Behind the Police: How The Police Defeated Lynching Via Torture

Episode Transcript
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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to
Behind the Police, a production of I Heart Radio Depressing Ship.
I mean hello, I'm Robert Evans and this is Behind
the Police, the podcast that's normally Behind the Bastards, but

(01:54):
is for this week, last week, and next week, giving
a detailed history about the you know, the cops and such,
the systemic manifestation of white supremacy. Yeah, a bastardy Yeah.
And the voice that you heard that's not mine, justin

(02:15):
is Jason Petty, better known as the hip hop artist propaganda. Jason,
how are you continuing to do? Pulling a ham sandwich
out the damn cabinet? There we go, There we go.
I don't Yeah, I'm sorry. No, No, it's been hours, guys.
There hasn't been enough freestyling on this podcast because I
can't and shouldn't yeah, and and and I should not

(02:40):
let me go right to something that would be incredible,
that would be very fun. You and like Glue Network
as annalists like you guys just do a song and
then just all of a sudden, Robert Evans just raps.
Oh man, if I had any musical talent, that would
be that would be cool. But yeah, yeah, we all

(03:02):
have our gifts, and my gift is reading things that
are really depressing for I don't know, another ninety minutes
or so, um, which is a kind of music. But yeah, anyway, Uh,
we don't talk nearly enough about lynching um today and
and that's starting to change because of the recent you know, lynchings.
I think we're at six right now, possible lynchings. Um.

(03:23):
But lynching has a long and well, proud is the
wrong word. I should have put proud in there. But
it's a long history in the United States, and the
history of lynching in the US is not entirely a
racist what I mentioned this before, but actually the term
came out of like people hanging British tax collectors by
their thumbs and stuff. Um. Yeah, so like the first
lynching victims were British people, um, and kind of had

(03:46):
it coming because they were they were being dicks colonialistics. Um.
Obviously nobody thinks of British people when they think about
lynching victims. UM. It's also fair like worth noting that
during the period where lynching was most common in the
United States UM, like the late eighteen hundreds to the
mid nineteen hundreds, UM, not every person lynched was black,
although the vast majority were. UM. Lynching was used to

(04:07):
enforce racial terror from whites against blacks, but it was
also a really common method of what we'd call, you know,
thinking back to our first episode public spirit law enforcement,
you know, communities dealing with people that they saw as problematic,
some of whom were surely guilty, some of them probably
who certainly weren't. I found one analysis of four thousand,
four hundred and sixty seven lynching victims from eighteen eighty

(04:29):
three to nineteen forty one. Four thousand and twenty seven
victims were men, ninety nine were women, in three hundred
and forty one were of unknown or more accurately, nobody
wrote down what the gender was. Three thousand, two hundred
and sixty five of these four thousand, four hundred sixty
seven victims were black, one thousand and eighty two were white,
seventy one were Mexican, and thirty eight were American Indian,

(04:50):
while ten were Chinese, and one was Japanese. All of
these numbers are, of course likely somewhat low, because we'll
never know the total number of people who were lynching victims.
Um Now. Historians who study lynching generally divided into three
separate regimes. The Wild West, where lynching was mostly white
people lynching a lot of other white people in areas

(05:10):
where there just wasn't law enforcement in a way, so
like this was like how you dealt with people who
were a problem. Um. And then there was the slavery regime,
which was found in former slave states where lynching existed
as a form of social control against black people. And
then a smaller regime of lynching on the Texas Mexican border,
where Latinos were lynched by white Texans. So there's a
kind of the three broad areas that most lynchings during

(05:32):
the lynching period in the U s kind of come
come down to. Um Now. In all of these cases,
law enforcement was about as likely to support any given
lynching as it was to oppose it. Uh. There are
many cases and the lynchings of white and black people
alike where police officers would just hand over their keys
to an angry mob to let them in the jail.
Sometimes this was due to the officers supporting the crowd's efforts.

(05:53):
A lot of times it was simple pragmatism, because a
ton of lynch mobs would burn down jails when the
police resisted them. Um. So of this was just like, well,
I don't want to die. Yeah, there's one of me,
and I got a real shitty six gun, Like okay, yeah,
this job, they're worth it. Yeah. There there was a
lot of that, um yeah yeah, um. Now, this was

(06:15):
often the case police kind of backing away because they
didn't want their jail to get burned down and to
get killed themselves. This was often the case with lynchings
in Oklahoma. Oklahoma's fucking loved vigilante violence, still kind of do.
But like, oh man, historians who study this are like,
fucking Oklahoma, those are like yeah um. And this was

(06:39):
particularly the case in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Now, the Sooner State
was in general a big lynching state. It was number
eleven in the nation for lynchings, and Oklahoma was famous
for having a public that loved taking justice into its
own hands. We're gonna talk about the Tulsa race right
of in a bit and the burning of black Law Street,
Um yeah, Wall Street and on Law Street, um yeah.

(06:59):
And and obviously this is in the consciousness of a
lot more white folks recently because the TV show Watchman
featured it. But the year before that all happened, a
mob of white Tulson's rushed the county courthouse to lynch
a prisoner, a white prisoner. The local sheriff's department did nothing,
and the local police were supportive. The chief called the
lynching of real benefit to Tulsa and the vicinity, But

(07:20):
the sheriff actually got fired for kind of well that
you're not fired, like we're called for standing down, uh
to this lynching. And again, historians will often note that
prior to the race riot or racist riot of Tulsa
had relatively minimal history of mass violence from white people
against black people. Right, We're not gonna say it was
like congenial friendly relations between the races, but like the

(07:43):
racist riot in nineteen one was really it was shocking
to a lot of people because yet hadn't happened before
in Tulsa. Yeah. And and if you think about it,
like it's logical because the black community had time to
develop infrastructure and flourish and stuff like that, because they're
relatively just like, look, you stay over there, we stay
over here, we'll figure this out. And yeah. One of
the kind of actually one of the precipitating factors of

(08:06):
that is that, like in the weeks before the racist riots,
some like local white preachers and stuff had started getting
very very angry about the fact that white people were
starting to hang out with black people in parts of
town and like developing friendships and like using it like
and that was like they were like, this has to stop. Yeah,
it's like the weird part of like the Venn diagram

(08:26):
of like racism and capitalism and just normal friendship to
where you're like, I don't know, this restaurant is just
it's good food. So I came down here. Yeah they're
way better at Yeah, yeah, foods better. It turns out,
contrary to what my uncle Dave told me, that's a

(08:49):
nice lady, that's a nice food that works here. I
don't know. It's kind of cool. It's good food, it's
good company. I don't understand the problem. You know. I'm
starting to thank racism now either, right, Cole. I'm starting
to think maybe we benefit from having these folks in
our community. Oh now, now, now we're time to shoot.
I guess so. Yeah. So. In the years after World

(09:11):
War Two, large numbers of veterans of both races had
come back to Tulsa and armed themselves in fear of
escalating interracial tensions. In Muskogee in nineteen sixteen, and armed
black crowd had stopped a lynching in May of nineteen
twenty one. Prior to the Big Racist Riot, an armed
group of black citizens had again stopped the lynching of
a black man for an alleged rape. Now, about of

(09:34):
lynchings of black men nationwide were justified because the crowd
accused the black man of rape or sexual assault in
some way. Now, only about two percent of incarcerated black
people nationwide head were actually convicted of rape. So we
can assume that the vast majority of these lynchings um
were unjust right um because the anyway. What occurred in

(09:54):
Tulsa later in May nine reinforces this suggestion. On Monday,
MA young black man named Dick Rowland gotten to an
elevator that also contained a young white woman. We will
never know exactly what happened. The most common story here
is that he likely tripped and bumped into her, and
she freaked out and the police were called. There's a
bunch of different stories around this. Nobody knows what happened.

(10:15):
But white black guy walks into an elevator with a
white woman. White woman screams, black guy runs away. He
gets tracked down and arrested by two officers, one of
whom was black. And these men were sheriff's deputies. So
Dick wound up in the care of the sheriff's office.
And the sheriff was a guy named Williard McCullough. He'd
gotten his job as a result of the lynching of
that white guy a year earlier, which his predecessor had

(10:36):
let happened, and Williard didn't want to make the same mistake.
So a crowd of angry white folks formed outside the jail,
which is pretty much standard procedure in Oklahoma when a
black man was accused of this kind of crime. The
police chief and again there's a police chief, and there's
a sheriff. The police chief, a guy named Gustafson, warned
the sheriff to take Rowland out of town. The sheriff refused,

(10:56):
arguing that the kid was safer in jail than in
an open car, and he may have been right about that.
The police chief felt that moving him out of town
would disperse the crowd, and he may have been right
about that. Um, we don't know exactly how it started,
but you know, basically, a black crowd with a lot
of guns showed up next to the white crowd who
had a lot of guns, and at some point there
was a struggle between an armed black guy and a

(11:16):
white guy, and the black fella's gun went off or
he fired it again, we don't know. But it turned
into a giant, fucking mob of of white writers gutting
down black people, black people shooting back in self defense.
And it will continue to talk about how it gets worse.
This is not an episode about the burning of Black
Wall Street. We will have to cover that in more
detail one of these days. Yeah, there are a couple

(11:37):
of points I should make. Um, I will say this
before you get to this point, like there's an interesting
thing that happened there all the way to Emmett Till
and to like, um, this this particular moment is like
just this idea of like weaponizing the white woman, you know,
and um, in a in a in it's just this

(12:00):
weird mix of just how social and supremacy and stuff
like that works where it's like you can use her fear,
you know that was implanted in her, you know what
I'm saying, uh, as an excuse to carry out violence
towards black men, right, and play the whole damsel and

(12:25):
distress thing, you know what I'm saying, And then them
being their own white women having their own versions of oppression,
right and misogyny, being like, well, this is a way
to get these men to do something for me, like
a position of power which evolves into the Karen's you

(12:45):
know what I'm saying. But it's just essentially like just
you're you're It's almost like yo, your oppressor has weaponized you,
and now you've become that, you know what I'm saying.
So just the like the awareness of just that a
mind scramble that which is it's like I said, it's
your own unique thing. Just this idea like the voice

(13:07):
of the white woman, you know that is like there's
there's history there, like Karen, don't come out of nowhere.
And but Karen, don't understand that you're being leveraged, you
know what I'm saying. To carry out voices of of
of violence, and then now it's almost like now you're
participating in that same violence, you know what I'm saying,

(13:28):
So like, I don't know. It's just such an interesting thing,
like how interlocking systems of oppression work, you know what
I mean, and like and how it all like keeps
power in the same place, interlocking system That's a really
important term, um because I do think there is a
tendency and a lot of groups to like, Oh, no,
racism is rooted in capitalism. Racism is rooted in you know, religion,

(13:51):
Racism is readed in class. Racism rooted this or that
racism is rooted has a lot of roots. It's less
it's like a hedgerow. That's why it's so hard to like,
you had dynamite like hedgerows with these gigantics sometimes centuries old,
like huge fucking plant walls that existed in the exists
in a bunch of places, specifically like in France during
World War Two. They were used as like to stop tanks.

