have to kill them this other way because we can't carry mace around.

Because we can't like... It's too heavy. It's too heavy, mace. Two Portland cops, Monty and Wickersham, were particularly angry at being banned from choking people. The PPA biography notes that they were in the process of being trained to give chokeholds at the time. So it kind of leaves you with the impression that they were so excited to choke people. And then they got their power thing. I don't get to choke anybody now.

I'm new to being a cop. Come on. Do you see their names are Monty and Wickersham's? Monty and Wickersham. Yeah, they sound British as hell. They do. Couple of bobbies in the old PPA. They traveled here because they're like, I hear you get to choke people more in the Portland Police Bureau.

Yeah. It's funny, when I was a little conservative... Well, I guess more conservative than I am now. I remember a video circulating around that was like a bunch of British cops, like a circle of them all around one man with a machete. And they had chairs, I think, and were basically all in a huge circle trying to calm this guy from swinging a knife and eventually deescalated him and nobody died. And it was like portrayed as like, look how silly it is because English cops don't have guns.

This is what it takes to deal with a man with a machete. And it's like, well, but they didn't kill anybody. Right, it worked. Everyone walked away alive. Is this a good story? Yeah, we're going to arm everyone with the chairs now. They're going to be heavy, but no one's going to die. Yeah.

So I'm going to quote here from the PPA's biography. Monty and Wickersham reacted to the situation with the typical black humor of police officers. They had t-shirts printed with the slogan, don't choke them, smoke them. No. Yeah. Sorry. It's my own reaction. Yeah.

Yeah. That's just the typical black humor of police officers. Making a t-shirt about an innocent man you choke to death. Good times. Uh. Uh. I mean, as someone who's wearing a novelty police violence t-shirt right now, I guess I can't talk, but it's a little different.

Someone in the city of Portland has found a don't choke them, smoke them t-shirt at like a fucking vintage store and didn't know what it was for. Oh, yeah. Uh. The biography goes on to state, the message they wished to convey was clear. If the carotid hold was no longer available to police, why not just shoot? Why not? Why not?

Why else are we going to do law enforcement? Bad to shoot people? Yeah. They started selling the t-shirts in the justice center's break room on the exact same day of Lloyd Stevenson's funeral. Um. Classy. Classy.

They were fired and the case went into arbitration. The union argued that the officer's apparent insensitivity had been unintentional because the officers hadn't known that Stevenson's funeral was taking place the same day. The firings were overturned and the officers reinstated. Uh. Um. You know, I am loving this city of Portland, citing more and more every time a cop gets their job back.

Yeah. It's great. Ugh. You know what's better than people mocking a murder victim and then getting back pay? Fuck Robert. I would say honestly most things, but possibly products and services. Yeah. It's certainly products and services.

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 in the good and 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 are back. Okay.

So there have been a lot of horrible crimes committed by the Portland police and defended by the PPA. We've gone through a number of them. We only have so much time in our lives and in this episode. So in the sake of brevity, I'm going to outline just one more. And this time the victim is not a black man. It's a 12-year-old boy. Oh good.

Yeah. In 1992, a home invader broke into the house where Nathan Thomas, the aforementioned 12-year-old child and his parents lived. The police arrived while the invader was in the house and the man grabbed Nathan as a hostage and held a knife to his throat. The home invader was 20 years old, drunk, and reportedly suicidal. Now this is obviously a nightmare situation. And like right, my criticisms of the police aside, there's not going to be a perfect way

to handle this. There's a good chance that he would have died no matter what had happened. This is a bad situation. That said, the tactic the cops chose to deal with this hostage situation was, shall I say, less than delicate. Instead of doing any of the kind of things you might expect police to do during a hostage situation that threatens the life of a 12-year-old, five different Portland officers opened fire from outside of the house with their handguns, pumping dozens of rounds into the house.

The hostage taker was shot 14 times, Nathan was also shot, and he died in the hospital. Just five guys start shooting into the building. What's even the point at that point? Like, ostensibly you're there to help, like you're not. I feel like ostensibly they're there to help the kid, but they're not. So why aren't they there? And it's also like, I will say it can be justified to use a firearm in that situation, but you don't use a pistol, all right?

