Part One: The Worst Police Union In History

Robert is joined by Tuck Woodstock to discuss the worst Police Department in the Country.

1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/06/10/police-unions-violence-research-george-floyd/ 
2. https://www.amazon.com/Pickets-Pistols-Politics-Portland-Association/dp/B0043SVC3E
3. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds/4434/
4. https://college.lclark.edu/programs/political_economy/student_resources/past/
5. https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-police-union-power-helped-increase-abuses 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Podcast pod cast podcast. I'm Robert Evans. This is Behind
the Bastards, a podcast where we talk about people who
are bad um with people who aren't bad. And today
the person who isn't bad to talk about the people
who are bad is Tuck Woodstock. Tuck, how are you
doing today? I'm okay. Thank you so much for having
me with such a generous introduction. Not bad, I'll take it. Yeah,

(00:25):
I'm going for it. Uh, Tuck. You are a Portland
area journalist and podcaster and someone who I got tear
gass with a bunch during you know, the whole year. Really,
how are you doing today, Tuck? I'm okay, I'm alright.
The sun is shining, which helps I think that there's

(00:46):
this been, this weird gift where yes, we do have
to just cower inside because there is a pandemic, but
we're getting like a little bit of extra so on
out of it. So I'm just trying to take it
where I can get it, you know, Yeah, take it
where you can get it is a good motto for um.
I just also feel like I didn't get the sun
in the summer because we were both working like nine
pm to five am, which is conveniently the only time

(01:08):
in Stark in the summer, and so I was like, well,
I was just out the entire night all summer, so
I get some sun now. So you would wake up
about an hour and a half before dusk and go
out to get to your guest again. Yeah, the number
of times that we all went to bed like as
the sun was rising, I had to like invest in
some like iyemasks, you know, it was ridiculous. Yeah, it was,
in other words, a very healthy summer. And it was

(01:29):
a healthy summer. It was a healthy summer because of
our friends in the Portland Police Bureau are are good buddies. Um.
And you know, when you're talking about the Portland Police Bureau,
you're also talking about the Portland Police Association, which is
the Portland Police Union and oddly enough, one of the
most important unions of not the most important police unions

(01:50):
in the entire country. Do you know much about the
p p A. You know, I know what I've heard
while I was standing outside their union building and people
were chanting at them, and I know that they don't
love any effort to defund the p p b uh
and that's about as much as I know. I know,
like the guy in charge doesn't love the protests, which

(02:13):
you know, shocking personally, but no, I don't know that much.
I'm excited to learn more about the people who's building
we've been standing outside of all year. Yeah yeah, yeah,
uh well, that's what we're gonna do today. And because
this is a this is actually a subject, you know it.
We're focusing on Portland today, but the p p A
is a subject that I think everyone, at least in

(02:33):
the United States should have some interest in because, as
as it turns out, they kind of the Portland Police
Union kind of set the tone for every police union
in the United States because it was the first it
was the first successful police union in the country. So
I want to start by talking a little bit about
police unions in general so we can contextualize why they're

(02:55):
a problem. Um So, A two thousand, eighteen Oxford University
study of police unions in the one hundred largest US
cities found that police protections in union contracts are directly
and positively correlated with police violence and abuse towards citizens.
This includes protections like contractual guarantees that officers found engaging
in misconduct should not be publicly shamed, that they shouldn't

(03:17):
be questioned within two days of a shooting or another
act of fatal violence, and that they shouldn't be publicly
identified after assaulting citizens. Shockingly, this causes police to hurt
more people. Um, really surprising stuff. That's why I love unions, right,
It's like all the cool worker protections, Like you get
to just kill people without any sort of repercussion or

(03:38):
notice whatsoever. That's why I love a union. Go ahead.
I remember when the steel Workers union went on strike
because they weren't getting to murder enough people, and we
were all like, yeah, you should get to murder more people. Yeah, yeah. Uh.
Two thousand nineteen studied by the University of Chicago found
that when Florida's sheriff's deputies received collective bargaining rights the
main power imparted by unions, incidents of violent police conduct

(04:02):
in Florida increased by across the states. This is not
a subtle correlation. Now. Professor Rob Gilso's research, which will
be published in an upcoming study, found that nationwide police
ability to collectively bargain led to a significant rise in
police killings of civilians, and of course, people of color
were subject to an outsized number of those killings. This