(14:13):
And the only way to get rid of a fucking hedgerow,
because there's so many roots and they're so deep and
so tough, is to fucking dynamite it like up right,
yeah yeah. So again, this is not an episode about
the burning up Black Wall Street and Tulsa, but there
are a couple of points I should make about Tulsa
in this period. Uh, it was unusual for having a
large organized black community that controlled a really sizeable section

(14:35):
of town Greenwood, um and that you know black Wall
Street is it was called, had its own banks, its
own theaters, a vibrant business community, good schools, and this
relative prosperity was really unusual for black communities in the South,
which is why it was called black Wall Street. Another
thing I should note is what historian Carol Anderson wrote
in her book White Rage quote the trigger for white

(14:56):
rage inevitably is black advancement. It is not the mirror
presence of black people that is the problem. Rather, it
is blackness with ambition, with drive, with purpose, with aspirations,
and with demands for full and equal citizenship. So powerful, man, Yeah,
it's powerful. Yeah. Yeah. The comedian clip that would I

(15:17):
Forget Home his name that was going around that where
where he was just like, look, man, we're asking for
the bare minimum. Like even the civil rights movement that
wasn't even equal rights were just like just just civil Yeah,
you know, just just basically I'm just saying black lives matter. Yeah,

(15:38):
like not like they're not I'm not saying they're in important.
I'm not saying they matter more than your It's just
just just matter, you know. So, like you said, like
just and and and the ambition of black America sparked
so much rage Michael Chase Special Yeah, yeah, yeah, and

(16:00):
that's yeah. So two large mobs gather at the courthouse again,
one white, one black. The white mob clearly wanted to
just murder Roland, who was the kid who you know
got in trouble. Uh. And you know, they were in
the mood to burn down the courthouse if the cops
tried to stop them. The black mob obviously wanted to
save their guy. Um. And this was a tricky situation
for the police, particularly since two weeks earlier, the state

(16:22):
Attorney General had finished an investigation that described the Tulsa
police as corrupt, poorly lead, and so poorly equipped that
they had to borrow cars from their civilian friends to
get to crime scenes they were hitching rides to like
not a great police force. So so funny the over
when this all are ups into violence. The overall response
of Tulsa's police to the massacre followed like kind of

(16:42):
perfectly encapsulates the different ways US cops responded to lynching. Overall,
Sheriff McCullough seems to have been probably kind of your
best case scenario for a white cop in this period.
He had black deputies. He seems to have listened to
their advice, and he basically spent the riot barricaded in
the jail defending Roland. You know, his black prisoner um
so hard to I'm not gonna call him a great

(17:04):
dude or like particularly woken anything, but like does broadly
what you'd consider to be the right thing here. Meanwhile,
the police chief, Gaustabson was pretty close to the worst
case scenario. Before the riot even started. He looked out
at a huge crowd of armed and angry white people
an a much smaller crowd of armed black people, and
he called the National Guard to ask for their help
to quote clear the streets of negros So police chief

(17:28):
not the same as the sheriff here. Um. Now, one
of the first things that happened after the riot was
that large numbers of angry white dudes gathered outside of
the National Guard armory to demand guns. The National Guard
was like, that's not how this works. You can't get
We do have some stars. We don't just hand out
guns to crowds. Dude, why can't somebody be that guy? Like,

(17:54):
why can't we interview that guy? When they got to
the door and him being like, nah, Nona, keep what
are you talking about? What are you talking about? So
this crowd, which included a number of uniformed police officers,
went over to a local sporting goods store. This particular
store sold ammunition to the police department, so the cops

(18:14):
in the crowd knew that it was a good place
to go to get guns and ammo. They broke in
and looted it so that they could go murder black people.
As the looting and killing worsened, the police chief called
in his entire department and began commissioning special deputies, some
four hundred random white dudes who were given guns and
legal authority by the police to go commit acts of
horrific violence. By dawn the next day, the black community

(18:35):
of Tulsa had pulled back to defend Greenwood, their neighborhood.
A massive army of angry white dudes, described in media
at the time as a force of citizens, police and
members of the National Guard, numbering fifteen hundred, invaded Black
Wall Street from two directions. They took unarmed black people
into protective custody. They killed anyone who resisted. Once again,

(18:56):
what had started as white violence had been portrayed by
authorities as a Negro uprising, which is how like the
local press covered it. And now this uprising was being squashed.
The last resistance in Greenwood happened at the newly built
Mountain Zion Baptist Church when the armed black men barricaded
inside refused to leave, the police and the guardsmen burned
it down. The Tulsa Police department also enlisted the help

(19:18):
of six J and four biplane aircraft. They claimed these
were four reconnaissance purposes, but there is evidence that the
planes were used to fire bomb and stray civilians in Greenwood.
And yeah, I'm gonna quote now from Tulsa World and
a write up of the riot quote. Tulsa police also
seemed to have been involved in the mayhem. More than
one witness identified officers, usually out of uniform, among the arsonists. V. B. Bostick,

(19:42):
a black deputy sheriff was rousted from his home by
a white traffic officer named Pittman, who then joined in
setting fire to Bostis House. I. J. Buck, a white
Greenwood property owner, set of policemen turned him aside. When
Buck tried to save one of his buildings, he said,
you ain't got no business building buildings for negroes. Buck
testified in court some three black men, women and children
were murdered during the Tulsa racist riot. We will never know.

(20:05):
They are currently in the process of excavating and what
they think might be a mass grave in Tulsa. Um,
but we will never know how many people died. Probably
hopefully we'll get a better account soon. But yeah, and
like just try to like try to get your brain
around the humanity of the moment. Like you're just you're

(20:27):
running barbershop, you at church, and a US military plane,
well owned country, you know what I'm saying, Like a
civilian plane that the police that the police were had
common deered. Yeah, okay, yes, a billion playing at the
police common deer. Like it's just just a like you

(20:49):
just bombed my church. Yeah, Like just try to like
get your brain around net you know. Yeah, yep, yep.
Um yeah, it's pretty yeah, like this is sad, yeah
yeah yeah. And I wonder how many listeners, uh of
all races have never heard this, you know what I'm saying, Like,

(21:14):
that's the part that blow Mama's black people that don't notice,
you know, it's pretty fucking wild. Um. And you know,
there there are two cases that I'm aware of of
air power bombing, like of of people on American soil
being bombed by armed airplanes prior to uh December seventh,
ninety attack on Pearl Harbor. And it is the attack

(21:35):
on Black Wall Street and the attack on the white
you well no, actually not just white, um, largely white,
but definitely mixed race union miners in Blair Mountain during
the the Union uprising there they were also bombed and
had gas bombs dropped on them too. So those are
the two cases before fucking Pearl Harbor that air power

(21:56):
was used to kill Americans. Um yeah, by Americans. Yeah,
by Americans. Sure yeah um so yeah. In the months
that followed the racist riot in Tulsa, Tulsa became the
nexus of KKK organizing in the state. There's a debate
about how much role they played in an actually the
racist riot. It was probably not super huge, but the

(22:18):
clan Tulsa becomes like the fucking headquarters of the Oklahoma
Ku Klux Klan in the wake of the racist riot,
and before much longer, Tulsa got a new clan backed sheriff,
a claned back police chief, as did many cities in Oklahoma.
Clan members of the city council, and of course the
clan bought brought with it violence not just against black people,
but against Catholic and Jewish Oklahoma's The governor of Oklahoma

(22:40):
eventually had to bring the National Guard in again to
deal with the Ku Klux Klan. So yeah, yeah, that's
yeah Tulsa. Uh and again like again, it goes to
like the like God, the clans all over the place,
Like why how all of a sudden, why are we
met at Catholic and Jews? Like when when did day

(23:00):
become a card of the conversation like that, even just
even you hearing even hearing you say, it makes sense
to me that the clan is like, Yo, it's cracking
over here. We'll go over here and get it, get it,
get it cracking. Let's take over the city. And while
we're at it, you know the Catholics, like the Catholics. Yeah,
what the hell that got to do with anything? You know? Yep, yeah, yep.

(23:22):
Uh so lynching and again I think really one of
the ways to look at the racist right and told
you this is a mass a mass lynching. Yeah, they
lynched the entirety of Black Wall Street because they were angry.
You know. The that young woman screaming was the excuse,
but it was anger over black success in organization. And
there's stories of like black or white people looting Greenwood

(23:45):
after they you know, arrested all of the black people
in town and as they were burning it down and
coming out of black houses with like furniture and property
and like angrily yelling like these inwards have nicer things
than a lot of white people. Like that. That was
a big part of why they did the um yep.
So like we want segregation, okay, cool, we don't want

(24:07):
you to use our money, okay cool. Damn y'all segregated
and using your own money. I guess we'll kill you.
I guess I hate that, man. What do you want?
I think it's pretty clear what they want. Yeah, yeah,
um lynch Ng's peak was probably in the eighteen nineties,
but it continued to be a massive problem. I mean

(24:28):
throughout the nineteen hundreds. Of the nineteen twenties were a
pretty bad time for lynching. Most historians will tell you
that lynching is best seen as a sort of non
state uh auxiliary to Jim Crow, the civilian side of
the enforcement of white supremacist laws. When the law fell
short in the eyes of racists, it was time for
a massive mob spectacle. Lynching generally was not just about murder.