You don't try from outside of a house to, I shoot a lot of handguns, right? They're very inaccurate compared to a rifle. Like they are only good at short distances and they are not for precision work. That's not what a handgun's for. You would have a sniper come in and try to shoot the guy threatening a 12 year old. That's a reasonable time to use a sniper. They just had five guys start shooting handguns into the building. It's so fucked up.

The president of the PPA at the time was a guy named Morse and he showed up on the scene with a PPA lawyer as soon as he heard that his cops had gunned down a small child. Now I want to read you this next paragraph from Pickett's Pistols and Politics because it has to be one of the most sociopathic things I have ever read in my entire life. As the father of three young sons, Morse's heart went out to the family of Nathan Thomas. The boy's accidental death was devastating, but Morse, a Marine Corps veteran and a long time police officer, was a man who had been thoroughly trained to maintain his focus and perform his duty, no matter how much he heard inside.

As he dialed the telephone number and contacted one sleepy lawyer after another, his focus was on the five police officers who needed his help. Cool stuff. Good guys. So I just even just calling it like an accidental death and it's like, I'm not convinced it was an accident. I don't think you just have five people shooting handguns into a house and be like, that, oh, oops, someone died.

If five people shoot handguns into a house filled with people, what you're saying, because I love nonverbal communication and the nonverbal communication that you're giving off when you and four other men fire handguns into a house is, I don't really care who I hit inside that house. Exactly. So obviously none of these guys were fired or seriously disciplined for shooting wildly. Now don't worry though, Tuck. The PPA's biographer wants us all to know that the police cared about what had happened

and they wanted to make it right. Quote, the association's concern for youngsters was demonstrated in a gesture of grief and sympathy after the death of Nathan Thomas. A few weeks after the boy's death, the union contributed $250 to the American Cancer Society. Nathan had received treatment for Hodgkin's disease and was in remission at the time of his death and $250 to the Nathan Thomas Soccer Scholarship Fund. Nathan was the member of a soccer team. So that's good.

Yeah. I always say, if you just kill a 12 year old kid for no reason, just donate $250 to a soccer team and it's all fine. Yeah. Now, I will say, the family of Nathan also reached out to the police later because they were working to raise money to build a soccer field in Nathan's memory at Laurelhurst Park, which is near where he lived. And the PPA did contribute $5,000 to the soccer field, so that's more money.

Yeah. They love to sponsor soccer. Yeah. They're big soccer fans. Do you think we can get them to defund PPB if we tell them that we just need to raise more money for soccer? A lot of soccer fields. That might do the trick, Tuck.

Not that I would want to defund PPB, I'm an objective journalist with no skin in this game. Anyway, go ahead. Yeah. Yeah. As a journalist, opinions are obviously forbidden. Now, there are a number of important things I didn't cover in this series. Like how PPA President Stan Peters hated the idea of woman cops and non-white cops and

deliberately made the union unwelcoming to them. Cool. I felt like focusing on the travails of police officers, even like obviously, it's weird because I don't think we should have cops. If we're going to have them, yeah, everyone should have the equal opportunity to be a cop, I guess. But I didn't want to focus on that in this episode as opposed to all of the horrible things that the police did.

Yeah, but Stan Peters super-racist and there was a whole fight within the union to make it less racist. That was a thing that happened, so, you know, in the sake of fairness, I wanted to note that. Yeah, I do want to close, though, by talking some more about the PPB's infamous Red Squad. In 1974, the mayor of Portland assured the city's liberal population that the Red Squad had been disbanded. This was a lie, and they later learned that year that it had just been renamed the Intelligence

Division and was actively keeping tabs on suspicious characters at the Oregon ACLU. Gotta keep an eye on the ACLU, folks. In November 1986, local press published rumors that the Red Squad had been secretly re-established as a new entity under the name Criminal Intelligence Division, presumably as part of a renewed Red Scare of the Reagan years. The police denied this, admitting that the Criminal Intelligence Division existed but claiming that it does not monitor peaceful or public activities and does not target groups or individuals.

