It Could Happen Here - That Time The Oakland Police Formed a Torture Gang

Episode Date: May 11, 2023

Robert sits down with Ali Winston, co-author of The Riders Come Out At Night, a book about the Oakland police.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Welcome to It Could Happen Here. This is Robert Evans, and It Could Happen Here is a podcast about things falling apart, and, you know, sometimes about making them better. Today, we're talking both about something that is implicated in a number of, you know, aspects of what we call the crumbles here in the United States, which is the police. And we're also talking about the tremendous difficulty that people encounter whenever they try to improve this particular aspect of American society, the near impossibility of reform within the police. And to talk with me about that,

and to talk with me about their incredible new book, The Writers Come Out at Night, is Ali Winston. Ali co-wrote this book with Darwin Bondgram. And it covers particularly the Oakland police and a scandal that kind of happened at around the same time as the Rampart scandal in Los Angeles, focused around a group of Oakland police officers called the Riders, who, well, I'm going to let Ali tell you about that. It's a pretty shocking and bleak story, though. Ali, welcome to the show. Hi there. How are you doing? I'm doing good. How are you today? Lovely, lovely. Ali, this is a great book. It's very deeply reported. I want to talk a little bit about what sort of brought you into this story, because this is something that kind of happened around the turn of the last century.

And it's kind of adjacent to a lot of issues that are still very much relevant in kind of the problems we have with policing, both kind of the thin blue line code of silence, the way in which police departments act in a very gang-like fashion to protect bad actors, the way in which kind of ill-thought-out reform policies targeted at kind of assuaging the fears of business owners lead to policies of tremendous violence, a lot of things that are still very much kind of at play all around the country. It's fascinating to me. So we came at this book, both kind of independently, we came at this as two reporters who'd worked kind of hand in glove together for about 10, well, since 2012. When we signed our contract, it was 2020.

But I'd started reporting on the Oakland Police Department in 2008 when I moved to the Bay Area for graduate school at Cal, Go Bears. for graduate school at Cal, Go Bears. And I kind of dove right into the topic of police and police conduct in Oakland because I'd wanted to, I'd been messing around with criminal justice reporting when I was back East in New York and North of New Jersey where I was working. And there really was, there were some really egregious shootings at that point in time in the early two thousands, mid two thousands, late two thousands, um, OPD about average, I think eight to 14 officer involved shootings, police shootings a year. Um, invariably there would be one or two or three or four, depending on the years, maybe more that involves someone who was unarmed fleeing bats. It was an awful, but lawful shoot, maybe more, that involved someone who was unarmed, fleeing,

it was an awful but lawful shoot, or maybe just an awful shoot that the DA didn't charge or didn't properly investigate. And at that time, it was really tough to get information about police shootings in California because of a combination of laws and Supreme Court, California Supreme Court decisions that intersected and kind of shut the door on any sort of record you could get about police disciplinary action or their past histories. So you kind of had to mine the civil courts and look for back doors in through the DA's offices and just kind of source up really well to try and report out these incidents. And Darwin and I met about around 2012. We started interrogating questions about power and the political economy of law enforcement. We started to raise questions about the percentage of budgetary allocation that OPD receives. It's

about 40% of the city's billion dollar budget, give or take. So we're talking 350, 400 billion dollars every year. The result, the net result for public safety is questionable. At best, it doesn't really tie into increase in police funding, increase in manpower, decrease in crime. Oakland is a very violent city, often ranks in the top 10 or top five nationally in per capita crime per 100,000 residents. And, you know, it's also been under this reform program forever. And we, this is the backdrop to all our reporting. There was always this backdrop of court ordered reforms. There's external oversight. The external oversight is oftentimes how the public and the press became aware of some very deep-seated issues in the

department and how they would get addressed because the politicians here are feckless or inexperienced or complicit or all the above. So we, over the course of our reporting together, kind of yoked together around a decade, eight years or so, we kind of realized, okay, we have a paragraph in each one of our stories that explains the backdrop, or maybe a little bit more depending on how legalistic a piece it was. We need to peel all this back. We need to explain to people, because this is the longest running oversight regime in the country, right? Two decades now, over two decades since the consent decree, the negotiated settlement agreement was signed.

