The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Riders Come Out at Night: Brutality, Corruption, and Cover-up in Oakland by Ali Winston, Darwin BondGraham

Episode Date: January 16, 2023

The Riders Come Out at Night: Brutality, Corruption, and Cover-up in Oakland by Ali Winston, Darwin BondGraham NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE From the Polk Award–winning investigative duo comes a critical look at the systematic corruption and brutality within the Oakland Police Department, and the more than two-decades-long saga of attempted reforms and explosive scandals. No municipality has been under court oversight to reform its police department as long as the city of Oakland. It is, quite simply, the edge case in American law enforcement. The Riders Come Out at Night is the culmination of over twenty-one years of fearless reporting. Ali Winston and Darwin BondGraham shine a light on the jackbooted police culture, lack of political will, and misguided leadership that have conspired to stymie meaningful reform. The authors trace the history of Oakland since its inception through the lens of the city’s police department, through the Palmer Raids, McCarthyism, and the Civil Rights struggle, the Black Panthers and crack eras, to Oakland’s present-day revival. Readers will be introduced to a group of sadistic cops known as “The Riders,” whose disregard for the oath they took to protect and serve is on full, tragic, infuriating display. They will also meet Keith Batt, a wide-eyed rookie cop turned whistleblower, who was unwittingly partnered with the leader of the Riders. Other compelling characters include Jim Chanin and John Burris, two civil rights attorneys determined to see reform through, in spite of all obstacles. And Oakland’s deep history of law enforcement corruption, reactionary politics, and social movement organizing is retold through historical figures like Black Panther Huey Newton, drug kingpin Felix Mitchell, district attorney and future Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren, and Mayor Jerry Brown. The Riders Come Out at Night is the story of one city and its police department, but it’s also the story of American policing—and where it’s headed.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education rollercoaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, The Chris Voss Show. Welcome to the big show, my friends. We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. As always, refer the show to your family, friends, or relatives.

You know, reach out to them. Say, have you subscribed to the Chris Voss Show? Have you found our Lord and Savior podcast? It's not a Lord and Savior. It's not a cult. Don't do that. Anyway, guys, be sure to refer the show to your family, friends, or relatives. Goodreads.com, Fortress, Chris Voss.

Follow us over there. YouTube.com, Fortress, Chris Voss..com Fortress, Chris Voss. Follow us over there. YouTube.com Fortress, Chris Voss. LinkedIn, Fortress, Chris Voss. All the LinkedIn properties, LinkedIn newsletter, all the crazy stuff we have going on over there as well. And possibly TikTok. See what we're doing over there. Trying to do over there. We're trying to get the format right. So anyway, guys, we have

an amazing author on the show. And as you know, we only have amazing authors on the show. It's kind of the rule of the Chris Voss show. If you're unamazing, you're not on the show. I'm the only one who's the unamazing authors on the show. It's kind of the rule of the Chris Voss Show. If you're unamazing, you're not on the show. I'm the only one who's the unamazing author on the show. But we have the most amazing authors on the show. And we have the hottest new book that just came out, January 10, 2023. The Writers Come Out at Night, Brutality, Corruption, and Cover-Up in Oakland.

We have one of the authors with us. Allie Winston is on the show. His co-author couldn't be with us, Darwin Bond Graham. I guess he's traveling right now, so we missed him having him on the show. But we're excited to have Mr. Graham, or I'm sorry, we've got the pop-up here blocking me. We're excited to have Allie Winston on the show, his co-author. Allie is an independent reporter covering criminal justice, privacy, and surveillance.

His work has been rewarded with several awards, including the George Polk Award for Local Reporting 2017. Allie is a graduate of the University of Chicago and University of California, Berkeley. He lives in New York. You can follow him at Twitter, at A. Winston. Welcome to the show, Ali. How are you? I'm wonderful. Thanks for having me. Thanks for coming. We certainly appreciate it. We spent a week at CES,

and evidently that got us off our game on the show. So we're trying to find which way is up at this point. I'm still just like, what are we doing again on the show? How does this work? Congratulations on the new book. Give us a.com or wherever other places you want people to find you on the interwebs.

Yeah, I mean, this is, you can find the writers come out at night at Simon & Schuster's website. That's our publisher. Atria Books is the imprint. You can shop for it at IndieBound or bookshop.org. If you have to, you can use Bezos

Corp. I don't like them, but local bookstore is a great place for it. But there's also an audiobook version of it as well. It sounds fantastic. There's an ebook for the people who like to read PDFs online or on Kindle. This is the compendium of basically more than a decade, more than basically 25 years of combined reporting for Darwin and myself in Oakland. And we tried to really write not just a history of policing in Oakland, but also a little bit of urban history and answer some broader questions or address broader questions about law enforcement and whether or not the current system we have works. Yeah, this is really an interesting read it's almost like a version of training day and uh it's the movie training day uh now you guys had both won polk awards so you got together

to write this book i see three awards behind you do you want to reference what those are no these are people these are emmys other people have won um no we actually started writing together in 2012 way back in the mists of time and the polk that we that was awarded to us very generously was for a sexual sex trafficking scandal in 2016 that involved dozens of law enforcement officers from oakland and other agencies around the bay Area exploiting a young woman. And then in Oakland, like the police department there covered it up and ended up, and then the coverup didn't work, emerged and kind of put their reform effort back several years. But you know, the hardware isn't important. Don't worry about all that stuff.