(04:23):
may have something to do with the fact that police
unions regularly sue to reinstate officers who are fired for
killing innocent people. Nationwide, they succeed about of the time,
but in some cities the number is north of seventy. Uh.
San Antonio would be one example. In Minneapolis, it's like
fifty or so. UM. Now, w b e Z, a
Chicago radio station, found that between two thousand and seven

(04:45):
and two thousand fifteen, Chicago's Independent Police Review Authority, which
the union fought for um because they only wanted cops
to judge as the cops rather than civilians to be
able to fire cops. Uh. This body investigated four hundred
police shootings and found officers were justified and three four
hundred incidents. So you know, I'm surprised about this too.

(05:06):
That's really generous of them. Yeah, that's I'm glad they
found those two bad cops. And they're like, see, we're
a legit organization. Where doesn't that you know, we're real,
We're real. Yeah. In Minneapolis, the police union also succeeded
in replacing its Civilian Review Board with an Office of
Police Conduct Review and over eight years, the public filed

(05:26):
more than misconduct complaints. Twelve of those resulted in punishment. Again,
I perfectly legitimate organization. That's really twelve bad ones. Uh. Like,
it's one of those things. I interviewed a cop years
and years ago about like police misconduct, and you know,

(05:46):
one of the statements he made to me is like, well,
when when journalists get accused of bad behavior, do you
tend to assume that like they were in the right
or the wrong to like make the case that that's
why cops back other cops. And I was like, I
get what you're saying, But also if I to hear
that out of twenty complaints of misconduct by journalists only
twelve or found valid, I'd say, no, it's got to
be at least thirteen hundred, right, Like, I know journalists

(06:09):
also are the complaints the journalists murdered people? Because I
would take those more seriously personally. It does it does
have something to do with what the complaints are about,
right Like yeah, So yeah, that's just a little bit
about unions, because today again we're gonna be talking about
the union that started it all. Because every statistic I've

(06:31):
just cited here, Uh, and all the murders and beatings
that those statistics represent, all the crimes against actual in
human beings, can be tied in some ways back to
a single specific police union, the Portland Police Association. Now
the Portland Police were not always unionized, but they were
always kind of ship like most police agencies in the
United States, their story goes back further than the concept

(06:53):
of police unions. From eighteen fifty one to eighteen seventy,
the city of Portland was policed by a marshal who
was elected or appointed to a two year term. He
could hire deputies and these were basically just like freelance
guys with guns and badges until the eighteen sixties. It
wasn't until eighteen seventy that Portland was enough of a
real city to merit its own police force, initially called
the Portland Metropolitan Police Force. At the time, the city

(07:16):
had about nine thousand residents and the police force was
seven people, which it seems like a good number for
a police force to be compared to the current number,
and I would take it. Yeah, yeah, seven cops. I
think they'd be nicer. Um. Things grew rapidly from there,
and in nineteen o eight Portland became the first city
anywhere in the USA to hire a female officer, So

(07:38):
that's good. More woman cops. Yeah. The Bureau was also
the first to use radios. In the early nineteen tens,
they joined the proud tradition of US law enforcement cracking
the schools of left wing labor organizers. And that's going
to bring me briefly to the tale of Portland's Red Squad.
Have you ever heard of the Red Squad? Now, I'm

(07:58):
so excited we still have one. But they don't call
it that anymore. Is it for communists? Yeah, it's for
beating the ship out of communists, well, leftists in general,
anarchists too, you know, they don't like the wobblies. So
the Red Squads started to ramp up as a unit
during the Roaring twenties, which, as a decade of increasing
wealth and equality and ballooning fortunes for the rich, was

(08:20):
also a decade when a lot of people were like,
communism seems like maybe something we could try. Um. And
you know, Portland's always had a left wing radical tradition.
More than a dozen of its citizens went off to
fight fascism in the Spanish Civil War and the labor
movement had a strong home here, and that was really
the crux of it. Leftists kept organizing workers into unions,
and business owners wanted those people identified and punished before

(08:41):
they could mess up people's profit margins. So while some
of the Red Squad was funded by the city, most
of its money came from business owners in Portland who
wanted to know which of their employees were considering joining
a union so that they could fire them. I'm obsessed
at this Do any of those businesses still exist? I
need to know. That is a great question and should
be looked into. I do not have that research in