(24:51):
Victims were usually tortured to extract confessions um and the
crowd generally took souvenirs and posed with the body of
the murdered black person. These were often family gatherings that
we're announced on the radio. Now I'm gonna quote picnics. Yeah,
picnics very kind. Yeah, go ahead and finish in your brain.
I'm not gonna say, just finished. What you think picnic?
What the end of that? What that's probably your short for? Yeah, okay,

(25:15):
go on. I'm gonna quote next from a book that
will be a major source for this part of the episode,
The Color of the Third Degree by Sylvan peder Meyer,
and he writes quote during the nineteen tens, into a
greater degree from nineteen twenty on, where the white elite
of the South voiced growing criticism of the practice of lending.
This changed attitude was the result of the economic modernization
taking place in the region, which was accompanied by efforts

(25:37):
to bolster the business and political ties between the southern
and northern states, along with an increasing orientation among the
Southern white middle and upper classes towards the cultural values
of the North. This led in nineteen thirty to the
establishment of the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention
of Lynching a s w P l or as Whipple.
Under the leadership at Jesse Daniel Lames. These white women

(25:59):
activists work prime merrily in church circles and their tireless
work against lynching. These women disputed the traditional rationalization of
this form of violence as a means of protecting white women,
and argued that white men were using the code of
chivalry merely as a pretext to justify violence against African Americans. Yeah, yeah,
good work, good ally ship, or whatever you wanna call it. Uh.

(26:20):
Nineteen twenty was actually the first year in which more
lynchings were averted by law enforcement than carried out between
nineteen thirty and ninety two, two hundred and ninety lynchings
were stopped by police. The activism of groups like as
Whipple helped helped reduced lynching through the nineteen twenties, and
while it saw an upswing during the Great Depression, the
number of lynchings dropped precipitously by the end of the

(26:42):
nineteen thirties and for most of the last few decades,
the anti lynching campaigns were seen as a major feather
in the cap of u s law enforcement. An example
about the police kind of modernizing and reforming and of
Southern cops rising to the occasion to protect black people
from violence. This is wildly inaccurate. Um Niedermeyer argues with
exhaustive documentation that rather than protecting black people from murder quote,

(27:06):
law enforcement authorities in the South were generally taking initiatives
to protect black suspects from being seized by lynch mobs. Now.
The way they did this was by loading suspects up
into police cars, which were a new thing then and
allowed for faster transport, and taking them away to distant jails.
Law enforcement did sometimes use violence and even call out
malicious to disperse lynch mobs, But the anger that had

(27:26):
spawned those mobs still had to be sated, and police
say did it by making damn certain that black suspects
got what those mobs thought they deserved, a swift and
violent death. Quote. In his study of the state of Kentucky,
historian George Wright comes to the conclusion that the number
of executions of blacks carried out during the first decades

(27:46):
of the twentieth century continually rose, while the number of
lynch ngs steadily declined during the same period. Likewise, the
findings of the political scientists James W. Clark show a
clear correlation in the nineteen twenties and thirties between the
declining lynch violence and the growing number of convicted African
American offenders who were executed by state authorities. The available
statistical data on the number of executions carried out in

(28:09):
the United States between nineteen thirty and nineteen seventy also
suggests the dwindling number of lynchings was tied to the
growing use of the death penalty. Although there is no
conclusive evidence to support the theory that lynching violence was
gradually replaced by the death penalty, it can be said
that the legal system in the South increasingly assumed the
function of maintaining social control over the black population during

(28:30):
the early twentieth century. See that is dizzying. YEA, hope
y'all caught it. It's so dizzy, it's it's like because
to to try to sort that out is to go,
you're you're off celter because like you said, you think,
oh it's cool man, maybe they're maybe these people are evolving,

(28:50):
and they're like, no, this is I'm They're just you
just want control of Yo County and you just like, So,
the point is, I can't be having these I can't
be having the city think they got more power than
me because I'm the law. So but they're like, but
I feel you. You know what I'm saying, Like Loki,

(29:10):
I feel you. I'm just saying, you don't get to
tell me what to do. So when so, from the
black perspective, do I can I make any distinction between
that mob and this jail? No? Because I still end
up dead, you know what I'm saying. So, and then
when we say and then, like you said, all the

(29:31):
signs we're talking about the other ones, that mass incarceration
and the deputy and the law for it's just it's
the same disease. This is what we're trying to say,
and here is right in your history. It's same ease.
This is why we don't make no distinction. You know
what I'm saying. This is why we keep saying the
orchards bad, orchards bad sayings. Apples, Yes, they're piss apples.

(29:55):
You know. You keep going away individual piss apples, hoping
and then trying to point at one. It ain't got pissed,
And I'm going what it's the yes, Oh you know
what's not? An apple filled with urine? First of all,

(30:18):
I've never heard of the term piss apple. But that's
great anyway. But I hope these products and services are
not because they are not. They are not. That's our
one line for advertisers, No apples filled with urine. This
is Roxande Gay, host of the Roxande Gay Agenda the
Bad Room, in his podcast of Your Dreams. Now, what

(30:41):
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a podcast where I'm going to speak my mind about
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I will be in conversation with an interesting person who
has something to say, We're going to talk about feminism, race, writing,
in book, some art, food, pop culture, and yes, politics.

(31:04):
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Roxanne Gay Agenda, The Bad Feminist Podcast of Your Dreams,

(31:25):
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We're back, all right, um cool, uh all right, So

(33:15):
when you really look at it through a gimlet eye,
the inevitable conclusion one comes to in all of this
um is. You know, while police often enabled violence, you
know of the Clan in the late eight hundreds, in
the early nineteen hundreds, and with the race riots in
nineteen nineteen, you know, Tulsa. While police often enabled such
things on an individual level, collectively, they were more than

(33:38):
anything else powerless to stop this violence. Um. Although you
could argue that didn't tryal that hard. Um, But they
weren't really set up to stop that violence either. And
to both the state and the kind of people who
tend to become police officers, that lack of control over
the mob was worse for them than whatever violence the
mob was committing. Often white sheriffs and police chiefs were
absolutely fine with killing black people. Would bug them? Was

(33:59):
the disorder? Um, because power people. In nineteen thirty three,
a sociologist with the the just tremendously unfortunate name of
Arthur Raper, which, oh, that's a rough one to dry
out of the names. Arthur Raper published a study that

(34:19):
suggested lynchings were most often permitted by making it clear
to the mob that the alleged offender would be quickly
convicted and punished. Southern politicians came to rely on the
death penalty is an easy way to appease the mob
and have avoid uncivilized violence. Local journalists supported the state
and it's massively increased rate of executions, seeing them as

(34:39):
a victory for law and order. Yo, when I was
so nice to teach high school, I to high school
for a couple of years at ninth graders. And one
time we went on this field trip, uh to Lacma
to the Museum of um you know, the museum in
in On Libreya. And so it's four teachers to a

(34:59):
hundred in fourteen year old, right, So I had me
and another teacher had control a half of them. So
I got seventy five freshmen. Right, We're walking by the
park and there's a dude selling like inflatable toys, so
like hammers and dolls and such like this. And at

(35:24):
this point it's seventy five of y'all and two of us.
They're gonna the kids are gonna beat each other with it.
There's no you're not gonna stop these freshmen from hurting
each other with these inflatable hammers. So my thought was, Okay,
if they're gonna do it, they're gonna do it. You're
you're freshman, and I'm not gonna stop you and Loki,

(35:46):
it seems kind of fun. I'm not gonna lie to you.
It seems kind of fun. So what I did was
I broke them up into their home rooms, right and
made them be feuding clans. So I made them send
gladiators from their home room to the middle for the
purpose of as the greatest teacher ever, for the purpose
of being able to make sure that no one gets

(36:07):
actually injured. Right. So, because the point is the same
thing that this sheriff is saying, I just need to
maintain order, right of course, I don't want you to
beat each other, and well, I just don't want to
lose control. It's really the point. The point is I
don't want to lose control because your mom are gonna
kill me if I lose one of y'all, right, and

(36:28):
I'm probably gonna lose my job. So I don't want
to lose control. But y'all gonna beat each other. So
in my mind, I'm like, at least I can make
sure that everyone's engaged, and I can then it's not
everybody beating each other, but you all sent bladd ear
is one of the funniest things I really got reprimanded
by the vice principle. But then the principal was like,

(36:50):
you're brilliant. Yeah, it's like that again, uhty problematic copy
in England, who was like, well, they were going to
throw the statue in the river and we could either
pull it out of the river later and put it back,
or we could beat a bunch of our citizens for
throwing a statue in the river. And that seemed like

(37:11):
the wrong call, you know, like yeah, yeah, um yeah.
This also dovetails into I won't go onto a long
rant about my ideas for school reform, but why all
children should be forced to carry claw hammers at all
times in public schools, um and private schools for that matter,
and all teachers to everybody should have a real big hammer. Um,
that's very important to me for a variety of reasons. Yeah,

(37:34):
I'm very pro hammer. I don't get into that. I
just found I just found the first thing we disagree on.
There'd be a lot less statues, all kinds of statues,
but a lot less of them. It would be a
great lesson on like pulleys and physics. Though, I'll tell
you that. Like we was like, all right, guys, this
was this, this is the freshman second Semester project has