There you go. So you, what caused you guys to get together and write this book? What was the, what was the thing that brought you guys together for it? Well, the thing that brought us together years ago, and I'm sorry, Darwin, my better half isn't here to tell this part of the story. But I was a reporter for a public radio station in San Francisco. And I would shoot my own photographs and write reports. My editor would help me put it up there. And we were all just running around like a chicken with my head cut off kid in my mid-20s and um i took you know there was one photograph i took while i was on a ride along um in west oakland and there

was a you know call for somebody who's having a mental health emergency and the cops are standing around talking to him and social workers were there they were trying to communicate with him and make sure the situation didn't escalate big, early dude. And one of these cops, um, had a, pulled his taser and was holding it low behind him in a ready position,

but like behind his back and kind of stepped off to the side. And, I put, drop my camera down to my hip, to my thigh and took a shot of it upwards. It was a nice shot. Um, but I'll say so myself,

but I read, I was reading Darwin's blog at that time. He'd moved up to the bay from Santa Barbara where he just finished a doctorate and was doing some reporting. And I followed his work. He was a really good writer, a really fantastic researcher. I saw the photograph on there without credit. And I emailed him and said, listen, man, I love your blog. Just put my name on that thing.

I don't need any money. And then we started talking. We figured out we had common interests we started writing articles together about um just covering broader issues of power and policing and then we started they we did some bigger picture things first like where the cops live where money was going in terms of like how much money from the city of oakland migrates out when you employ a police force that's 90% commuters. Wow.

And then, you know, pensions and all that stuff, because it's a big part of any city's budget line. And then over the years, we just started, we kind of learned that we were a pretty good team and did a lot of reporting on the situation in Oakland and a bunch of other places around the country. So, yeah. There you go.

It's fun. You come together. I mean, sometimes when you use other people's pictures, you get hate mail, especially if it's, who's the big agency that buys, like, everything? Getty. Getty. Man, you use one of their pictures?

Woo! Yeah, you get a letter. No, I mean, it was, and then while we were doing these reports, we were putting together, we were writing mostly for an alt weekly, the East Bay Express, which has since fallen on harder times, as the entire sector of the media has. And the nice thing about those weeklies was that they were a little bit offbeat and they gave you a little bit more time and circumspection of the editing

to be critical and analytical and think about issues in a way that didn't keep you on too tight a deadline so you could have some space to write. And even though we'd get, you know, for our features, we'd get 3,000, 5,000, 8,000 words, we kept on saying there are all these things that are on the floor, you know, we're dressed in the cutting room, you know, we're looking at all these, like, symptoms, these scandals and one-off things

we have in the structure of the article. And this is, you know, it's not to say it's a bad thing, but the way that magazine and long-form articles go, you kind of reference the deeper history and the context of like, okay, here are the underpinning problems here. And in Oakland, there's been this 20-year effort, 20 years this month, to try and reform the police department through a consent decree, a legal mechanism that's supposed to address deep constitutional flaws in policing or another institution like prisons, mental institutions,

school districts. They're all, when there's issues, they're sued and under a pattern and practice case, and then a consent decree is implemented to try and set out a reform program to right the wrong. It's the mechanism, flawed, flawed certainly but it's the mechanism that american society uses to try and address these issues when they reach a critical point and oakland had been under the consent decree when i first got there in 2008 for five years then 10 years then 15 years and you know we said at some point you know we do have to write the deeper history of this place we do have to try and address like okay why has this gone on so much so long

what's the problem here is it just the city of oakland no because it's a very interesting place very remarkable place in its own regard um it's further left than most of the country is i think in terms of local politics um but in some ways, it's not that different, right? It's not New York or Los Angeles or Chicago or Houston. It's about 420,000 to 450,000 people. Pretty mixed up racially. Job mix as well. White collar, blue collar. Just not the sort of place that, you know, a lot of other cities around the country are very similar to it and have similar problems. So we thought it'd be a good way to get at the sort of place that, you know, a lot of other cities around the country are very similar to it and have similar problems. So we thought it'd be a good way to get the problem of police reform and also like write a history of a really important place that we feel has been a little bit overlooked.

Like San Francisco, in the Bay Area, San Francisco, which is just across the bridge, has far worse weather. You know, the local politics are just um and you know oakland has its own problems too but san francisco is just a very gets a lot of the it sucks up a lot of the oxygen and oakland doesn't really get the shine that it deserves definitely so in a way we tried to write a book that's the history of a place using the law enforcement as the central institution of the state because it's what most people come into contact with when they come in contact with city government. They don't think of the state as like the garbage man or the postman that comes around and drops off their mail.

And one of our models was a book by a dearly departed sociologist named Mike Davis. It's about Los Angeles. He wrote it right before the riots in the rebellion in 1992. And it really is a staggering piece of urban history. And that was kind of our model. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here with a little station break. Hope you're enjoying the show so far. We'll resume here in a second. I'd like to invite you to come to my coaching, speaking, and training courses website. You can also see our new podcast over there at chrisvossleadershipinstitute.com.

Over there, you can find all the different stuff that we do for speaking engagements if you'd like to hire me, training courses that we offer, and coaching for leadership, management, entrepreneurism, podcasting, corporate stuff. With over 35 years of experience in business and running companies as a CEO, I think I can offer a wonderful breadth of information and knowledge to you

or anyone that you want to invite me to for your company. Thanks for tuning in. We certainly appreciate you listening to the show. And be sure to check out chrisfossleadershipinstitute.com. Now back to the show, and be sure to check out chrisfossleadershipinstitute.com. Now back to the show. Wow. And I guess Oakland's been the longest city under this court oversight than any other law enforcement body in the nation.