(09:02):
front of me, but I I it wouldn't be hard
to do. I don't think people were reporting on the
Oregonian reported on in the thirties. Yeah, well they have
a mixed story in this episode two. Um so Yeah,
the nineteen thirties Portland kind of sounds a lot like
Portland today. For example, in nineteen thirty four, there mayde

(09:25):
a celebration. Demonstrators hung a red Revolutionary flag over city Hall,
and a malfunctioning poll mechanism stopped the city from taking
it down. The Portland Communist Party held a parade against hunger, fascism,
and war, and for the first time in Portland's history,
the protesters had a functional p A system. Demonstrators were
called to meet at three pm to march to the
Plaza Park for unemployment insurance, social security, free milk for children,

(09:47):
and a release of class war prisoners. And that really
scared rich people in the town and the cops. The
Red Squad started sending an officers to infiltrate left wing groups.
After this, they hired agent provocateurs to suggest acts of
violence during planning eatings that the police could then crack
down violently before protests, claiming that they had intelligence about
violence from protesters. Um, yeah, it's some good ship. Yeah.

(10:09):
Where they where they threatened by the unemployment or the
milk for children? That's what I really need to know
what they're concerned about here? Equal I would say, equal parts,
equal parts milk for little kids and unemployment shares. Yeah.
And I'm gonna quote now from a two thousand right
up for Lewis and Clark College by Michael Monk. Quote.
Throughout the decade, it's undercover agents and provocateurs made desperate

(10:33):
efforts to suppressive, destabilize radical political groups and union organizing,
including pressuring Lincoln High School students, artists, and anti fascist organizers.
And again he's writing this in two thousands, so before
Rose City Antifa exists, before antifa is like a buzzword,
like just kind of to note that the Portland police
is antipathy towards anti fascists goes back quite a ways. Um,

(10:55):
And there's a reason Portland police were sympathetic to fascism
during the nineteen two when the Second KKK arose, it
was something of a cross between like an MLM scheme
and a hate group. Oregon was one of its centers
of recruitment. It was one of the states with the
most clansmen, and there were a number of times where
huge numbers of KKK guys would would march through the
streets of Portland. And of course many of the clansmen

(11:16):
who marched through Portland were also cops. In ninety three
Portland Telegram article reported that the police bureau was quote
full to the brink with clansmen. The Portland Police Bureau
actually deputized a hundred clansmen handpicked by the local Grand
Dragon and designated them Portland Police vigilantes. They got badges
I love it so cool and good. It makes sense,

(11:42):
you know, there's all the chance in the street of
like cops and clan go hand in hand, and it's
like no, literally they are just like the one hand
on the other hand on the same human body. Yeah,
it's not a euphemism. Yeah. Um. Now, as you might expect,
a police bureau that consisted mostly of white supremacists and
fascist sympathizers did not react kindly to the cause of
organized labor. On July eleven, nineteen, Portland's longshoreman went on strike,

(12:06):
blocking the Union Pacific train line from delivering freight out
of the port that gives Portland it's name. The Portland
police loaded up onto a train with a bunch of
strikebreakers and attempted to drive through the Union lines. When
longshore been threw rocks at them, the police drew shotguns
and revolvers and fired wildly into the crowd from a
moving train. Uh. They wounded four and killed one, So
that's good. Yeah, you know, I guess the protests today

(12:30):
could be worse firing live rounds at us from a
moving vehicle. They did ramas a couple of times with
police cars, um, but not with a train, right, yeah,
it's getting We've reformed them. Uh. In nineteen thirty six,
a German naval vessel sailed into Portland's harbor, and of course,

(12:52):
because it was ninety six, the German navy was, you know,
a bunch of a bunch of Nazis, um and yeah,
this this vessel or the Swastika flag, which marked the
very first time that the swastica was flown in the
city of Portland, but of course not the last time.
The Evening Herald, a Klamath Falls newspaper noted thousands of
citizens who lined the west Harbor wall and city officials

(13:13):
gave the end in which was the ship and its men,
an enthusiastic welcome. So thousands of Portland's showed up to
cheer for the first Nazis to come into town. They
got to march like the actual Nazi sailors, got to
march through the streets of Portland. It doesn't sound wrong
to me. Now. Those literal Nazis were of course protected
by the police, and they were opposed by a small