(37:57):
come up with the best pulley system to tear down
a Confederate statute. Yeah, the person that could do it
with the where the smallest little person in my room
is able to pull down this whole statute. That person
get to a yeah, you do you pulled? You have
the little kids pulled on the statue. And then you're like,
and this is why Aliens didn't build the pyramids. Yes,

(38:21):
you've figured this out, and so did the Egyptians. Yea,
so did the Egyptians. Alright, alright, alright, we gotta get
back to the subject. So in nine yeah, Arthur Raper
published a study again like yeah, basically that the Southern
politicians came to rely on the death penalty is a
way to appease the mob and avoid uncivilized violence. Now,
you can't easily get a swift conviction if you have

(38:42):
a real trial. Obviously, remember the data we have suggests
that the vast majority of black people targeted by lynch
mobs were innocent of any serious crime. Uh, if this
ship went to court, even a crooked court, it would
take time. And during that time, like like if it
if you were if you were doing this the way
police are supposed to hand endle cases like this. It
would take a lot of time and it might be yeah,

(39:05):
it might be off. And it's way easier if you
go into court with a confession, because then you're are like, well,
he confessed. Uh So, police in this time focused on
securing confessions because a suspect who confesses isn't really a
suspect anymore. During the early nineteen hundreds, the a CP
documented cases of forced confessions in Southern States. These were

(39:26):
a tiny fraction of the total number of cases, which
numbered in the hundreds of the thousands. The CPS resources
were limited, and they were picking out specific cases that
they were challenging in courts. These were a percent of
what was going on um In three fourths of the
cases they documented, the black defendants alleged that they had
been tortured into confessing by the police. The vast majority

(39:46):
of these cases were either alleged murders or rapes. The
color of the third degree goes into significant detail about
a number of cases that illustrate this transition. One I
want to highlight to you all is the case of
the murder of Raymond Stewart in ninety war Stewart was
a prominent white farmer and landowner, and he was found
dead in his home in Kemper County, Mississippi. There were
signs of a struggle. Almost as soon as the news

(40:08):
got out. Two hundred people gathered in front of his
home to look for the officers. Three young black men
were eventually arrested. A lynch mob form to go and
murder them, which prompted the local sheriff to call an
e extra deputies and fortified the jail with machine guns
and tear gas grenades. The National Guard was almost called
in and a state of emergency was declared in order
to preempt white mob violence. The sheriff's department immediately set

(40:29):
to torturing the absolute ship out of these three kids.
Confessions were quickly obtained, but when the case actually went
to court, one of the young defendants began to complain
that his confession had been forced out of him. Near
deer Meyer writes, quote Brown, who was this one of
these kids, testified that after his arrest, he had been
subjected to violent treatment, above all by Deputy sheriff Cliff
Dial to force him to admit the crime. He told

(40:51):
me to come on out here that he had to heard.
I told I killed Mr Raymond. I come out of
the jail house and I said, I declare I didn't
kill Mr Raymond. He said, come on here and pull
your clothes off. I'm gonna get you. I said to
the last that I didn't kill him. There was two
more fellows about like that there, and they was whipping me.
They had me behind a cross chairs kind of like that.
I said I didn't kill him. They said to put
him on again, and they hit me so hard. I

(41:13):
had to say yes, sir. Mr Cliff Dial said give
the strap to me, I will get it. He took
it and he had two buckles on the end. They
stripped me naked and bit me over a chair and
I just had to say it. I couldn't help it.
As the court transcript shows, Brown supported his testimony by
pointing to the injuries from the blows to his body.
Question they whipped you hard there? Answer yes, sir, I

(41:33):
will show you there are places all the way up.
Question did you bleed any? Answer? Did I bleed? I
sure did. Brown testified that after Dial had forced him
to confess, he threatened him with additional beatings if he
were canted his statement. Furthermore, he emphatically maintained that he
did not kill Raymond Stewart. If I die right now,
I am going to say it. I ain't never harmed
Mr Raymond in my life. If they want, they can

(41:54):
kill me because I said that, but I ain't never
harmed Mr Raymond. Afterward, Henry Sheild was called to the
next to the witness stand. He was another one of
the boys arrested. He testified that after his arrest, he
had been whipped by Deputy Sheriff Cliff Dial in the
murder In jail. Shields said that due to the relentless whipping,
he eventually gave a false confession and declared that he
had a hand in Stuart's murder. Mr Cliff Dial and

(42:15):
then come back that evening and whipped me first. I
tried to tell the truth, but he wouldn't let me.
He said, no, you ain't told the truth, and I
tried to stick to it. He whipped me so hard
I had to tell him something. Ellington, who was the
third boy who was forced subsequently to the stand, also
testified that he was innocent and had been forced to confess.
He stated that shortly after word of Stuart's murder started
making the rounds. He was seized by a mob of

(42:36):
roughly twenty people, several of whom were employees of the sheriff,
including the previously mentioned Cliff Dial. He said that the
men had tied him to a tree and whipped him.
He went on to say that a rope which had
been thrown over a tree limb, was then tied around
his neck and members of the mob pulled him up
in the air twice to force him to divulge information
about the murder. Yeah, it's pretty bad, it's real real, Yeah,

(42:57):
you know, from a practical standpoint, like hey, you know, um,
you know, rocket scientists shareff you know, if you beat me,
there's evidence, so I can go, Yeah, this right here,
that's that's his buckle. That's where that came from, this
rocket science. And then secondly, I think remember that the

(43:18):
To Catch a Murderer, the little series on Netflix. Remember
how like when they finally showed that interrogation of the
little dude that clearly was autistic, you know, and when
they bullied him into saying something just so they bullied
him into say it. Yeah, we'll talk about um that
in a bit because that there's yeah that ties into

(43:40):
this actually rather directly. Yeah, yeah, like this so yeah,
all that to say, like this isn't this is a
normal practice? Yeah if yeah, if you treated your domestic
partner the way that police routinely treat people in Terry Asians,

(44:00):
they would have easy legal standing to get a restraining
order against you and take your guns away if you
own guns, Like it's emotional abuse. So, um, it's worth
noting that. Further on in their testimony, Uh, these boys
made statements to the effect that a great deal of
the local white population knew they were being tortured at
the jail. Now they've been specifically taken to a separate,

(44:23):
geographically isolated jail on the other side of the state
line in order to hide the fact that they were
being tortured. Um. This was common behavior for police around
the country. But at the same time, it was important
to the police that enough white people knew these black
prisoners were being tortured to stop mobs from burning down
one of the jails. Under questioning. Officer Dial did eventually
admit to having beaten the boys. He said that it

(44:44):
was not too much for a negro, not as much
as I would have done if it was left to
me that statements. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and again it's people
can handle a lot. That's exactly what I'm getting into.
This is part of the very long standing trend in
in not just law enforcement, but white racism, the idea

(45:05):
that black people feel less pain than white people. It's,
for one thing, documented that black men and women are
prescribed lower doses of pain killers by doctors for the
exact same ailments as white people are prescribed higher doses.
And this is like a large Black doctors do this.
This is a largely unconscious thing. It's it's so deeply
woven into the fabric of our society, the idea that

(45:25):
black people feel pain somehow less than white people. Yep, yeah,
I don't even maybe that's there, Yeah yeah, might have
something to do with police officers, for example, putting a
knee on one of their necks for eight minutes and
forty six seconds because you're soume, we're fine. Yeah now, yeah,
And you can draw a direct line from the whipping
of slaves in the pre war South and like justifications

(45:48):
for why that wasn't cruel. It was the only way
they would learn, you know, they don't feel pain the same.
This is what you have to do. You can draw
a direct line from that to officer dials abuse to
the fact that, for example, today black and Hispanic people
are fifty like Leier in the United States to experience
non lethal use of force from police. Yeah, yep, all
tied together. Yeah yeah. Dial and his fellow officers insisted

(46:14):
that despite the force used, all three black boys made
free and open confessions to the murder, and this convinced
the all white jerry. Part of white convinced the white
jerry is that a reverend who had been in the
jail at the time testified that they had given free confessions.
By the way, that reverend repeatedly referred to all of
the boys as darkies. Um yeah, yeah, unbiased religious official there. Yeah.

(46:38):
And again I'm highlighting a single case because it is
important for you to know. But also this happened in
every state, particularly in the South and a lot of
parts of the North, on a regular basis. Most police officers,
particularly in the South, had similar participated in similar things.
This was the norm. This was a common occurrence. Um yeah, yeah.

(47:06):
If they didn't participate like officer Dial, they were aware
of other officers doing it. That's probably more common than
than doing it, just because most people aren't comfortable with
with carrying out random physical violence, even most police officers. Um,
but they let it happen. Yeah, broadly supported it. Yeah. Yeah.
The fear that's already striking in somebody, that's like, obviously

(47:28):
the person you talk to is a sociopath, you know
what I'm saying. So like the fear of being like, well,
I'm not going to get in his way because he
won't turn it on me. You know, this guy's crazy.
Look at him. Yeah, crazy, I mean, um, And of
course he's not crazy. Officer Dial, I have no doubt.
Um was completely in possession of his white right mind,
white mind, um, and not not any way mental real

(47:48):
He was a He was enforcing white supremacy through violence
in a way that was effective and rational. Um. Yeah.
So the white jury, after a day and a half
of proceedings, voted to convict all three boys of murder
and have them executed. And thankfully this was a case
where the CP managed to get involved in time, They
appealed and the lives of all three young men were saved.
So as happy an ending as the story of torture

(48:11):
can have, Um, there's a there's a trial like right
before Brown versus Voard of Education that uh missed, missed
all the missed all the fame because of Brown versus
Vard of Education. When yeah, about the white jurors like
being able to, like the law of saying like I
have a right to be you know, tried in front
of a jury of my peers. But it wasn't until

(48:35):
after this case because our documents only recognized two races.
So so if this is a Latino dude, and that's
that's what the case was. It was a Latino dude
who got in a bar fight with a Latino dude, right,
but according to the eyes of the constitution, Latinos are
white until this case. Right, So if you've got an