Yes, and that's by a little bit of an accident of history, and it's also really fortuitous. So consent decrees, when it comes to law enforcement, since Congress passed a bill in the mid-1990s under the Clinton presidency, allowing for the Federal Department of Justice to bring pattern and practice lawsuits against police departments involved in really egregious abuses. Law was passed after Rodney King and LAPD was considered, okay, well, this is a department

that has deeply documented problems and flaws and states also passed similar laws, so which state's attorneys general could also bring similar suits. A number of police departments went under these consent decrees following their own respective scandals. We mentioned Training Day earlier. Training Day is based on, when was that? 2001, 2000? The Rampart.

Yeah, so that film, which is brilliant in its own right, is based on a, is deeply rooted in a scandal called the Rampart scandal involving LAPD officers who framed up people, beat them, stole narcotics, sold it back to the streets, really gross stuff. And it was an entire division at the time that was involved in that conduct. That suit was brought by the Federal Department of Justice. They also pursued cases against police in Washington, D.C. Metro, Pittsburgh,

Pennsylvania. Since then, they've done cases against Chicago PD, Seattle, New Orleans, the list goes on. In Oakland, that didn't happen because the Riders scandal broke in a scandal that the book is named after involving four officers who were charged. There were others involved in the conduct, but four officers were accused by a young rookie who they were ostensibly training, and in reality trying to basically introduce and induct into their ways of completely unconstitutional policing, framing people up with fake narcotics that they didn't have on them,

beating them, kidnapping some of them, you know, emptying cans of pepper spray into their mouth, drop, you know, busting one guy's eyeball up with his, with an elbow drop so bad that his cornea almost burst. These officers, their scan, their, when their information came to light, when this whistle, this rookie blew the whistle on them, which later led to two criminal trials, they were acquitted, hung juries, a little bit of noble cause corruption and people thinking that the ends justified the means, but we can get to that. Instead, the Federal Department of Justice backed away from taking that case because it was the end of Clinton's term. W was about to come in to his first term and the Clinton people didn't want to take on the extra work.

And unfortunately, um, some of your listeners may think this is a, you know, politicized comment, but it's just evidence, uh, shows to be true during Republican administrations.

Little to nothing gets done by the federal government on police reform. Yeah. And now we have two terms of W and one term of Donald J. Trump to show the way in which the DOJ civil rights division, whichim chanin and john burris who had been receiving reports of the basically the people who are the victims of the riders had been coming to them for months beforehand saying i got worked over i got worked over you know these guys planted drugs on me i'm in jail and i don't deserve to be you know i didn't have anything on me they flaked me and um these attorneys once keith batts allegations the young rookies allegations became public realized my god this is what we had been hearing about so they conducted their

own investigation went back and pulled together accounts from 119 victims of the riders and filed a civil suit and that civil suit in order to resolve it and not you know break the bank which the city of oakland was looking at at the time and it's not you know it's not a wealthy place it's not like los angeles or new york they can't absorb the just enormous payouts that those cities make every year for police misconduct um they said okay well we'll enter into a reform agreement overseen by a federal judge and we'll agree to this reform program and we'll try and clean our police department up.

And this is really, you know, we want to be better. But the fact that the riders weren't convicted of their criminal offenses, which were charged by the local DA, not state DOJ, not federal DOJ for the sort of reason that basically we tell a story that Bob Mueller was a U.S. attorney in San Francisco at the time. And the DAs who investigated the riders' criminal conduct, because they didn't only commit administrative violations that got them fired, they committed crimes, alleged crimes. And the state DA and his inspector did their own investigation,

found a mountain of evidence to that, went into Bob Mueller's office, who later ran the FBI and was one of the special counsels who investigated Donald Trump, put the evidence across the table to him. He flipped through it, looked through the papers, looked through the rap sheets of the people who were going to be alleged witnesses, many of whom had been involved in street narcotics to varying degrees, but nothing like we weren't. We're not talking any Nino Browns or Felix Felix Mitchells here pushes the folder back across the desk to the ADA. David Hollister and says, I wish you the best of luck. So they pass.

They completely pass on their responsibility to hold these cops accountable because, you know, how are you going to weigh the word in thinking of the prosecutor? I'm weighing the word of people on the street versus decorated police officers. Yeah. Yeah. Let's talk about that, what you mentioned earlier that leads into this. You know, the fact that it's really hard to convict a police officer in this thing because, you know, they're basically, you know, they're deemed as the ends justify the means. Let's talk about what that comment means that you mentioned earlier

and how hard it is to get these convictions on officers and how much they know that they can get off. I mean, that's kind of the power behind it. I remember the shocked look on the face of the officer who killed George Floyd. He never thought he was going to get convicted. He thought he would get off too. Well, there's a few things that come about to that. First off, it's worth keeping in mind that for many of the people who ended up suing the police department,

the people who were the victims of the riders, they'd actually had their day in court on their initial criminal case with an ADA charging out the case and a judge hearing their challenges and hearing issues with the, you know, may have the defense attorney may have presented issues with the cop or may have seen issue, seen evidence prior that the police officer's word may not have been, you know,

viable. And then they pass on it. They pass on their responsibility to the breaks and say, Hey, hold on a minute. There have been issues in the past. Let's explore this a little bit more. And,

you know, they would cut plea deals. These officers were allowed to stay on the street. Um, and in the sense that, you know, when these officers were actually brought back to, brought up for trial, you know, you have to keep in mind that the jury pool doesn't just pull from Oakland. It pulls from all across Alameda County.