(13:35):
number of brave anti fascist demonstrators. Eleven of them were
arrested quote on a charge of parading banners without permits
by members of the Red Squad. Yeah, that is the
danger the Nazis are here. I mean, honestly, this sounds
exactly like what would happen to you today. Like it
is not different, No, it's not at all. Like Nazis
continue to march in town and the police continue to

(13:56):
arrest the people who show up to oppose them. It's
the same, it's the same. It's great. These Nazis had
a boat, which I guess is a change. You know.
I think we there's like the Trump the Trump boat
things that we're sinking the other boat. Do you know
what I'm talking about? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that was like yeah, yeah,
it's not the same, but I feel like it's like

(14:17):
a similar energy if we could kind of combine those
two things together. I think the sinking boat was one
of my favorite things to see on Twitter all year.
It's just like the singing Trump boat, because there were
a lot of like Trump vessels that sunk, non Trump vessels,
just China have a good time. Yeah, that I don't
like as much. Now, Yeah, it's all great, So go ahead.

(14:41):
The anti fascists who protested again actual Nazis marching through
the streets of Portland carried banners denouncing Hitler and demanding
that the US and no athletes to the Berlin Olympics.
Nobody listened to them. Um, and again eleven of them
were arrested. The newspaper notes that three of them were
Read College students. Congratulation just read you had a strong

(15:03):
reaction to that, tuck. Yeah. I know a lot of
people from Read College, and it it just tracks there.
Um there. What is their slogan? Their slogan is like communism, anarchy,
free love. What is it? It's something like that. It's
really powerful. Good for them. Well, I'm proud of Read College. Uh.

(15:24):
The newspaper also notes that five of them were women,
which it says something about the times. I guess that
that was that was a worthwhile statement to make. Um yeah, uh.
And I think before we move on, I want to
read the names of the arrested people, because I think
it's probably good to remember that while thousands of Portlands
showed up to be like yeah, Nazis, eleven people were

(15:44):
like fuck you guys. Uh, and those people ruled uh.
John Hammond, Robert Lewis, William Wood Esther Layton, who was
the secretary of the American League against the war and fascism,
Mary Gould of the International Labor Defense League, uh Say Nordling,
Earl Steward, Frank Webber, Mrs Violet Olsen, and Mrs Levina

(16:05):
Hennett and Lillian Foster. So good on all of them.
All right, did some research while you did read that list,
because I too am a journalist and I just want
to read to you. An unofficial motto of read is communism, atheism,
free love, and can be found in the Red College bookstore.
It was a label that the Red community claim from
critics during the nineteen twenties. So here we are, yeah

(16:27):
this period, Good on you read. So when World War
Two started, the Portland Police contained a number of officers
who are members of fascist and Nazi sympathetic organizations. They
put their heads down and whistled loudly as their nation
went to war against fascism. It was rather ironically this
war that would finally convince the Portland police that all
those labor organizers they've beaten and shot over the years

(16:50):
might have had a point. The cause of this was
Police Chief Niles, a forward thinking cop who had established
one of the nation's first police academies in Portland and
nineteen forty. Prior to this, Portland police had been trained
on the job, which means they were not trained at all.
The book Pickets, Pistols and Politics, which is a complete
history of the Portland Police Union, and I can send
you a copy if you want to. It's it's fun
reading notes that quote fresh recruits were given a star

(17:12):
in a whistle and shoved out the door. Good. Why
why would you need to train anyone that's better though
than what they're doing now. Our cops are highly trained
and it has not helped. Let's go back to the
whistle star day whistle. I do love a whistle. Yeah,

(17:36):
you know who else loves whistles? Everybody loves whistles. Yeah,
what do you do? Yeah? And let's hear from our finisher.
Are you're plug there? I was going to go to
ads and say that our our sponsors, all of whistles
sponsored by a whistle company. Yeah. Well, Big Whistle is
actually heavily in bed with the police union, so I

(17:57):
don't think we're going to get any of that money.
Fair enough, another sponsors foiled. We're back. Okay, So we're
talking about Harry Niles, the police chief, who's again Big
modernizer you know, also establishes Portland's or Oregon's first police