And we just needed to explain to people why this city had gone so far, why it was an edge case, why it was an outlier. And in order to do that, we couldn't use 5,000 words. We needed 120,000, 160,000. Yeah, this is a dense book in a way that's still intensely readable. And I think part of what makes it readable is it goes to a tremendous amount of effort laying out things that people kind of know

in broad. And a good example of this would be people talk a lot about the kind of concept of the bad apples. There's both on the side of people defending police departments that it's a few bad apples and then kind of, and you find this more on sort of people on the left criticizing police as an institution, the idea that like, well, the fact that those bad apples are supported and defended by the rest of the department kind of

means that they're all bad. You get this, these kind of like broad discussions about that phenomenon. What you do in this book is kind of get very granular with the way in which that actually functions on the ground. I'm thinking about a specific point where you've got one of the characters, one of the people that is a major source kind of for this book and a major source for this scandal was a police officer who effectively turned on his fellow officers and reported all of this illegal violence being done by this gang. And there's a point where this guy, after he's kind of become thoroughly horrified and disillusioned by what the guys that he's writing with are doing, goes to other people in the department who are like, yeah, those guys are like messed up and it's bad and you just kind of have to, you should just department who are like, yeah, those guys are like messed up and it's bad and you just kind of have to, you should just kind of like, you know, try to move on, but don't make waves about it, right? And it's this, the kind of the fact, the degree to which other people can not just know in the department what's happening, but be disgusted by it and still

when I'm kind of the shit hits the fan, fundamentally defend the officers doing it, right? The fact that they're able to warn other officers away from being around those guys doesn't mean that they won't absolutely throw down to defend them, which is something I think people are broadly aware of, but the going into the actual personal dynamics is, you know, something I think people are kind of broadly aware of, but the kind of going into the actual personal dynamics is, I think, really valuable. And you do a very good job of capturing that at the ground level. Well, what we wanted to do is explain how, so it's not bad. Apple theory, I think, is, honestly, it's a distraction. And frankly, it's an excuse.

What you're dealing with is culture. Right. And culture eats politics and policy for lunch, breakfast, lunch, dinner, and all the meals in between every single time. You can't change culture unless you understand it. So what we wanted to do, and we were able to do this because we had very good sourcing, not only inside and around the department, current former officers, we had reams of records. I mean, we sued for, I want to say hundreds of thousands of record pages of records, videos,

audio files, um, got old court transcripts, cassette tapes of old internal affairs interviews, backstop those by talking to the people there and involved. And we were really able to, we were able to kind of reconstruct not just the initial scandal of the riders of, which stemmed from this young officer, Keith Batt, who is from a city, from Sebastopol, which is a bit north of Oakland, very different place, rural, a bit crunchy, quite crunchy. Not nearly the like real rough and tumble grit of Oakland around the turn of the millennium. And Keith comes in, he's a criminal justice major in college, really idealistic, wanted to join an active police department, applied to dozens of departments, to several departments around the area. Um, and the first one that took him was

Oakland and Oakland had a good reputation among police culture. It was an active department. The cops worked hard. They were well-trained. They were decently paid. Um, and it wasn't a, uh, you know, in the Bay area, like the two departments that people look to are like, are the Oakland police department and SFPD and SFPD is a closed shop. It is a legacy department. It is run by an intense old boy network of Italian and Irish folks, some Chinese, some Asian immigrants that are kind of led into that now. But it is just, it's such an insular place. OPD is actually typically more welcoming of recruits from outside. And they really like people who are hard chargers, active, willing to learn. And Keith finished near the top of his academy. Excellent shot, really sharp on the uptake.

His instructors liked him. And right when he was about to go on the street, one of his instructors pulled him aside and said, hey, I hear you got a side to Chuck, to Clarence Mabedang, one of his instructors pulled him aside and said, Hey, I hear you got aside to, uh, to Chuck, to Clarence Mabinang, who was his field training officer. And he says, okay, listen, um, you need to keep your mouth shut and you need to keep your eyes open. You're going to see some crazy shit, but just go along to get along, you know, just keep your head down. Yeah. Keith was like, wait, what, what are you talking about? Like, that's, that's some wild, just keep your head down. Yeah. Keith was like, wait, what, what are you talking about? Like, that's, that's some wild, that's some wild shit. Like, that's not what I'm expecting. It's a little bit odd. And these are older officers who he respected. He goes out and gets in the car with Chuck and Chuck is this little, you know, very, um, very

intense buzz cut Filipino dude. And he's like, all right, I'm going to teach you. I'm going to take you out and toughen you up. Like, this is not the academy anymore. I'm going to teach you how to be in the streets. We're going to get in a fight tonight. This is Bat's first night on the job, first time stepping into a Crown Victoria patrol car with his FTO. And he's like, what?