But that's true, right? I'm going to quote next from a write-up by Michael Monk. In 1992, Officer Sewert, officially detailed to spy on radicals and subversives, attended and submitted a confidential report on a meeting by a coalition of peace, labor, and environmental groups to discuss a civilian police review board. One of the victims of that surveillance sued Portland for violation of his civil rights four years later and won a $2,000 award in court. Although the court decision was not reported by the Oregonian, it led to public hearings

on the Red Squad in 1996 by the Metropolitan Commission on Human Rights. Although denied press coverage even by the Willamette Week, the commission grilled Red Squad Commander Lieutenant Larry Findling and Sergeant Norman Sharp. They admitted they used paid agents, volunteer informers, and other techniques to monitor dissenters and agreed that even the reasonable suspicion of something as trivial as trespass triggers their response. The MCHR proposed a series of controls on the Red Squad to Mayor Katz. Not only did the mayor reject the proposals, she dismantled the MCHR.

Yeah, Portland's got a long tradition to good mayors. Nothing but quality in Portland mayors. I was trying to make a joke earlier about Vericats being good and I'm so glad it didn't work out. Nope, turns out leaders are bad. So the Red Squad spent the end of the 1990s violating the civil rights of dissidents. In October of 1999, it sent an undercover agent to spy on protesters opposing Bill Clinton's Air War on Iraq.

In 2000, on May Day, the Red Squad's black van videotaped the faces of demonstrators who hadn't actually broken any laws, which is, again, a crime that's a crime. The Red Squad's behavior was egregious enough that they pissed off Circuit Court Judge Michael Marcus who ordered the Oregon police to stop tracking citizens who aren't breaking the law. Two years later, information surfaced that they were still doing that. It is currently against Oregon law for them to surveil lawful demonstrators, but we can only assume the Red Squad is still doing what it always did.

Whatever name it operates under now. Anyway, that's the story of the Portland Police and the Portland Police Association. Yay! Good stuff. I will rest easy knowing that I'm definitely not being surveilled by the Red Squad because it doesn't exist anymore and they're just chilling cool now. Thanks, Robert. I appreciate knowing this context that not only are things bad now, but they always have

been bad and there was plenty of time to fix it and we just didn't. Yeah, but you know, this inspires me to kick the can right down the road to the next generation of people. Can't even go to the Burger Barn. That story made me just want to go to the Burger Barn and support the Burger Barn. It doesn't even exist anymore. Yeah. That's the real tragedy.

It's tragedy. Anyway. Tradgy. Tradgy. Tradgy. I don't know. My brain stopped when you said Willem at Week. I was like, what?

And I missed the next one. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I think that was a, either they changed their name or that was the name they used to operate under. I don't know enough about the history. No, it is Willem. It's Willem at Week. Oh, it is.

I thought it was Weekly. No, it's Willem at Week, but it was like Willem at Week versus Willem at Week. It's like a very non-Portland pronunciation and I'm like, Robert, where are you from? I'm from Texas. Get out of here. Yeah. No. I'm like the Portland police.

I'm not a Portland police. I don't live here. That is something I like. I mean, I do live here. No, yeah. But that came up in my head when we were talking about the police the whole time is like, at what point did they stop living in Portland? Do you know?

Yeah. And I don't have good information on that. Yeah, I figure. But yeah, it is. People should know that about 82% of Portland police live outside the city. Many of them in another state, Washington. It's cool stuff. It's cool and good.

Yeah. Cool and good. So, Tuck, you got anything to plug? Yep. Still, much like in the last episode, I'd still make a podcast about gender. The new season is dropping right around when this episode drops. And we have programs to provide money for housing, medication, food, really basic things for trans people, particularly black, indigenous trans people and trans people of color.

So if anyone wants to contribute to any of that, they can go to patreon.com slash gender. That's patreon.com slash gender. Awesome. Patreon.com slash gender and also we have, if you listen to this and we're like, boy, Portland is and its problem with cops is more interesting than I thought it was. We have a podcast about that called Uprising and it's about everything that happened in Portland this summer. Please check that out.

Again, Uprising, it's a podcast that's more things about Portland that will frustrate you. There's never enough. Yeah, never enough. Not a great audio of things exploding though, so if you were like, my headphones haven't triggered me yet. That's what I was going to say. I was like, oh, that sounds cool to listen to.

No, I have PTSD. Trigger warning, the podcast, uh, podcast. 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 with like a lot of guns, but our 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 podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Alphabet Boys 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 in 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.

As 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.