Defense attorneys will challenge to try and get juries that don't have African-American residents of Oakland on them. That's one thing that they really pushed for in this case to make sure that they would pull into more suburban jury pool. And then even in Oakland, there's a divide between the hills and the flatlands. And the hills are where wealthier residents live. And they also experience their share of crime. But it tends to be property crime and break-ins and car theft rather than gun violence and homicide. And it's not to say that their concerns aren't invalid but in a certain sense there are there's in a city like oakland which does have a high crime rate and there's a lot of frustration with the persistence of this dynamic down the decades and that's the sad truth

it's not the only american city like that um there's a subset of the population that believe that police officers have too many restrictions placed on them to do what they need to do and they need to clean up the streets. And these officers, the riders actually, um, were part of a very hard charging culture under during the term of mayor Jerry Brown, before he kind of in between his stints as California governor. Um, this was during the beginning phase of his second political act. He ran for mayor in Oakland and I believe was elected in 96 or eight. And then after that,

after his terms in Oakland served as California attorney general, and then won election to the governor's office in the early 2010s. And while he ran for mayor, Brown had previously that cultivated this image as like as a uh kind of a progressive populist environmentalist he basically campaigned on a platform to make oakland into this sort of green utopia and by the time he got in office and started implementing his and you know there's certainly a very left-wing population open it's sure that's kind of place it's right next door to Berkeley for folks

of yours who may not be able to kind of situate the social milieu out there. And when he got in the office, I had people in city government. We had people in city government say to us, this guy came in and before we knew it, it was Rudy Giuliani West. And the cops

were doing zero tolerance policing. They were rousing homeless people from downtown, engaging in a very aggressive gentrification push. He would go to police lineups and urge the cops on, hey, hey, hey, clean up the streets, take these criminals off, da-da-da-da-da.

That was the underpinning atmosphere there. Brown never really... He didn't suffer any negative consequences from the rider scandal. He kept climbing the ladder all the way up to Sacramento in the end, again. Yeah. Well, I mean, you play the donor class,

and the donor class is the one that's getting pulled over for tags and, you know, minor offenses. I remember at one point Oakland had gotten in trouble. They were one of the first to really start using, they were scraping license plates with the new software system. Yep. Did you guys touch on that in the book? Is that relevant to the?

Yeah. So we, Oakland was one of these agencies that, you know, after nine 11, there was a pretty substantial build out of local law enforcement, some use of surveillance technology that had mostly been developed by the military and then implemented in time in domestic settings, network surveillance cameras, motion detection,

license plate readers, which can read your license plate and determine, you know, whether or not your, your tag is out. There's a warrant out on your tag or if you're, you have X number of traffic tickets and they need to put a boot on you. Oakland, you know they've really kind of started in places like new york after 9-11 and there was a tremendous influx of federal um grant money to building out that infrastructure um part of like hardening the homeland and the global war on terror the kind of flip side of it um which some of your younger listeners may not remember it's really a dark chapter in our history, and we're still dealing with the ramifications of it now.

But in Oakland, as of, I think, by 2009, they'd gotten some grant money to build out a security project for the Port of Oakland, which is massive. It's in West Oakland. It's the main port for the Bay Area. It's one of, I think it's the fifth largest in the country at this point, depending on the volume of traffic. But it does tremendous business. And it's really a vast facility. So the Port of Oakland, they got money to build out security cameras and build out a decent security system for a very large facility.

And in time, by 2013, somebody in the city government, a number of players in the city government had said, oh, we have all this grant money. We're going to build out a surveillance mechanism for the port. Hey, let's build a kind of centralized command post for the city and we can deal with it. We can use our license plate readers and cameras and gunshot detection audio to kind of look out for violent crime and maybe deal with some of the issues that we have with this because there's always this rationale you know surveillance is a business and it has very has no documented impact on violent crime and minimal documented impact on property crime there are decades of studies to that effect if listeners are interested they can get into that literature it's really not a scientific, it's not a debate

at this point. We see the things where the guys run into shops now and they just clean out a shop. There's plenty of video of all of it. There's videos of the guys breaking into windows in San Francisco of cars. It doesn't stop anybody. Nope. And it doesn't really help solve any of these cases either. So this was also, this is in 2013 and the city of, it was a couple of weeks,

maybe a month after the Everett Stone revelations came out and there was a lot of attention on mass surveillance in the country. So it kind of kicked off a uproar. It's also worth keeping in mind that it's in 2013, Oakland had been in the midst of, had basically seen very sustained protest movements for about four years at that point, starting with the murder of an unarmed young man, young black man, Oscar Grant, on New Year's Day 2009 by Bay Area Rapid Police Officer Johannes Meserly. They made a film about it called Fruitvale Station.

And, you know, Meser he was eventually convicted uh charged and convicted but they were you know very very very sustained and vigorous protests over that um then by for about two years then in 2011 the occupy movement in oakland really brought together kind of a mix of folks who are involved in the oscar gra movement, which also focused on broader issues of police brutality in Oakland and the Bay Area, and also a very strong student movement at the time that was protesting austerity measures by the state of California. And Occupy Oakland was part of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

It was one of the most militant camps, engaged in really intense clashes with the local authorities and was subjected to some really horrific repression. And there was a lot of surveillance, both from federal and state law enforcement, of both the Oscar Grant movement and the Occupy movement. And there had been reporting to that effect. I did a lot of it. Darwin did some of it. And, you know, we really really when that surveillance center got crafted

we started looking at it and popping news about it made a big deal and we paid attention to the rationale for it and in the test runs and the dry runs for the surveillance center you know it'd been up and running it wasn't hard to kind of fuse together um and it had the support of the city council which kind of blith really blithely you know signed off on it not knowing what the capabilities were and hearing oh well it's going to address violent crime well we trust law which kind of blith really blithely you know signed off on it not knowing what the capabilities were and hearing oh well it's going to address violent crime well we trust law enforcement to do that um and in the dry runs the police department had used it not for not to track down um violent suspects or people involved in shootings and high-speed chases and you know

grand theft auto of which there's plenty, you know. Take your pick on any given week. There's a couple different incidents that they could have used it for. Track people driving from one end of the city to the other across the freeways. You know, it could have been done. But, no, they used it to track protests and to keep tabs on demonstrations. So it's pretty clear from what they were doing or what their intents were down the road. You know, it's not, you know, we would just, we got tons of documents. clear from what they were going for, what their intents were down the road.