(18:18):
science school, forms a discipline board for his cops, and
he gives his cops modern uniforms, which at this point
they did still have to pay for themselves. But Niles
had some problems that got in the way of him
modernizing the Portland Police. One of them was the fact
that a lot of Portland's cops were old as hell. Uh.
The pension was bad in those days, and so people
would hang onto the job even though they like really

(18:38):
could barely walk anymore, um because again it would be
that or starve on the streets. Old cops had never
been forced to pass a civil service exam, which was
required of new recruits, and that was also a problem
for Harry because again, he wants police to be professional.
To make his dreams of a young, sexy, modern Portland
police beer or a reality, Niles had to find a
bunch of extra money and what was at that point

(18:59):
of very limited budget. So he decided to put all
of the old cops on what he called park patrol,
which would force them to spend twelve hours shifts on
their feet at a much lower rate of pay, reducing
their pay opened up funds for new cops, and basically
he was kind of hoping that making them walk all
day would make a lot of them quit or die
on the job and free up more money. Die on
the job. Yeah, you kind of get that. He didn't

(19:22):
say it, but he's giving the old guys a job
that makes them walk twelve hours a day, you know,
hand disrespectful. On the other hand, they are cops. They
are gonna kinda let this one even out. I'm still
distracted by you calling it police science. Yeah, yeah, like
like like your printing and ship. Yeah, like like the

(19:44):
idea that there should be some rigor applied to how
you determine whether or not a crime was committed by
someone as opposed to just being like grabbed the nearest
person who wasn't white and throw them in prison. Now
was my point is, like maybe like do science and
stop with crimes. Yeah, that was the idea cops walking,
like you know the vandalism that sometimes you'll see that says,

(20:06):
you know, kill a cop or whatever, but like they
should like have a subtitle that's like by making them
walk twelve hours a day in a park, Like we're
not bad people, we just want them to walk more.
See what happened. We agree with Portland's old police chief exactly.
Get the look out. Harry Niles, the leader of Anti
far He created, didn't you say? He created like discipline,

(20:28):
like the first discipline Yeah, the discipline board. Yeah yeah,
which again he was very unpopular with the rank and
file cops. As a rule, the people the cops hate
most in Portland police history is their police chief. Um.
Although there's some debate. Well we'll talk about that a
little bit later to uh so, Yeah, Harry has all
this plan to make a bunch of old cops walk

(20:49):
until they die or quit, and the city council is like,
this is a great idea, and uh in September of
ninety one they basically back legally his plan to do
park patrol. But they in in December of nineteen forty one,
Japan attacks Pearl Harbor in the US winds up in
you know a thing like a big like a big kerfuffle,
I think would be the best way to describe what
they call world kerfuff Yeah, the big the big world kerfuffle. Um. Yeah.

(21:15):
And this was a problem for officers, even officers who
hadn't been Nazi sympathizers because people went kind of bug
funk at the start of the war and assumed that
Oregon in California were going to be invaded by Japan. Um.
And this wasn't entirely irrational because the Empire of Japan
did kill several oregon Ians with bombs tied to balloons.
Um So, like, yeah, that's we don't talk about that much,

(21:36):
but there were some attacks on on Oregon. I think
it was Oregon and Washington had like some minor strikes
on their soil, like a thing that happened, Yeah, it
rings a bell. But the balloon part I was just like, wait, pardon,
that's a thing you can do. They tried some they
tried some wacky stuff. Um. So, a more direct problem
for the police was that number one, they suddenly had

(21:59):
a whole new tie the patrol duty to do, because again,
people were afraid of being invaded. And number two, there
were a whole bunch of young, fit cops that got
drafted um and that meant that they couldn't really afford
to get rid of all the old ones. So to
make up for this, Niles put the entire bureau on
full time service with no days off. Portland police were
expected to work twelve hour shifts, seven days a week.