And sure enough, Chuck gets in a confrontation that very night with someone drunk in front of his own house, just drunk in front of his own house, threatens to shoot the guy's dog, takes the guy in after beating him up. And Keith is like, wait, what? You shoot dogs? And yeah, they told him that, you know, every now and then they would encounter somebody with a dog and they would shoot the dog and then cut the leash in order to make it seem like the dog was going to attack them. And that was just his introduction to it. And over the two weeks that he worked with several officers on shift, there were three other officers who kind of made up this little clique of, um, uh, freewheeling cops that they call, that call themselves the riders. And it were, they were Jude Siapno, Frank Vasquez, and Matt Hornung.

And those three were kind of at the center of it. And they would, they were basically took it on themselves. They were not a task force. They were just patrol officers. They would kind of roam around West Oakland, going out and looking for people to arrest, just jumping out on random folks. They were not reactive. They were proactive. So they essentially ended up kidnapping people, planting drugs on them when they didn't find drugs,

beating the tar out of them, torturing them. Siapnoe's nickname was the foot doctor because he had a habit of taking his ass to a retractable baton and beating detainees on the soles of their feet till they couldn't walk. Yeah. Their bruises were so painful. For some reference, that was called bastinado by the Spanish Inquisition who loved to do the exact same thing. Yeah. No, it's really, it's grim.

It's really, really grim shit. So Keith sees all this stuff. It's just like two weeks of like training day, that film. It's two weeks of that. It's not just one week. And he's like, I can't do this. This can't be the way policing is. And he keeps going, you know, kind of casting around for help.

And the catch 22 that he's in is that anybody who he tells about this behavior is obligated by OPD's regulations to then report said misconduct. And if they don't, then they're guilty of failing to report misconduct. So he has to kind of hedge his words and talk around these issues. And his friends who work in OPD, who work in CHP, California Highway Patrol, he tells about this stuff in this roundabout way are all giving him the same advice. You know, I don't know. Like, do you want to write out your career? Like, can you do this? Is there a way you can switch out? Is there a way that you can thread the needle? And it gets to be too much. And so one day after two weeks, he decides, I can't do this anymore. I can't put more. I can't put innocent people in jail. I can't forge paperwork for my my supervisors. I can't forge their overtime. You know, I can't help them steal money from the taxpayers like this.

confronts them in a parking garage in front of a church in right north of downtown Oakland. These guys called the light cave they would hang out at. And he's telling Chuck, listen, I can't do this. This isn't the right way. And Mavon asks, well, you know, you have a problem. No, no, I don't think you're really getting this. He's trying to like talk him past it. And then Keith keeps bringing up Frank Vasquez and Frank. He'd seen Frank choke people. He'd see Frank empty a can of pepper spray into somebody's mouth, put his fingers into their eyes like a bowling ball. He said, oh, if you have a problem with Frank, you can talk to him. Vasquez comes over, you know, drives over there that have a conversation about that.

And Keith at this point is so wired up and so terrified. He's looking at Mabinag and looking at Vasquez and thinking to himself, okay, can I get to my pistol before they get to theirs if they want to hurt me? And if we have a shootout, how's it going to look if three Oakland cops are bucking lead at each other in uniform on shift, right? He's running this calculus in his head. Doesn't come to that. In the end, Mabinag convinces him to go in and sign a resignation letter. And when he does that at OPD headquarters, one of his supervisors from the academy gets a hold of him and says, no, no, no, this is not you. What is going on? And they convince him to go upstairs and talk to internal affairs. And then he spills the beans on what he's seen the past two weeks,

and that blows the lid off this scandal. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me as the fire and dare enter... Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows. Presented by I Heart and Sonorum. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures.

I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season

digging into how Tex Elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every week to understand

what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez,

will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzales wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well.

Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There had been a number of people who had like attempted to kind of like victims of this particular gang of guys who had like attempted to complain, attempted to come forward. But yeah, it's not really until this officer on the inside with a very good record is willing to say something that anything starts to happen.

So you have to remember the context here. I'm sorry for cutting in, but I was remiss on this. So the context of Oakland in late 1990s, early 2000s, is that it's in the middle of New York style urban renewal. Jerry Brown, who later became governor of California, was kind of on his way back up the political rung. And Oakland was his first stop. He was reelected mayor in 1998,

I believe on this kind of ecotopian platform where he, cause he was going to turn Oakland into this socialist, you know, environmental friendly metropolis, but he gets into office, he starts going to community meetings and he realizes public safety is the number one concern. So he becomes Rudy Giuliani West, as one of his former employees put it to us, pushes a massive building program in downtown Oakland for new residential market rate housing and enlists his police department to go on a clean up the streets spree by any means necessary. And he would go into the lineup and cheer them on, root them on,

say, listen, you know, I got your back. I'll back your play. You know, just take back those corners from these dealers. That's what those officers, that's what Mabinang, Hornog, Siapno, and Vasquez were responding to. They were responding to the instructions from their supervisors, from their chief, from their mayor that came down the command chain to clean up the streets and do this sort of stuff. And they were actually, you know, Mabinang and Vasquez in particular were very highly valued officers. They were proactive. They made their supervisors look good. It was this kind of one hand washes the other bit. Yeah. And I, I, one of the things that I found particularly kind of

impactful is the way in which you describe both the violence, the absolute horrifying cruelty of what these guys are getting up to, and how that intersects with Jerry Brown's political career, with the kind of promises he's making to clean up the city, and the kind of metrics that are established to provide basically evidence that this plan is succeeding. You know, it really like kind of gives on the ground context to what this kind of broken windows style policing, what it actually means in terms of a human cost, and it's devastating. And equally devastating is the lawsuit that kind of comes afterwards when this all gets exposed. One of the things that was most shocking to me, because I was only kind of broadly aware

of this case at all, is when these guys, the officers in this gang, go on trial or when that process starts, one of of them this guy vasquez like goes on the run steals an ar-15 from his department and fucking disappears and he's still in the wind no one's ever found this guy yeah he was most likely in mexico um he's from mexico he's born down there and has family around medida um the theory is that he and you know he was stopped by a cop that's when yeah they would they he people realized that he had been that he'd stolen a gun from the department but he kind of badges way out of this encounter with a cop in solution city which is a delta town near where he lived and or near his. And that was the last anybody had seen of him, has seen of

him. The theory, the theory that's rattled around quite often, and there's more often than there's probably some heft to it, is that somebody from the either the department or the police union helped him down to the border in Chula Chula Vista. And he walked across. So the odds are that he's in Mexico. Ostensibly the FBI are still looking for him. He's a fugitive, but he's never, never been found. No.

And he, when this happens, cause his, his buddies and the writers are all go, all do in fact, go on trial. And, you know,

you might think the fact that, that one of them like bounced and fled the country after stealing a gun would have an impact on things but no no in court they're not you know the the prosecutors aren't allowed to tell the jury what happened with vasquez because they're it's worried that it might prejudice them which is wild to me well in the first trial so there were two trials sorry a little bit all three cops in the first trial there's hung juries in them i think there were one or two holdouts maybe and from the reporting that we did the interview that we did with the ada on the case dave hollister

it seemed that these were people who were convinced that these were good cops and the ends justified the means or therefore you know know, this kind of noble cause corruption actually has an audience among some segments of the population around here. I mean, I'm sure you see this across the bay now in San Francisco. There's all these people who are, you know, kind of advocating this sort of vigilante violence that that former fire commissioner was committed against homeless folks, unhoused folks. For folks who aren't aware, the fire commissioner of San Francisco, this was a couple of months ago, right around the time that there was a big wave of San Francisco's

collapsed into anarchy sort of stories. Which happened every 10 years. Which, yeah, yeah. And, and have been, you know, it happened at the same time that, that tech CEO, uh, was stabbed to death, uh, turns out by another tech founder. What did he do? But yeah, this story that the fire commissioner had been attacked and there's this video of him getting brutally beaten by a homeless man it turns out he had been going around at night and macing homeless people at random and one of the hairspray yeah hairspray hairspray hairspray it was crazy it was awful shit yeah and then someone attacked him with the homeless with a uh with a crowbar but all that those facts were omitted anyway so the bottom line is with the um