We got tons of documents. We got these emails back and forth and searched for the terms protest, demonstration, banner, just all the key terms that could tell you what these were about. We didn't find them. We found tons of stuff that related to protest. We didn't find anything that related to murder, shooting,

homicide, 187, the penal code, anything like that. No, not at all. Wow. And as a result of that, the city of Oakland implemented a standing oversight committee for its use of surveillance technology, which is still in place today and served as a model for similar bodies around the country. It's one of the things I'm most proud of, actually. There you go. You know, it's interesting to me.

I remember the big kerfuffle when that came out and the story broke and people were looking at it, you know, and I guess it was more designed to track those protests. But one of the biggest, you know, we've had a lot of people that have come on, especially since George Floyd, we've talked about racism in cities. We've talked about police brutality. You know, we've talked about police brutality going back, you know, into the 200 to 400 years of this country and the abuses of police and racism have been combined to use. I believe police departments were initially started as slave recoverers that would go find slaves that escaped and bring them back. And that's really where policing evidently started in our nation, or at least that was the proponent of it.

And it's interesting to me, of all the cities, is there any big city that, one of the things we've talked about is how a lot of times these, these cities use these, these revenue generating sort of things like they were doing with the tagging and registration and stuff. And they use it to harass people, especially in, in ghettos and areas that are more economically blighted to try and help. And it keeps those people down because they're constantly being harassed.

They're being pulled over two or three times a day. They're being just penalized to death. The warrant system, the payment system, there's even what people deal with, with the bail money system, the cash bail system. Um, and it really creates these, it really keeps people down and keeps them from moving up economically and creates these depression zones economically that, that it's very hard for people to get out of. And, and is there any cities you, you mentioned earlier in the podcast that there were a lot of cities around there are under these uh agreements with the justice department are there any major cities that get this right or is this a endemic problem of just size and scale create abuse well you know in terms

of the ways in which law enforcement and cities do treat, basically engaged in that sort of regressive taxation against citizens for violations and so forth. I mean, that really, I think that's one of the elements of the Ferguson Rebellion in 2014-15 that really kind of that cycle of protest really cast light on how, you know, state does kind of lean on people in a certain class in certain zones and treat them as an extractive resource. You know, I don't know if we've gotten it right. I think there's a broader recognition of the problem. When it comes, when we're talking about mass incarceration, there's a sociologist at Berkeley who I studied under a little bit named Loic Wacombe who addresses the issue. It's not

an idea of mass incarceration. That's a little bit of a misnomer. The idea is correct that we're putting tremendous numbers of people behind bars in a disproportionate way to any other country in the world for some of them, many of them, for nonviolent offenses.

Or some people because they can't pay for it. They can't pay for it yeah they pay for their freedom and pre-trial detention is a huge issue but the the misnomer here is that um that wacom sites and i actually believe this um is that it's not mass incarceration it's hyper incarceration in new york city where i grew up there's such thing called super blocks they're referred to as super blocks there are areas of the city they're specific census tract zip codes which send you look at the number of people in state prisons and account and jails um who are from these areas it's just come wildly out of proportion to anywhere else wow those are the areas that are so heavily policed right wow in another and for

instance if i'm sitting out on my stoop with a can of beer, say it's before the New York state legalizes weed and I'm smoking a blunt and I'm drinking a bunch of open beers and I have music playing, right? Chances are in certain neighborhoods in the city, I won't get rolled on. However, if I'm in one of these super lock areas, there are going to be cops on the street probably doing vertical patrols of the building, right? If it's a public housing project or, you know in the day they used to have private houses private apartment buildings that would have you know landlords that would let cops into patrol to keep order and then i would

get written up and if i had a warrant out or if i was on probation or parole and i got searched and i had a box cutter or folding knife on me i'd go Wow. Get sent back in because that's just, okay, well, state's looking at you and the officer's looking for something because the officer has an incentive to hit a quota and show activity for his day to please his bosses, who then pleases the city council member, who then, which then pleases the mayor because they want to show citizens they're doing something. So all this pressure of the state to address deeper issues that law enforcement actually is not equipped to address. David Simon, you know, the creator of The Wire, writer of Homicide, very astute observer of law enforcement, has shown this many times in his fiction and in his journalism, that police are basically used as a Swiss army knife by the state

to address issues that they're not prepared or trained to deal with and that no one institution can deal with um and when all that downward pressure the state is focused on people at the long it doesn't really hit the people who it doesn't fall on people the same way it falls on the most vulnerable um people the people who are not who don't have the ability to shelter out who are under the most um constant presence uh constant pressure by the state. And, you know, it's a way in which we really kind of look at the American law enforcement system as being broken. And I think this book demonstrates that in the case of one city and that can be extrapolated. I think there are echoes that readers have found and will find to other cities in their own communities. You know, it's interesting. We've had a lot of conversations with authors on the

show about their books. And, you know, the term that politicians will use, especially Reaganites, Republicans, sort of people tend to use is the rule of law. We're going to re-invoke the rule of law. You saw that started