(48:55):
all white jury, they're like, but they're still looking at
a Mexican dude and he's like, dude, like, these are
not my peers, Like and then they're going, what are
you talking about? You guys are both white people. It's like, no,
where you can't you can't play it both ways, man,
Like you know what I'm saying. So, so what's interesting

(49:17):
about this case, like you said, is like there's clear evidence,
there's obvious evidence. They dude that did it said he
did it, and then the jury acquitted. You know what
I'm saying, Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. And the case
that I just related to you was only exceptional because

(49:39):
some version of justice was eventually done thanks to the
hard work of the end of a CP. Unknowable numbers
of black men and boys were tortured and executed without
the end a CP ever coming to their aid. Um,
just because you know, that's not a criticism of the
end of a CP. The resources were limited, um, playing
whack a mole man like you can't be everywhere, you know. Yeah,
And the FBI did not start to really look into

(50:00):
the problem of torture enforced confessions by US law enforcement
until nineteen forty two. And the Bureau does again get
a little bit of credit for intervening to try and
protect black Americans faster than any other wing of the
US government, But as near to Miyer notes, their efforts
were limited in scope and saw very limited success and
absolutely did not stop the problem or really arrested in
any major way. Some of this has to do with

(50:21):
the history of police torture, and this is where we
get into stuff that's both white and black history, um
you know, in in a in a in a way
um or a history of at least police abuse of
both white and black people for all of the eighteen hundreds.
In the first half of the twentieth century, it was
not illegal for the police in the United States to
torture people. Charges could be brought against the cops that
they committed assaulter, battery, and breach of their regulations, but

(50:44):
that was as hard to prove as you might suspect.
Some states had laws to prohibit the use of violence
to force confessions, but that was not an across the
board sort of thing, near to Meyer notes quote as
investigative reports from that date. From this period reveal, however,
penalties were rarely imposed because district attorneys, duges, and jury
members were highly reluctant to limit the power and authority
of law enforcement officials. While the white press in the

(51:06):
South generally avoided using the term torture and it's reporting
on cases of police violence during interrogations, the term was
purposefully used by the black press to expose and announced
the violent abuse of African American suspects, often in a
bid to gain public support for the fledgling civil rights struggle.
A more common and prevalent term was the third degree,
which was adopted as police jargon in the late nineteenth
century and entered the general American vocabulary in the early

(51:28):
twentieth century. And I'm gonna guess most people know this term, right,
that's yeah, as I say, from the TV, from the choose,
And what that means is I'm going to torture the
ship out of Yeah. Yeah, it's bad. Um yeah, so yeah,

(51:50):
And it is like it. It is a term that
was used to justify police, to dress up police torture
something else. Torture sounds like a crime, giving them the
third degree is something that like hard bitten but goodhearted,
dragnet type cop has to do it. He doesn't like it,
but I gotta keep a city safe, you know. Um yeah.
The term really took off in the nineteen thirties, right

(52:10):
alongside a massive increase in police use of torture. In
ninety one, President Herbert Hoover established the National Commission on
Law Observance and Enforcement, better known as the Wickersham Commission.
It reported that the third degree was used throughout the country,
most often in big cities like New York, Chicago, Detroit,
and Los Angeles. In the South, torture was used to

(52:30):
control black bodies and white mobs, but in the urban
North it was just used to make cop lives easier
by guaranteeing them quick convictions. People at the time were
rightly angry at this, and initiatives were enacted after the
Wickersham Commission to reduce the use of the third degree. Police,
for their part, denied that the third degree existed and
worn with any additional legal restrictions on cops, would cause

(52:53):
crime to rise. Yeah. Yeah, they have one tool and
they use it real well. You know, yeah, well, you know,
you know, if you do this, then you know you're
gonna do You're gonna call it's gonna be more crime.
And as you hear props say that, imagining it's coming
from the voice of a police officer actively pulling a
man's fingernails off. Yeah so yeah. For a long time,

(53:20):
historians thought that government scrutiny successfully reduced the use of
police torture, and maybe it did reduce it, but it
did not eliminate it, and modern scholarship suggests that it
just caused cops to get cagier and a little bit
more clever with how they tortured people. One way to
do this was to transition to methods of torture that
left no physical marks on the victims. In nineteen thirty,
a New York Legal aid organization listed two cases of

(53:43):
suspects who were brutalized by police during interrogations. Most of
the torture victims were uneducated whites under the age of thirty.
A large number of those white boys were immigrants. While
black people were a minority of torture victims in the North,
they were a disproportionate percentage of the victims of New
York Police Department. Torture victims were black men, and black

(54:05):
people made up only five percent of New York's population.
So that's follow me. Now, that's pretty bad. Yeah, yeah,
that ain't good. Dog. When you think of like, so
when I think of like just just statistics of like okay, uh,

(54:26):
some like some like three times three times more likely
if you're a black miner boy to be tried as
an adult, uh, and then and given the harshest, like
the harshest possible sentence. It's like I used to wonder, like, okay,

(54:50):
when like when did how did y'all pull this off?
Like how like I just I couldn't. I couldn't do
the math, Like okay, so like why why why try
us as adults? Like I don't. I don't understand why
you think and why us more than anyone else. And
then you hear stories like this where you're like, well, yeah,

(55:12):
I mean they you know, they routinely just you know,
we could take a lot of pain, and then they
you know, it's well, I mean they've been torturing us
for a while, you know, so like and now you know,
you go, you get to a time where, you know,
post civil rights, where like you said, like you can't
you can't just leave physical marks, and like can I

(55:33):
actually torture fools? We try to figure out other ways
to do it, you know, we just yeah, it's got
so you're continuing the problems. So it's like them getting cunning.
That's what I'm trying to get to them being cunning
is the tradition? Yes, Yes, And then saying also this
thing that you have extensive documentation of happening never happens

(55:55):
when you're a liar. Believe us we're the cops. Yes,
And it gets it gets, it gets worse. I'm gonna
quote again from niedermeyer Um. The report by the Wickersham
Commission highlighted numerous cases from Southern states in which police
officers and sheriffs used batons, fists, and whips to extort
confessions from black suspects. The report also documented the use
of the so called water cure on black suspects, a

(56:18):
forerunner to water boarding that US soldiers used during the
Philippine American War eight two. The water cure consisted of
tying suspects flat on their backs and using a hose
to force water into their mouths or noses until they
provided the requested information and made a confession. Furthermore, the
report mentioned torture methods on African Americans that included the
use of electricity. One of these involved in improvised electric chair,

(56:40):
which was used until nineteen by the sheriff's office and Helena,
Arkansas to extract confessions. The report also pointed to individual
cases of police torture of people of Mexican origin and
white suspects. The cases collected by the Wickersham Commission indicate
that the vast majority of the victims in the South
were African Americans. Primarily men, but also women. Moreover, they
showed that police torture of African Americans in the South

(57:01):
was already commonplace before nineteen thirty. Diverse historical studies confirmed
that this practice can be traced to the days of slavery.
It never ended. They just got cunning, Yes, there it is, yes,
and and I love like, I love how you're you're
bringing out the idea that like, we're not we're not
historical revisionists in the sense to say that this is

(57:24):
a uniquely black experience. That's not to say that black
have had Blacks have had a unique experience in this,
but this is not a unique experience. This is a
This is a continual abuse of power and a protection
of wealth, resources and supremacy. And and nobody is safe.

(57:44):
Nobody is safe. That's part of the that's part of the
the people started to realize. A lot of liberals who
would have been broadly pro police, uh, you know, have
started to realize since getting tear gassed and shot with
rubber bullets by the cops, it's just like safe. If
you give them the right to violently oppress one group
of people, they will start fucking with you. It's the whole.

(58:08):
It's the whole. First, they came for the communist and
I was not a Commis, Like, that's how it works.
It's fascism, Robert. You know what isn't, hopefully fascism the
products and services that support this podcast. Yeah, yep, not
fascism all legally antifa um hopefully Yeah. I call the

(58:37):
Union Hall as his mat of life and death. I
think these people of planning to kill Dr King. On
April four, Dr Martin Luther King was shot and killed
in Memphis. A petty criminal named James Earl Ray was arrested.
He pled guilty to the crime and spent the rest
of his life in prison. Case closed right, James Hilvay

(58:59):
was con for the official story, the authorities would parade
all we found a gun that James L. Ray board
in Birmingham that killed Dr King, Except it wasn't the
gun that killed Dr King. One of the problems that
came out when I got the Ray case was that
some of the evidence, as far as I was concerned,

(59:21):
did not match the circumstances. This is the MLK tapes.
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(01:00:57):
So the through line, the direct line you can draw
from the use of force to suppress black people during slavery,
through the KKK and lynching to the third degree. That
through line is critical because what ties all of this
together is a desire by white people in particularly not
just white people but white moneyed people, um in terms
of who's organizing this to fight against the establishment of

(01:01:18):
black autonomy and equality and sort of weaponizing the rage
that white poor people feel over being poor and turning
that in a racist direction. Anyway, there's a lot that
goes into this. Historian William Brundage, cited by Niedermeyer, sees
white supremacy as continually contested to rain and when black
people would fight back and gain the upper hand. However,
briefly in this struggle, police were the most reliable tool

(01:01:41):
whiteness had to fight back. This has been obvious to
serious researchers for a very long time. Swedish sociologist Gunner
Myrtle wrote in a nineteen forty four study titled an
American dilemma. Quote, the policeman stands not only for civic
order as defined in formal laws and regulations, but also
for white supremacy and the whole set of social customs

(01:02:03):
associated with this concept. It is demanded that even minor
transgressions of cast etiquette should be punished, and the policeman
is delegated to carry out this function. Nineteen forty four,
Gunner saw it. Yeah, there's don't say you weren't warned. Yeah,
people tried, Yes, and yes, I love the idea that

(01:02:26):
it's a Scandinavian country. Now. Yeah, the whitest dude in
the world, what are y'all doing? This is a problem. Yeah.
The federal government and federal law enforcement made attempts in
the nineteen forties and nineteen fifties to push back against
the torture and murder of black people by police. There
were numerous investigations in two different sheriffs and police departments.