with horning of hornung vasquez and siapno they're they're hung on the first trial and then the second trial they're acquitted uh they're hornung is acquitted of some charges and there's hung juries in the rest of his charges and those for siapno and mabinang but in the second trial first trial the defense was well they didn't do what keith did keith's bad is lying the second trial was well the defense turned to a strategy of well actually frank if asquez was the leader so it's all frank's fault yeah it's easy to throw that guy under the bus because he's gone. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And to say he was a ringleader is absurd because everyone knew in OPD and outside OPD that Mavadang was the shot caller in that little gang. What's interesting is the lawsuit. So there's a little vagary here about the criminal investigation

into the Riders. The police department and the police department's internal affairs investigators and the police chief made a decision from day one, from on high, that the investigation would only be limited to what Keith Batt saw, that it would not expand out beyond his two weeks on the job and the incidents that he witnessed personally, and that they were able to corroborate with other people. And there was another cop, Scott Hewison, who did corroborate some of this stuff. Once it came out that he'd falsified some reports, he decided to save his own skin. So he also caught some of the flack that Bat did, but not nearly the same sort of death threat type shit that Keith caught. So with regard to the broader lay of the land, the criminal, the investigation didn't go into a broader pattern of what else was happening on these shifts.

What other cops were involved? Because the riders, you know, there's a ball that they actually signed for each other. And there's several names on that ball. It's not just those four cops. It's not just those four cops. So the civil suit, there was a civil suit brought by two civil rights, two attorneys in the area, John Burris and Jim Channon, who had been suing the department for years. They'd actually received walk-ins, the victims that you'd mentioned earlier, over the years alleging that they'd been arrested, beaten up, framed up, tortured by these cops in West Oakland. And when the news of Keith Batt, um, blowing the whistle on the writers hit the newspapers, it clicked for them and they realized they'd been seeing this pattern. So they opened up their own pattern and practice

investigation and did their own investigation of complaints and canvassed neighborhoods and got names from people who had filed complaints and alleged similar patterns of misconduct and came up with 119 plaintiffs who laid out a pattern of abuses that spanned much more of the city, the downtown area, other parts of West Oakland, even as far as East Oakland, in a much broader time frame, stretching back almost basically to 1995, five years prior. So the reality of OPD's abuses and their kind of deep corruption in that period of time was far larger than the criminal case against those four riders would have it. And I should say that these civil attorneys took up the challenge where both the state attorney general and the federal authorities, both the local United States

attorney and civil rights in Maine Justice dropped the ball. They did not open pattern and practice investigations into OPD. And we have it from the ADA himself, who was in the room when he presented their case because they were cross-designated as U.S. attorneys during their whole investigation and vice versa. He presented the case to the sitting United States attorney at the time, one Robert Mueller, who should be familiar to your listeners as the former head of the FBI twice over. Swinging Bob Miller. That's right.

And, you know, Mueller flipped through the pages and was looking, you know, trying to see if any connections to Russia and Alpha Bank and so on. But no, actually, I mean, he's flipping through and he pulls out these files and he looks at the long rap sheet of some of these witnesses. And these were people in the street. These were people who had been arrested before, had been involved in narcotics sales, petty assaults, robberies, burglaries, what have you. Like they were people who were not, they, they were not kids. They were not clean sheets. And he handed the file back to Hollister, to the ADA and said, I wish you the best of luck. It's important to note that this was a different era. A cop's word was very, very, very hard to impeach on the stand. There was no body camera video. There were no cell phone videos at the

time. You would maybe have a rough camcorder every now and then if somebody's shooting like a little video on the street, kind of grainy digital cameras and the sound wasn't great, but there wasn't much beyond eyewitness testimony. And that's why Keith's words were so important, why his testimony was so critical, is that you had a cop coming out and blowing the whistle on his department and saying, no, this is not right. This is what they're doing. They should be punished for it. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me as the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonorum.

An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters... to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows

as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex Elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google Search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech

from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people.

I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh.

And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with.