with Nixon, probably before that somewhere. But it's really heavy-handed with Nixon. Then you saw it with Reagan. What was interesting with Reagan was Reagan took away a lot of the kind of social support that you had for people that had

mental problems that needed to be put in an institution and get some mental help. A lot of that was taken away and defunded, and the police were left to handle those sort of people. Don't forget the Clintons either. The Clintons, go ahead, fill us in. Yeah, I mean, in the Clinton era, you know,

a lot of the support for public housing was also rolled back. The rest of the, you know, social safety net was really shredded during that era too. It was a bipartisan project, and the way that the Democrats decided to tack right in the 1990s kind of followed that Reaganite playbook. That's right. They cleaned up welfare, tried to clean it up, and they pulled back a bunch of stuff, huh? Yeah. I mean, the benefits really decreased tremendously. Public housing, there's less support for Section 8.

Our homelessness issue now, which is a national problem, it's really acute in the Mountain West and in the West, and it's not really great on the East Coast either. But that stems from kind of the rollback of supportive housing, mental hospitals, treatment programs, drug treatment programs, things like that. And once you leave these people on the street to have their breakdowns in public, what's going to happen? The cops are going to be the person that has to address them, and they're not a caseworker. They're not a mental health expert.

There's so much of that, these people, and it's really, in a way, it's kind of unfair to them. Do you guys address in the book the sort of thing that came after George Floyd with the police reform where they were like, I mean, they called it, it was a horrible term, defund the police. But basically, you know, this idea to maybe have the police not handle, you know, mental health calls saying things of that nature yeah i mean we deal with you know to us that the george flo the protest movement that's that portion of the black lives matter movement that cycle um the second cycle started with it really is part of you got to look at it kind of you got to pull back and step back from it and see the forest for the and not look at the trees and see the forest it really in the u.s uh there's been kind of this pendulum that happens with law enforcement. The pendulum swings one way towards Mano Duro, law and order, crack heads and take names, clean up the streets, restore order, and then, okay, well, you do that for a while

and you violate people's rights and you treat them like chattel and you treat, you know, the police become viewed as an occupying army. That leads to things like the black Panther movement that leads to things like, you know, calls for police reform that also leads to things like people going out and taking shots at cops and DAs, which did happen in the sixties and seventies. Um, it happened in the 1910s and twenties too, you know, right before the Palmer raids. So, And again, we touch on all this. Your readers can dive into it. I promise we don't make it dull.

None of this is dull. So there are these swings back and forth, back and forth. After the ways in which the American establishment clashed with left-wing radicals and anti-war protesters in the 1960s, there were reform efforts in the 1970s. The Oakland Police Department was probably, until the consent decree was passed down in the 2000s, in the 1970s, they actually had a reform-minded chief named Charles Gain, who was a white man,

grew up in Oakland from a Dust Bowl family, migrated to Oakland when he was a kid. He wasn't down with having a racist, jackbooted police department. He actually wanted to do things better. He established a, let's see, a white-collar crimes unit, a tenant protection unit. He had early intervention programs and training programs for officers to make sure that they could be, if they got in confrontations, they'd sit down and basically talk them through in these sessions and figure out how they can deal with it differently

and try to make that individual officer better and more responsive to the community. And then, of course, there's a backlash. The funding dries up. The old guard in the police union wants to do things the old-fashioned way and doesn't want these newfangled reforms coming in there and taking their beloved institution apart, pushed the guy out. Funny story, he was then brought in later by Feinstein, Mayor Dianne Feinstein in San Francisco before she made her way to Congress. And he basically, when Harvey Milk was murdered by ex-SFPD officer Dan White, you know, there were really

big disturbances in the Castroro which was the lgbtq district and still is the lgbtq district in san francisco and you know the cops wanted to go in there and crack heads and uh chief gain said no you're not doing that stand down you know they're not they're venting themselves feinstein fired him because he refused to let the cops loose. Wow. Yep. It's... Maybe she won't. She probably won't. I don't think she will because she's not remembering much these days.

That's what historians are for. I'm not knocking Diane Feinstein. I'm just saying she's not all there and her staff would agree to that. But, you know, it's interesting how these politicians rise. I mean, kind of what we've been talking to and kind of what I've been to that but uh you know it's interesting how these politicians rise i mean kind of what we've been talking to and kind of what i've been building on is is you know maybe that's our biggest problem we need to we need to care about electing better um better

politicians but you know i think sometimes we we seem to more and more over the years we've had this donor class ruling this oligarchy of our country. You know, the Supreme Court things have basically made it so you can buy your politicians and different things, Citizens United, et cetera, et cetera. And it's really made it so there's a big wide gap between us. And it's almost like, well, keep the people down so they, you know, are a complacent workforce and complac. And so that we can make our own money and just keep cracking heads. And I imagine some of these, from what you guys documented, some of these, you know, you kind of alluded to it. So I'll ask you if there's more to that.

But it seems like these police officer departments, they just keep on rolling. They're just like, hey, whatever, that guy's here for two to four years, whatever. We're just going to keep doing our thing and busting heads. Yeah, I mean, that is one way in which, unfortunately, you know, being a police chief is not, they seldom last for more than four or five years, and that's a long term. Yeah. there are ways in which law enforcement because it's such a paramilitary culture as a top-down culture the reform is expected to change the actual leadership of the institution is expected to

come from the top but in reality it comes from like the sergeant lieutenant level training up the basically like the senior patrol officer those guys set the example of what happens on the street and realistically if you have good people in those positions who respect the law and try and treat people equitably and aren't out there to abuse folks, maybe the system, maybe your law enforcement

can actually enforce the law equitably for everybody. And if there's an old guard culture in place, or there's a culture in place that protects people who are abusive and who flaunt the law because they're popular or because they're in with a certain clique of supervisors or because they deliver the numbers that make the supervisors look good, even if those cases end up falling apart and costing the city hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars, that poisons the institution. And that increases community trust in the agency. And honestly, the one thing about Oakland that really has worked is that the citizenry in Oakland have been aware of the issues with their police department for decades. The earliest state investigation of OPD was in 1949. Wow. And that's quite early.