(01:02:47):
Some of these investigations even lad to punishments. But as
we saw in the Red Summer of nineteen nineteen, at
the end of the day, black Americans had to rely
on themselves in order to fight back. They did this
in large part through the end of a c P.
These cases helped to drum up both public awareness of
the problem in public support for changes to the system.
You can draw the elect line between the end a

(01:03:08):
CP spending decades fighting these cases and why the murder
of Emmett Till caused a massive nationwide reaction, even among
a lot of white people. It's because they had laid
the groundwork. And you can make a similar case for
not just the end of l a CP at this point,
but like why specifically the murder of George Floyd finally
caused for more seeing Now, Yes, because you gotta you
gotta go back from like from Rodney King all the

(01:03:29):
way to Mike Brown. This. Yeah, it's like it's a
continual like, oh my god, enough enough. Yeah, you gotta
really prepare the white majority to give a shit about
the murder of a black person. Is that I guess
negatively looking at this for years years? Get a white
care Yeah? So um yeah. And again, the CP eventually

(01:03:52):
was successful through a number of cases in in getting
a series of Supreme Court decisions that significantly regulated and
reduced the admissibility the a forced confessions. Um. And that's
that had that helped. But again regulation of the police
in this regard, while it was a good thing, it
did not cure the problem of confessions obtained under the
third degree. It again just inspired the police to get subtler. Yes.

(01:04:16):
In nineteen eighty nine, Gary Dotson became the first wrongfully
convicted person to be proven innocent by DNA testing, and
Gary was white. If you're curious. In the decades since,
more than two people have been exonerated by DNA testing.
In fifteen to twenty percent of these cases, police induced
false confessions were involved. Overall, twelve percent of overturned wrongful

(01:04:36):
convictions in the last thirty years have involved a false confession,
which we don't call a forced confession anymore but probably
ought to. Yes, yeah, yeah, because no one falsely confesses. Yeah,
they are forced to. Nobody's like, ah, you know, it's
like you have a fender bender in traffic, Like I
confess to rape. I'm so sorry that was my Like totally,

(01:05:00):
He's like, wait, you know what my bad did I say?
Did I say I killed that guy? No? No, I
mean I didn't kill that guy. My bad. You know,
I thought was that Tuesday? I thought you saw my Tuesday. Yeah. No, no, no, no,
I didn't say I admit to murder. I said I
liked Fox Molder. I've been watching rewatching the X Files recently.

(01:05:20):
It's my bad. It's you know what I'm saying like,
It's just I fumbled my words. Yeah. The most shocking
example of this might be the case of the Central
Park five, also in nineteen eighty nine. In this case,
a white female jugger was beaten and raped. Five black
and Hispanic children, all between fourteen and sixteen years old,
were taken into custody. All five confessed, and then all

(01:05:41):
five recanted their confessions, claiming they had only confessed after
hours of terrifying and stressful police interrogation. They claimed that
they had only admitted to committing the crime because officers
had heavily insinuated they would get to go home if
they did. All five were convicted and sent to prison.
Donald Trump, then a prominent con man, repeatedly urged that
the boys should be executed. In two thousand two, the

(01:06:04):
real rapist confessed, and DNA evidence confirmed his guilt and
the innocence of all five boys. They were released. The
case of the Central Park five sounds remarkably similar to
the case of those three boys in Mississippi, doesn't it? Yes,
and it should seem very familiar with you because just
because a certain uh, certain elected official was invested in

(01:06:26):
making sure that they stayed in prison, Yes, yes, uh
and yeah the case of the Central Park five. Yeah,
in this case, the boys, you know, in the case
that we read earlier, um, in Mississippi, those boys were
straight up physically tortured. What the Central Park five endured
is much subtler, but some people might call it torture.

(01:06:47):
And this brings me to discussion of the read technique.
The read technique is an interrogation tactic invented in nineteen
sixty two by a former cop and a polygraph expert.
You may recognize the nineteen sixty two is just right
out the same time the Supreme Court said, y'all got
to stop forcing people to confess the crimes they didn't
commit via torture. John Reid, the techniques creator, had a
reputation for being the kind of guy who used psychology

(01:07:09):
to get confessions rather than violence. The origin of his
technique came from a nineteen fifty case when a guy
named Darryl Parker came home to find his wife raped
and murdered. Parker was interrogated, and, according to the New
Yorker quote, Reid hooked Parker up to the polygraph and
started asking questions. Parker couldn't see the movement of the needles,
but each time he answered a question about the murder,

(01:07:30):
Reid told him that he was lying. As the hours
wore on, Reid began to introduce a story contrary to appearances.
He said the Parker's marriage wasn't a happy one. Nancy
refused to give Parker the sex that he required, and
she flirted with other men. One day, in a rage,
Parker took what was rightfully his. After nine hours of interrogation,
Parker broke down and confessed. He recanted the next day,

(01:07:51):
but a jury found him guilty of murder and sentenced
Himp to life in prison. Now Read was like, Ah,
this is the way we should always do interrogations. Uh. Yeah,
And he refined his strategy into a technique which generally
boils down to elaborately accusing the suspect of committing a
detailed crime. After hours and hours of interrogation, Read opened

(01:08:12):
a consulting company which by two thirteen trained more interrogators
than any other company in the world, working for everything
from local police to the FBI, the CIA, in the
Secret Service. The company brags that the people that trains
get their suspects to confess eight percent of the time. Bro,
just think think about what we're telling you right now.
You have to be a absolute like Navy seal level

(01:08:40):
mental agility and fortitude to defend yourself when you're innocent. Yea,
like when I actually didn't do the thing. I have
to be this skilled, you said, which is why you
wait for your lawyer, which is why you have a
right to remain silent. Use it. Just shut the fuck up. Yeah,

(01:09:06):
the Read technique was used on the Central Park five
and numerous other people who have confessed to crimes they
did not commit. Now, the Read company and its president
will say that that is not accurate, that they were
not using the Read technique, and it's largely because they
didn't do it right. That's what they'll claim is that, like,
false confessions are only the result of abuse or misuse
of the technique because the technique has safeguards in it

(01:09:27):
to make sure that no false confessions are obtained by it.
So when people who are trained in the read technique
get confessions from innocent people. It's not because of the
read technique. It's because they were wrongly using the read
technique that makes it cool? Can you the pretzel you
just put your body in? Wow? Okay? Yeah, it wouldn't

(01:09:48):
be great to be able to just like to be
able to just with a straight face and no like
soul conviction. Your soul is so dead inside that you
could make that sentence and be okay with it. Yeah.
It's like if I have a school that trains people
to fire over the heads of crowds with assault rifles,

(01:10:09):
and then some people fire into the crowds with assault rifles.
Clearly none of that's like, I have nothing to do
with that. Said the heads I fled fire told you
shoot over the head. Yeah, there's a safeguard to make
sure no one gets hit. Oh yeah. So the read
technique has started to fall out of favor in the
last really in the last few years, and seventeen was

(01:10:31):
when like one big agency stopped sending interrogators and to
be trained in it. And it this seems to have
like you know you mentioned earlier. I think it was
to catch a predator, right, Um, that that the like
the fact that a lot of interrogations are videotaped and
that some of those came out in documentaries and people
got to see, oh my god, is this what cops
are doing? Yeah, this isn't okay. So it is still

(01:10:53):
very common, still widely in use. But the tide might
seems to be turning on the read technique. We'll see. Um,
it is not legal for police to beat the ship
out of suspects to force a confession, not anymore. And
I guess you could see even the read technique as
an improvement over literal physical torture. Um. But it is
legal for police to lie about evidence, to withhold food

(01:11:14):
and water from suspects for what I would consider to
be long periods of time, and to subject them to
verbal abuse and psychologically torture them until they see confessing
is the only way out. I can't say if the
read technique is responsible from most false confessions in the
modern United States, but I can't tell you the police
department that is responsible for more false confessions than any other.
You want to guess, No, Chicago, Who's gonna be one

(01:11:38):
of the two, right, yeah? Yeah, yeah, Now, more than
thirty of all exonerations that involve false confessions were people
who confessed in Illinois state, and most of those were
people who confess to the Chicago p D. And the
question to why is this happening has a lot to
do with a dude named John Burge. Yeah. So yeah,

(01:12:03):
like a little a little side note especially about what
what you're talking about, like how some of these confessions happen,
and how slick they are, because like say, for example,
you hear on the news that somebody died on Fourth Street, right,
So then when you get picked up and then cops go, ey,

(01:12:26):
did you hear about the shooting on Fourth Street? And
you're like yeah, and then he goes, yeah, that the
that the lady was coming out of the house, and
you're like, yeah, I heard that. First of all, the
story wasn't that there was a shooting. The story was
somebody died. So when he said did you hear about
the shooting, what he's doing is making sure you just

(01:12:47):
confessed to information. They said he had information about the crime.
And because you it's like, I didn't say shooting. You
said shooting? Well no, no no, no, no, no no, I just
asked if you heard about You said you heard about it.
I didn't tell you. The story isn't that there's a shooting.
So like how slick that type of like practice is.
And you listen, I'm telling you this stuff out of experience,

(01:13:08):
you know what I'm saying, Like somebody saying, hey, you here,
the liquor store got robbed out. Hey you heard about
that liquor store robbed Like I had to learn to
be like, nah, I ain't heard ship. I don't heard nothing.
I don't I mean, I don't know. You know what
I'm saying. What do you mean? You don't know? You're
not You're square, You're not part of You're not part
of the streets. You know. I've seen you with your
friends and I'm like, uh, sorry, I don't live here,

(01:13:29):
you know, just like you have to like be Yeah, anyway,
all that to say this stuff is like as like
heinous as we're telling you. It's so subtle and it's
so slick, you know what I'm saying, Like everybody swears, well, well,
if I was in the situation, I'm like, na, you
you would do exactly what everyone else does in the situation. Yeah, yeah,