His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network,

available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You know, I can't help but thinking about the story that's kind of blown up right now about there's a man on the subway recently in New York City who was, you know, acting kind of erratically I'm seeing from guys like Matt Walsh, the Daily Wire crew, you know, particularly in right-wing media is, well, this guy had been arrested, you know, 40 times or whatever. And it's like, well, that's not germane

to anything that's happened. It doesn't give you the right to lynch someone. Yeah, exactly. Like the penalty for having been arrested in the past is not getting strangled to death. That's not the way the system is. That's not the way any of this is supposed to work. And it's,

it's, it's interesting. There's a degree to which, um, I guess it hasn't changed. And there's a degree to which I'm kind of worried that, uh, the,

the sort of nature of social media means that we're a lot more open about the kind of violence we're willing to accept for. I agree. Yeah, I agree with that entirely. I mean, that's unfortunately the backlash to a lot of, to both Black Lives Matter cycles in 2014, 15 and the current cycle is a lot more virulent than,

than you'd have it if you just watched kind of the soft focus PBS frontline documentary versions of it, there's a lot of really naked justification and support for extra legal violence. And that is part of the issue with law enforcement and holding them accountable. There is always going to be a segment, small, sometimes vocal, sometimes not, of the society that supports violence beyond the extent of the law, beyond the constraints of our system. And that's why oversight, why running the rule over law enforcement and making sure that they behave according to the laws and that they are operating within the bounds of their limits insofar as we have set them out for them and insofar as like it look this book is not a book questioning whether or not police should exist

it's a history they do exist they have existed this is what it has looked like to date right if people other people want to make those cases and look at hypotheticals or envision a different future, that's totally fine. What we're trying to do is lay out the ways in which people have pushed back on one of the most egregious departments in the country consistently for over a century and actually had some sort of lasting impact on it. And there have been some impacts that have really changed because of, look, there's no more public strip searching of people in the streets.

That happened in Oakland on the regular every day as late as 2009 and 10. It was common that the cops would say, look, I'm going in your ass for rocks. You better not have anything there, right? In the middle of the morning on a crowded street in front of people driving by on the way to work. That sort of civil rights violation would happen all the time. The department no longer shoots, shoots maybe about three or four people a year. That's way down from 14 to 15 a year, a decade, 12 years ago. That's because they've changed their chase policy, their pursuit policy. They used to pursue

people with an intent to catch them at all costs. That ended up resulting in cops chasing people down blind alleys or ending up way too close to a suspect and pulling out their weapon and opening up fire, regardless of whether or not they actually had the suspect had a firearm or another weapon or whether the cops were under threat. The change in the pursuit policy has led to more of a there. The instruction now is to contain, don't pursue close, call for backup, set a perimeter, preserve life. That's not been that change was not something the department submitted to voluntarily. They are brought there kicking and screaming. But because there has been this outside imposition of court oversight for so long, and because it hasn't gone away, because it's not overseen by the Justice Department or the State Attorney General. You know, some of the political figure can't like they can't there can't be a deal cut in the back room between a senator, staffer and the Federal Department of Justice or the mayor and the state attorney general and their wife or whatever.

Like that sort of thing doesn't really happen when the plaintiff's attorneys aren of lets the situation play out as it will, and both judges on this case have actually been very by the book and very stringent on how the oversight has gone. So that's why it's gone on for 20 years, and it actually has resulted in good changes. There are a lot of people who bitch about it, who cry that, oh, well, we need to be out from this oversight. It's hampering the police. They can't do their job as they will. Well, do you want to go back to 20 years ago? Do you really want that? Do you want that sort of abuse?

No. And that's why there is a constituency in Oakland that did manage to change a lot of things around. There's a police commission here that now oversees the department. It's not perfect. now oversees the department. It's not perfect. It's very much in the infancy, but that's a body that existed to take control away from the mayor and move it more towards civilian control of a police department. And this is, yeah, it's a long arc. But the bottom line is that it's not about a one or a zero. There's no linear progress here. It's kind of goes in waves, but there has been progress, which is a crazy thing to say when you look at the shit that's in the book.