And the Black Panther Party certainly didn't occur within a vacuum. The 1970s and 80s also saw very sustained movements for police accountability, the creation of a review board following egregious instances of people being shot by the cops, unarmed people, young folks being shot by the cops unjustifiably and them getting away with it. decree has persisted for so long or has basically resulted in a lot of good changes in oakland and why the city council all the politicians in oakland are have to be aware of this issue is that the citizenry never lets them forget right there are a lot of and there are a lot of civil rights attorneys in the area who will basically watchdog the police department and file suits against them and try and get settlements and succeed in getting settlements to address things like unwarranted strip searches, which the Oakland police department used to do with people in public. They used to strip you and search you cavity search you sometimes in the middle of the street, if they thought you had

narcotics and we're not talking 1960, we're talking 2005, 2009. Holy crap. Yeah. You know, dropping a grown man's pants in the middle of the morning in front of a bus full of morning commuters and tell them to drop them and spread them. We're talking about a police department that as of 2008 had falsified about 60% of all narcotics warrants. Holy crap. Yep. That's a lot.

I mean, it's, this is the sort of thing when these issues are, they're brought up and they're examined and they're, people try and deal with them as best as possible. Those sorts of scandals are not happening in the present day because there's been so much, there's been such a volume of intensive watchdogging in the police department. However, it's not perfect. There are some issues with current internal affairs investigations that may or may not lead to the police department extending their oversight. We've yet to see.

There's a hearing later this month to that effect. But the pattern that's emerging, the information that's emerging is not promising. There you go. Yeah. But that doesn't mean that things haven't changed. In the early 2010s, late 2000s, when I was really covering officer-involved shootings on the day-to-day, the Oakland Police Department would shoot about 12, 15 people a year and kill several of them, a number of whom would be unarmed. And they'd end up costing the city millions of dollars,

oftentimes involving officers involved in the number of prior shootings um some of whom had been fired and then rehired because of problems with the internal affairs process which then you know was a basic case in point evidence that the reforms hadn't taken place and had been affected effectively implemented so there has been progress you know to this day at this point in time the police department shoots and kills at least one or two people a year but that's and no one should be shot and killed by the police or anybody else for that matter but that's a dramatic reduction and that's because the ways in which the pursuit policies have changed the use of force training has changed the reporting has trained has changed the early early intervention for officers involved in uses of

force that fall below the level of pulling your weapon and shooting at somebody, pulling a taser on somebody, using your baton, using your OC spray on someone, using a restraint hold on somebody. You know, if you hit a certain number of those, you get talking to and say, okay, well, let's look at these situations. What are you doing that gets you into these sorts of confrontations again and again and again? Are you pulling up too close to suspect vehicles? Are you engaging in chases that maybe your supervisor has told you to break off on the radio because rate of speed is too high, streets too narrow, you're posing a risk to civilians and so on? Those things have changed, but it's by no means perfect. And I think that the changes have happened. The lasting changes have happened because the citizenry have not let up over

decades. There you go. And they shouldn't. Yeah. And that really is the thing about police reform, about policing and holding law enforcement accountable in this country. It comes from the citizens and it's possible to a degree. Have we arrived at the end point no we have there's a lot more work to be done but the work happens at your local community and it happens over time it's not an instantaneous

thing it's not you know click and gratify like we're so used to in this culture these days yeah and some of these politicians will just grab the hey we arrested a lot of people you know the rudy giuliani sort of method of search and whatever and they're like the rest are up and people will be like oh okay that's good that means that you know the streets are getting cleaned up by the politician we hired to clean up the streets and and the rule of law and and so you see that but we don't somebody needs to sit down and like really maybe someone has uh look at the cost of it because you know i look at the extraordinary cost of what we pay out to you know prisoners that were wrongly

imprisoned the millions of dollars for the civil rights stuff you need to add all this up and go at some point you know people that vote for these politicians or citizens just need to go, hey, man, what this is costing us in taxpayer funds to settle these lawsuits could be better spent someplace else. I mean, I think logically we could. Call me crazy. I don't know. Well, that's the tragedy of the defund slogan. It's not about defunding law enforcement. It's about taking some of the

money that you put towards that repressive apparatus and putting it into positive programs, right? 1960s, the Great Society program under President Lyndon Johnson, Lyndon B. Johnson, aimed at trying to, you know, after the Watts Rebellion and after a lot of the similar, you know, upheavals in the mid-1960s against repressive policing, uh, doesn't sound familiar to anybody and, um, you know, civil rights abuses. The Johnson and the Kerner commission report, which is a remarkable document and reads as if it was written yesterday with some small, you know, changes to demographic and information and a little bit of other technology, um, You know, these issues, they try to address them through social programs,

through funding community building programs and intervention and non-law enforcement public safety initiatives. And there was a lot of resistance to that around the country, including in Oakland. Mayor John Houlihan in the 1960s actually rejected Great Society funds because they thought they were coddling criminals and so forth. So and that that is worth noting that as of the 1960s, Oakland was run by a Anglo-Saxon Republican conservative milieu. And by the late 1970s, they had one of the country's first Africanrican-american mayors and a very progressive and a progressive city council so and that was a direct result that was kind of a the the panthers and that entire the anti-war movement were kind of the flashy the symbionese