(01:13:51):
which is why you don't talk and you wait for
your fucking lawyer. Yes, Yeah, John, John motherfucking birds, John
Bird is proof that the old tes tactics of the
third degree still aren't as much a part of the
past as some folks might like to believe. John Burge
was a decorated Vietnam veteran who served as a military
police officer, working for a time as a Provost marshal

(01:14:12):
investigator during that conflict. After the war, he returned to
Chicago and became a cop in nineteen seventy two. He
was promoted to detective one year later. In nineteen seventy three,
he tortured his first victim. According to the Marshall Project quote,
his officers had arrested a man named Anthony Holmes on
suspicion of murder and wanted to him to identify an accomplice.
When Holmes refused, the officers left him handcuffed in an

(01:14:34):
area to investigation room and went to find Burge. A
few minutes later, Burge strolled into the interrogation room with
a mysterious box in a brown paper bag. The box
had a hand crank on one end and two wires
with alligator clamps coming out the other end. According to
trial testimony, decades later, Burge then picked up the alligator
clamps and barked, inward, you're going to tell me what

(01:14:55):
I want to know. He fastened the alligator clamps and
pulled a plastic bag down over Holmes's head, warning him
not to bite through it when the pain hit. Then
he started turning the crank. He was electrocuting him. She's
over the next few yeah, uh yeah yeah. Over the
next few years, Burge continued to be his department's go

(01:15:16):
to torture man. Department rumors stated that he had learned
the techniques he employed during his time in Vietnam on
the bodies of North Vietnamese po ws. We call this
fucos boomerang, the tactics used in colonial wars overseas. Coming
back to the United States, Burge denies that he tortured
anyone in Vietnam. He also denied torturing people here, so
maybe you don't take that super seriously. Um. Yeah. He

(01:15:38):
quickly perfected what he called his inward box, which is
what he named the box he used to electrocute black people,
often electrocuting their testicles. I've talked to one of Burge's victims,
and that's what Birge did him as he electrocuted his
testicles with his inward box. Um. Yeah, there's there's a
there's which is a whole other story I want to
get to. But there's this weird fascination with torturing of

(01:15:59):
black genit with it's very common in lynching, very common
in lynching, that they would be severed and even taken
as like souvenirs. Yeah, and it's one of those like
my eternal question putting through how much detail do I
go into? We could have done six episodes on lynching,
and it deserves six episodes, but not trying to give
a broader I appreciated like that not being mentioned. Yeah, Yeah,

(01:16:21):
it's the thing because of his high case clearance rate,
because he gave boy John's real good at getting criminals
to confess. He's solving all these murders. Because of his
high case clearance rate, John was promoted to sergeant and
then to lieutenant and eventually to commander. John burgess behavior
was not hidden from other men in the Chicago Police.
He kept his inward box out on open display at

(01:16:42):
a table in the police station. He trained dozens of
other Chicago officers in his techniques, which expanded over the
years to include electric cattle prods, simulate and simulated executions.
Burgess officers often beat subjects with telephone books, flashlights, batons,
and bats. They burned men with hot radiators cigarettes. They
put plastic bags over the heads of others and suffocated them.

(01:17:04):
This went on for a very, very long time. The
end began in nineteen eighty two, when two police officers
were murdered and Burge and his team tortured the ship
out of a pair of black brothers until they confessed.
The injuries one of them suffered were significant enough that
a medical official reported on them, and that was the
first crack in the Burge system. Allegations of torture by

(01:17:26):
Burge and his men, though, didn't break through the blue
wall of silence until a nineteen eighty nine civil lawsuit
by the People's Law Office. One of the attorneys behind
this case, who later represented many Burge victims, was Flint Taylor.
He described the existence of Burgess Unit as an unremitting
official cover up that has implicated a series of police superintendents,
numerous prosecutors, more than thirty police detectives and supervisors, and

(01:17:50):
most notably Richard M. Daley, the city's former longtime mayor,
and a previous state's attorney. The whole story came out
in bits and pieces through a mix of victims coming
forward in anonymous sources within the department. One of these
anonymous sources was a cop who left again anonymous voice
messages for Flint Taylor. Taylor and his fellows nicknamed this
guy Deep Badge. So part of the lesson here is

(01:18:12):
that after seventeen years of torture that was enthusiastically supported
at every level of the Chicago p D, a couple
of good cops did finally work up the courage to
leave anonymous voicemails after a lawyer had figured out the
basics of the case and publicized them. That's what good
cops get you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's like three of them,
and then and it takes me seventeen years to do anything.
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. Burge was eventually accused of

(01:18:36):
torturing more than a hundred people, virtually all of whom
were black, between nineteen seventy two and nineteen ninety one.
That means recent. Yeah, at this point, we know that
there's probably over two hundred victims. We will never know
the true number of Birge victims. It's been a lot
of these guys were executed, a lot of them died
in prison. In the Chicago Police Board voted to fire

(01:18:58):
John Burge. This into did plans the local Fraternal Order
of Police had made that same year to honor Burge
and four o their officers with a parade float. All
of the other four officers were also accused of torturing people.
By the time he was fired, Burge had risen to
the rank of commander. He was not charged criminally until
two thousand eight and not sent to prison until two
thousand eleven. He got out of prison in two thousand fourteen.

(01:19:21):
Chicago has paid out millions of dollars in reparations to victims,
but an unknown number of Burge's victims still remain in prison.
Multiple people were released from death row as a result
of all of this coming to light, but we will
again never know how many innocent men were executed. Burge
died in two thousand eighteen, four years after he was
released from prison. Chicago's police union issued a statement on

(01:19:42):
their Facebook page offering condolences to the Burge family and
insisting it does not believe the full story about the
Burge cases has ever been told. Dean Angelo, former head
of the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police, told reporters, I
don't know that John Burge got a fair shake based
on all the years and years of service that he
gave the city. He insisted, Burge put a lot of
bad guys in prison two thousand eighteen. The cops who

(01:20:06):
believe this are still on the force. Just guys there,
most of the force. Ah, yeah, guys. Yeah, you're asking
you're asking us to respect you, and it's like I
would love to I would love to respect just do

(01:20:29):
respectable things. Yeah. Yeah. You know who I respect. My
my neighbor across the street who has never tortured several
hundred people that I respect him. Yeah, he's He's earned
my respect by virtue of being a human being who
doesn't commit random acts of violence. Yeah. It's not hard

(01:20:49):
to earn respect. You just have to not Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
So I'm sure that Burge did go to his grave
believing that, like what he did had been worth it,
because he again put a lot of bad guys in prison.
I talked to one of Burgess victims, and this guy
had an extensive violent criminal record when he wound up
in Burgess hands. He had done bad things, and John

(01:21:11):
probably figured, we've got a crime. This guy's a scumbag fucket,
he's got to be guilty. And oddly enough, that thinking,
the thinking that John Burge probably used to justify his crimes,
the thinking that the Chicago Police Department and the Fraternal
Order of Police in Chicago certainly uses to justify Burgess
crimes even today, that thinking these guys were guilty, that
thinking puts them all right in line with the law

(01:21:34):
abiding interrogators who used the read technique. Richard Leo, a
law professor from the University of San Francisco, spent nine
months sitting in an almost two interrogations in Oakland during
the mid nineteen nineties. He learned that most officers who
again these guys were all trained in the read technique.
He learned that most officers were skipping a critical aspect
of the proper read technique. That aspect is having an
initial interview with the suspect. You're supposed to like interview them,

(01:21:56):
have like a normal conversation with them, and kind of
decide if you think they're guilty before you move on
to the interrogation. I'm going to quote from the New
Yorker again. The read interrogation technique is predicated upon an
accurate determination during behavioral analysis of whether the suspect is lying. Here, too,
social scientists find reason for concern. Three decades of research
have shown that nonverbal signals so prized by the red

(01:22:18):
trainers bear no relation to deception. In fact, people have
little more than coin flipping odds of guessing if someone
is telling the truth, and numerous surveys have shown that
police do know better. Aldert Rig, a professor of psychology
at the University of Portsmouth and England, found that law
enforcement experience does not necessarily improve the ability to detect lies.
Among police officers, those who said they paid close attention

(01:22:40):
to nonverbal cues did the worst. Similarly, an experiment by
Cason shows that both students and police officers were better
at telling true confessions from false ones when they listened
to an audio recording of an interview rather than watch
it on video. In the experiment, the police officers who
performed less well than the students but expressed greater confidence
in their ability to tell who was lying. Cops will

(01:23:01):
always tell you they know how to spot a liar
they are lying. Yeah, you can't really, there's no way
to know. Yeah, there's no way to know, you know.
And I feel like in all my police interactions, UM,
and I'm saying this as someone with like I don't
I don't think I have a criminal record. Maybe you

(01:23:22):
know what I'm saying. But in all of the interactions
I've had, whether it was o overtly racist or very aggressive,
or the guy was being a nice guy, or you
just meet like like you guys playing a nice cary,
or you just meet like a he's just like he's
like really a good dude. It really doesn't care. He's

(01:23:43):
just he's just doing his job. You know. I feel
like I've had all of those you know what I'm saying. Um,
But in the ones, invariably, you know you're being sized up,
you know, and it's like so even then like this,
it's just and sometimes I'm like, why are we playing
this game right now? Like this is your your horrible actors?