Yeah. Yeah. But it is like, it's important both, you know, I think our, our, our audience is definitely much more of, of our audiences in the constituency of, you know, get rid of the police entirely. Um, even if you're coming at it from that, I mean, especially if you're coming at it from that standpoint, actually, I think kind of one of the mistakes that a lot of people who are on that side of things, which is generally where I find myself, is using that as an excuse to not actually understand how the police function, using their sort of distaste for the institution as an excuse to not understand how the institution works, why it's resilient, and the ways in which both harms can, to an extent, be mitigated, but also just on a strategic level, how it functions to defend

itself. I think that this book does an exceptional job of going through that in a way that's nuanced and detailed, but also compelling and readable. Like you're not going to have to, I do really recommend your book. People are not going to have like trouble getting into it. Like I was drawn in from the first page. So I really do think this is something folks should look into no matter where you live in the United States, even if you've never been to Oakland, you will get a lot out of this. I would say that we did make an explicit attempt to make the city the main character. So to draw people into Oakland and kind of cast it in the same way that Mike Davis cast Los Angeles and City of Courts. May he rest in peace. He was a great inspiration for us. But more than anything

else, there are tons of parallels in Oakland to other places. It's not a unique place. I mean, it is a unique place, but it's also very typical for an American city like Los Angeles and New York and Chicago are completely atypical. They're huge. They don't, most American cities are like 400 to 600,000 people large. Oakland's racial balance is almost 30-30-30, white, Latino, black, 10% Asian, roughly 8-10% Asian than everyone else thrown in there. It's really balanced out, and in some ways it's very representative.

And it's also Rust Belt City in certain respects, although that's changed a lot with the tech boom. We could be going back the other way. Yeah. But it really, there are echoes in stuff that's happened in New York and Los Angeles, in Cleveland, in New Orleans, in Portland, in Seattle. It's the experience that we've had here, particularly with police oversight and reform, I mean, Portland and Seattle are two other cities that have actually undergone very similar programs with departments that are more alike to OPD than not. Yeah. Well, Ali, is there anything else you wanted to make sure to get into in this conversation?

Well, I think your point about, I just wanted to touch on your point about where people come out for the institution. I think it's really important, regardless of what you believe about where we should and shouldn't be with law enforcement, you got to understand it. Yeah, absolutely. most people have with the state now in many American cities because we've stripped down so many other aspects of our societies. Our mental hospitals are gone. Our schools are failing. Public housing barely exists. Our healthcare system is decimated. And cops essentially catch a lot of the end product of those problems. It's one of the reasons why I started reporting on criminal justice because you can look at so many other issues of American society through that system. And also you can see ways in which like political agendas, the way that police departments lobby and the messaging that they push out, they don't do it in an isolated fashion. It's coordinated.

Like there are these big swings that happen on the national political stage, if you will. We were at one moment with police reform and abolishing the police, defunding them with Black Lives Matter. The immediate pushback within six months was there's a crime wave. There's a crime wave. There's a crime wave. We need to support our cops. And now we're at the point where people are taking acts or basically committing acts of vigilante violence because they have it in their head that things are so out of control in New York. Homeless man is choked to death because he's having an episode on the train. San Francisco, this fire commissioner is going around bear spraying people who are camping out on the streets.

this is the sort of like back and forth swing that oftentimes starts with people who are trying to protect their budget line, who are trying to protect their political power. And it ends up with consequences like that, where people take it to that level. And I think that looking at law enforcement as a political actor is really important for understanding how we are, where we are in this society, and also understanding the ways in which you can try and rein them back in and keep your boot on their neck. Because realistically, if there's no oversight, if oversight is pulled back, there's a reactionary core at the heart of American law enforcement. It's always been there. We document it back basically to the turn of the century in Oakland, in just this one city, which is a newer city in the States.

And if you don't, if you let that go, that core will rise up and basically take over the department. That's what happened with the riders. That's what they were. They were a representation of a hardcore that had existed in Oakland for decades. And I think that that's really a really, I think that's a critical takeaway for readers from this book. Yeah, I would, I would absolutely agree. Well, folks, the book is called The Writers Come Out at Night, Brutality, Corruption,

and Cover-Up in Oakland. It's by Allie Winston, who you've just been listening to, and Darwin Bond Graham. I can't recommend it enough uh ali thank you so much for for being on the show thank you so much robert it could happen here is a production of cool zone media for more podcasts from cool zone media visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iheart radio app apple app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of fright.

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