liberation army obviously was one of the most extreme ends of it um they were the flashy like you know media um they were flashy media events and you and movements which had substance to them, but a lot of attention focused there. And not much of it focused on the undercurrents that led to Lionel Wilson being elected to City Hall in Oakland. The social movement that kind of pulled behind him. And, you know, Barbara Lee, the Congresswoman from Oakland, one of the few people to vote, one of the only congressional representative to vote against the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, you know, she's going to run for Senate now, but she got her start as a volunteer for Shirley Chisholm's campaign and, you know, doing social programs with the Black Panther Party, one of their arms. So it shows that those social movements pulled a lot of people along in their wake.

It changed things, but in a way that didn't, that slow change is not very, it's not sexy. It doesn't capture the attention in the same way. And let's be honest, you know, I've been a reporter for almost 17 years now. Reporters go for the shiny dimes. Yeah. What do you hope people come away from reading your guys' book? Well, first off, I hope they come away with a sense of place. Oakland's a wonderful city, despite some impressions that you may get from it in the book.

But it's a wonderful place, And we wanted this to be something that felt like the city. We want you to feel like you get something of the city when you're there and when you're reading it. We also hope that you come away with a proper understanding, well, not proper, but that the lesson that the police are a coercive apparatus,

that it's an arm of the state that was designed for social control and to protect power, that that's really, uh, and a crime suppression and control was a justification that came around later on, like in the 20th century. Um,

as the institution evolved, as society evolved, it's not to say it's not important, but our lawn is law enforcement. The best way our police, the best way to address that issue, maybe not because that's not what they it's not important but our lawn is law enforcement the best way our police the best way to address that issue maybe not because that's not what they were designed to do to begin with um and we do hope that there are there's some inspiration for to be drawn on from the actions of some of these individuals in our book these whistleblowers who were ostracized

by their law and by other cops had their lives threatened, um, really put through the ringer and ostracized while these are, you know, while the riders themselves still to this day remain very popular amongst the current of and retired Oakland cops. Oh yeah. I mean, that's when you talk about a poison culture,

like that's really an example of it. The fact that they're still very much involved in the Oakland social circles and Keith Batt's name is mud. Unjustly, I would say. But I think that their actions, the actions of all these citizens we name, and many of whom we don't

name, people who took part in these protest movements down the years, the folks who showed up at city council meetings and really tried to hash out these issues and come to a better solution, took part in these commissions, volunteered for them, showed up at city council meetings and really tried to hash out these issues and come to a better solution, took part in these commissions, volunteered for them, showed up, watchdogged, made public comment. We hope that that serves as some sort of inspiration because it's all about, it's not about us, it's not about the book that we wrote. I mean, the book that we wrote is really about the community.

We wanted to reflect the efforts that the community has made in Oakland over so long to really try to reflect the efforts that the community has made in Oakland over, you know, so long to really try and make their city a better place. And I think that in some ways, you know, it is a better place. It certainly is a better place than it was in the summer of 2000 when Keith Batt was riding the streets in West Oakland with Chuck Mabinag, Matt Hornug, Jude Siapno, and Frank Vasquez,

and just was blown away at the depravity that he saw. Yeah, it's just crazy. You know, you look at things going back from whistleblowers, going back to Serpico in the 70s and things like that, and, yeah, there's a lot of changes that we need to make, and it's great that you guys write these books because you guys bring them to light as the fourth estate and, you know, report on what's going on. And that's the only way change can happen is education and exposing the shining light on all this stuff.

So thank you very much, Ali, for coming on the show and sharing this with us. Thank you so much, Chris. Darwin wishes he could have been here as well. But, you know, this has been a wonderful conversation. And I hope that the listeners really pick the book up and give it a read, give it a listen. The audio book is read beautifully. And again, it was an honor to write it. And we hope that it really does have some influence on the national conversation and in communities that, you know, beyond Oakland. Yeah. I mean, we, we need reform. We need to do things better. I mean, the,

the, the police industrial prison industrial complex that we have is just extraordinary at how it feeds itself and operates itself. Um, and you know, we, everything needs to be better in the world. So we need to all work towards that end. Ali, give us your.com so people can find you on the interwebs, please. Unfortunately, I don't maintain a website. I will one of these days,

but I'm so caught up in the day-to-day of my reporting. I'm at awinston on Twitter. You can reach me at ali.winston at protonmail.com, secure and encrypted email. I'm on that platform. I also use, you can find me through there and then we can take it to other channels. But,

um, other thing that I do, I do a lot of work on, um, the far right as well. Extremism. Um, I report for the British broadcasting corporation,

uh, Rolling Stone, New York magazine, a bunch of other places, Der Spiegel every now and then. So I have, I have another arm of what I do that's separate, that is similar but separate to law enforcement.

But that's where you can find me. This book is in stores. The Writers Come Out at Night, published by Atria Books. Please, if you can, shop at your local bookstore. There you go. Pick up the book wherever fine books are sold, folks. You can order it up. It's available now from January 10th, 2023.

The Riders Come Out at Night, Brutality, Corruption, and Cover-Up in Oakland. An amazing story by Allie Winston and Darwin Bond Graham. Thanks to everyone for tuning in. We certainly appreciate you guys being here. Go to goodreads.com, 4Chess, Chris Voss, youtube.com, 4Chess, Chris Voss, and all those places on the internet that we are, LinkedIn, etc., etc. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other, stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time.