(01:24:07):
I know what you're doing, you know what I'm saying. Like,
and then when you when I hear you say like
they were supposed to train train to do an initial interview,
and I noticed dudes trying to build rapport with me,
you know what I'm saying. Um, And I'm like, I
know this is okay, I know, I know what you're doing. Like,
I know what you're doing. Okay. What time of day

(01:24:30):
was it? All? Right? Word? How tall was the guy? Okay? Cool?
Uh So I'm just like, just get to it, man,
just get to it. Let me tell you. You want
to know where I was. You want to know where
I live? Okay, Here's where I live. Here's what I
was doing at this time. Tell me what time it was?
I fit what description? Can we just get to that
rather than artists rigamar Yeah, I'm ranting. Yeah. So I

(01:24:50):
talked earlier about how police torture to force confessions didn't stop.
It just got settler under pressure, and the same is
true with the impact of racism and law enforcement. After
Jim Crow ended, the most obvious justification for bigoted policing
was gone, but the bigotry remained, as it a system
that was built almost completely during a period of time
where either slavery, black codes or Jim Crow laws were

(01:25:10):
the rule. In Minneapolis, where black people make up nineteen
percent of the population, they are subjected to fifty eight
percent of use of force cases by the city's police.
A May two thousand twenty, studies showed that out of
ninety five million traffic stops nationwide between two thousand and
eleven and two thousand and eighteen, black people were vastly
more likely to be pulled over than white people, except

(01:25:32):
at night, when the gap shrinks considerably Black people because again,
the cops can't tell what race you are is easily black, yeah,
so they're not They're not able to judge this is
a guilty person before the interaction. Black yeah. Black people
are also more likely to be searched during a stop,
even though white people are more likely to actually have

(01:25:52):
contraband on them. I could go on and on, but
the basic point is the same. All of these cops,
from Officer Dial to John Birge to current police officers
who are today two and a half times likely to
shoot a black man than a white one, all of
these cops are making, at a certain level, the same decision.
They are judging black people as guilty before they know

(01:26:14):
anything more than their skin color. And this is persistent
through every single level of law enforcement in our country.
Over the decades, activists and good lawyers and Supreme Court justices,
and even a few decent cops here and there have
worked to make forced confessions and admissible in court. They
have worked to report and charge police for torture. They
have worked to tear down the Jim Crow laws that
provided legal justification for a lot of police aggression. And

(01:26:36):
yet the aggression is still there. We have learned to
channel it and probably to make it less fatal. We've
gotten better at punishing the most blatant expressions of it,
but we have not stopped it. And American police today
are still doing the same thing they have been doing
since the eighteen hundreds. They are enforcing white supremacy through violence. Period. Yep, period.

(01:26:58):
I'll say this in like period. I say this like
on a personal note. So, my little brother, you know,
not by blood, but we just grew up together and
I lived in our house whatever it is. You know,
our families work. My little brothers is a California Highway patrolman.
So confession, I got law enforcement in my family. My

(01:27:21):
brother has worked there for ten fifteen years. He's never
pulled a gun ever in his life, right, never has
he ever pulled a weapon out. He is one of
those ones like you said that it's like reporting dudes,
that's like building community layers ons. He does it after school.
He lives, he's in the valley, does after school programs,
runs a basketball league like the people know him so

(01:27:42):
like so, so there's that. My father, you know, we
talked about my father. My father was a Black Panther.
After he left the Black Panther Party because they killed it, right,
he moved being the FBI. My father was l a
county probation officer. He worked with like underage defenders, retired
from their right so worked in a special handling unit.

(01:28:02):
He wanted to deal with the violent ist of young
offenders thirty years thirty years, never at once recommended jail time,
never right because of what he's talking about, the systems
designed to destroy these young black and brown men. So
his answer was let me have them. I remember as

(01:28:25):
a child, like going to King signeras and and and
g D g D like graduations and stuff like that,
all these like random kids that I didn't know. Turns
out there were kids on his caseload because he was
shielding them from the system. He told me stories of
like looking at the judge, telling the judge full well,

(01:28:45):
do not send this kid to prison. Do not send
him to prison. The cops doing the same thing. The
cops arrested this guy, showing them, showing them the transcript
and being like, this is a false confession. This kid
is innocent. He shouldn't be on my case. Ode and
then watching that foill go to prison. You know what
I'm saying. So when you, when you, when you even

(01:29:06):
into us, bring all those things up to say, this
is that even if you find good men and good women,
the system is flawed. And this is what we're trying
to get to. The structure is wrong. Yes, the the
the statement all cops are bastards, I think has been traditional,

(01:29:28):
like historically kind of unproductive in terms of actually getting
people to to um confront the real issues of of
of law enforcement. But what people mean by it is
actually very accurate, which is that it is it is
impossible to be like even if you are a good person,
a nice person who is a police officer and is

(01:29:48):
legitimately aware of the problems and policing and trying to
do your best, you are also partaking and helping to
con and helping to maintain and and further a system
that is undamentally abusive and enforces for supremacy and a
period we are not what what we're not saying is
that all cops should never have a job in that

(01:30:09):
that that like, there's there's homicide detectives who are good
solving murders. When we get rid of the police and
replace them with something, I want those people to still
be solving murders because it's good. Yeah, Um, you know
there are. If you know a a police officer who
is a great person and is is an asset to
the community, that person should probably still be doing a

(01:30:32):
broadly similar a lot of the same things they're doing.
But there shouldn't be you know, I talked to cops
a lot. I've talked to a lot of cops will
talk about like being forced to arrest people for simple
possession of drugs, even though they personally agree with ending
the drug war, and like that's the problem that you're
forced to do it, and that's the we don't We

(01:30:52):
We decided as a as a species that just following
orders is not a justification for violating people's civil rights.
Think about when we decided that and why, yes, and
where it led and where it started. Yeah, yes, you
are hearing the cries of both my father and my brother,
who both were like, I don't know if I could
do this much longer. Even in me trying right, I'm

(01:31:16):
trying to do the right thing. I'm trying to be
an advocate for these young people, like I'm doing my best,
like at least they got somebody on their side, you
know what I'm saying, And you're but you're still like,
I'm still I'm still throwing you to the wolves. I'm
just giving you, you know, a protective jacket. But the
point is I'm still throwing you to the wolves because
the it's the the whole like it's what you're trying

(01:31:40):
to say, It's like the whole thing needs a grenade.
Because again, like you said, I want to be able
to call somebody if my house is being broken into.
Of course I want to be able to call somebody,
But most likely who's breaking into my house is a
meth head just trying to steal the PS four because
he wants to hit. Don't kill the guy, like just

(01:32:03):
I just want him out my house, and you know what,
I could probably you know what, I probably won't call
him because I could get him by my house because
he's hot. You know what I'm saying. Yeah, yeah, it's
it's this I mean and again when you actually we'll
talk about this some next week. But when you look at,
for example, homelessness, you find out that it costs the
state less money to give homeless people homes then it
costs to police and incarceraate them. It costs less money

(01:32:26):
to give drug addicts drugs than to police them and
to deal with the results of them stealing ship for drugs.
They found that on like Denmark where they give heroin
addicts heroin and it saves them huge amounts of money
Toronto to Yeah, like safe injection zones. You don't have
to police this ship. And in fact, most things shouldn't
be policed. Maybe only violence should be policed exactly. If

(01:32:49):
you're like, I try to like as as simple as
we can make it. If my daughter comes in and
she don't do her chores because she's got a cold,
and I ground her rather then say here's some tail
and all, like you would be like, that's ridiculous. You've
for a ground her because she got a cold. That's stupid. Okay,
that's putting an addict in prison, you know, what I'm saying.

(01:33:11):
It's like, this is did do you? What do you? What?
Are you grounding? That doesn't make sense? We're ranting. Yeah,
we're ranting. And um it's it's time for some plug
doubles to get plugged. Yes word uh all my instagrams
and socials are prop hit pop. Go to prop hit

(01:33:31):
pop dot com for poetry, rap, for some podcasts, for
some sustainable merch, some cups, some coffee. If you want to,
you want to support non corporate coffee on a coffee head,
hit me up. Let's talk about like Jeff tweetye and
cigarettos because I am the most unicorny black dude you'd
ever meet that I can talk to you about cigarettes

(01:33:55):
and I am. I'm gonna keep reading and writing about
police for another week or so. Um and um, I
don't know. We'll talk about Bill Cooper or something at
some point. Yeah, we'll talk We have all for some
like for something light, like a like a dictator. Yeah yeah, yeah,
we'll talk about somebody somebody fun you know, well, somebody

(01:34:17):
not connected to my own safety. And yeah, well we'll
do We'll talk about chairman now or somebody somebody here. Yeah,
everybody loves a good chairman mouse story, Oh my dad,
or maybe Tito Tito. Yeah, yeah, Tito was cool as hell.
I mean he was a monster, but he was a
cool monster. Still talking about bastards, but the point is yeah, yeah,

(01:34:38):
Well we'll do something more lighthearted. But um you can
find us online it behind the Bastards dot com, where
there will be sources for this episode, including the really
important book The Color of the Third Degree, um, and
all the other really important book The End of Policing,
both of which are important, if not easy reading, well, actually,
end u Policing is very easy reading The Color of

(01:34:58):
the Third Degree is some rough ship. Um. Yeah, and
you can find me on Twitter at I right, okay,
and go be a good person and disband um the
American system of policing. Um, I'll do do both of
those things ideally today, Amen, shall we collect offering? Behind

(01:35:24):
the Police is a production of I Heart Radio. For
more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What girls in the Forest, our imagination and our family bonds.
The forest is closer than you think. Find a forest
near you and discover the Forest dot org brought to

(01:35:45):
you by the United States Forest Service and the AD Council.
What girls in the forest, our imagination, and our family bonds.
The forest is closer than you think. Find a forest
near you and discover the forest dot Org brought to
you by the United States Fourth Service and the AD Council.
After thirty years, it's time to return to the halls

(01:36:06):
of West Beverly High and hang out at the peach pit.
On the podcast nine O two one o MG, visit
Jenny Garth and Tori Spelling for a rewatch of the
hit series Beverly Hills nine O two one oh. From
the very beginning, we get to tell the fans all
of the behind the scenes stories to actually happen, so
they know what happened on camera obviously, but we can
tell them all the good stuff that happened off camera.

(01:36:28):
Listen to nine O two one O MG on the
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Robert Evans

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