(22:21):
And remember they didn't get overtime yet, so this is
like like again, no sympathy for them, but kind of
a ship gig. Like you can see why they would
be unhappy with this. Uh. These this state of affairs
was originally supposed to last just three weeks, but once
it became clear that this you know, world cerfuffle thing
was gonna last more than a month, Niles extended the
new schedule indefinitely. As you might expect, officers were not

(22:43):
wild about this new state of affairs. Enter John Hayes.
He was a young, fresh faced and popular officer whose
previous job had been as a pinball machine repairman. Shockingly,
pinball machine repairman did not get paid well. So at
age twenty two, John had created a labor union for
pinball mechanics UH. In pursuit of this goal, he'd met
members of the Multnoma County Central Labor Committee, and they

(23:05):
helped him learn how to organize a bunch of pinball
guys into a union that could bargain for better wages.
I'm so mad that this is going to get bad soon,
because I'm obsessed with pinball union, and I would wear
their T shirts all yeah, the pinball Union. Unfortunately, the
pinball Union is irrevocably tainted by their relationship to the
Portland Police Association. It's really tragic. Yeah. So nationally, there'd

(23:28):
been a couple of attempts at police unions by the forties,
but none of them had worked out. The Boston police
had unionized in the nineteen teens and then gone on
strike for better wages, which had resulted in a mass
riot through the streets of Boston a citizens looted everything
that could possibly find. President Woodrow Wilson had called the
police strike a crime against civilization and told the American
Federation of Labor president there is no right to strike

(23:50):
against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time. Every
single striking Boston officer was fired and the union died
a painful death, and the AFL revoked all police union
charters after this point. So cops had tried to unionize
and it had gone very badly for them, and there
were not police unions when the John Hayes is like,
what if I unionize the Portland police. So they're not

(24:12):
the first, but they are the first that will succeed
at unionizing. Um. So obviously this was a dangerous thing
to try to do, and a lot of people felt
that the police should not be able to organize under
any circumstances. Those people would, of course, proved to be right.
Officer Hayes reached out to ask me the American Federation
of State, County and Municipal Employees, which is the largest
trade union for public employees in the company, and he

(24:34):
was like, you know that thing that ended really badly
last time, what if we do that again? That's good stuff.
It's just so interesting to me because I have a
friend who organized, you know, helped organize the union. Asks
me in Portland, and there's there's literally like a no
cop asked me movement right to get the And I
had no idea. And I don't know if they knew

(24:54):
either that this actually happened, like in Portland itself, you know,
so I did know this until it was actually Alan Kessler,
who's a local lawyer that like informed us of this book.
And I did not know the Portland I just thought
they were another cop union, but they are like the
cop union. Yeah, so that's good. Explain something, yeah, so

(25:16):
asked me agreed to back the Portland Police as long
as they included a clause in their charter that they
could never strike under any circumstances. And Hayes said, of course,
of course will never strike. We would never strike, that
will never happen. We I promised the Portland Police will
never go on strike. And then you know asked me,
was like, okay, and they made a deal. And to
make a long boring story short, Hayes gradually succeeded in

(25:36):
signing most of his fellow cops up for the union.
Under the chiefs nos Uh. The Portland Police Association went
public in April of nineteen forty two, and the initial
reaction was less than positive. The Oregonian on April sixteenth
wrote an editorial about what a bad idea it would
be to allow cops to unionize. The editorial writer noted
that if police unionized, no matter what, those cops would
always be suspected of quote greater loyalty to union than

(26:00):
to official duty. I always want to congratulate the Oregonian
editorial board for getting something right at some point in
its long storied history. It doesn't last long, don't worry.
This was the one time I'm sure they fired that
guy immediately. Um so, Yeah, public suspicion was not enough

(26:20):
to stop the Portland Police Association from getting off the ground.
On an April ninety two, the p p A held
its first official meeting and voted for its first president.
Now Hayes, as the founder of the union, had acted
as interim president during this early period, but his fellow
officers felt that he was too young and inexperienced to
represent them at the negotiating table. Instead, they picked a

(26:42):
literal Nazi. They're like, let's do ageism and fascism all
in one. Sure did the Nazis have a union? Because
if not, I guess it could have been worse. They
had the National Socialist German Workers Party. But yeah, uh
uh so yeah. Otto Miners was the first president of

(27:04):
the p p A, and he's described this way in
the p p a's Weird Biography of Itself, which is
very positive quote. He was an outspoken man, some would
say loudmouth, whose accent revealed his German upbringing. Earlier, he
had been an active member of the German American Booned,
though for self preservation in a nation at war with Germany.
He later played down his interest in the land of

(27:25):
his ancestors. Now that's that's fund to me, because they
say that like, well, he was a German Man who
remembered the Boond because he was interested in his German ancestry.
That's not what the German American Boond was. The German
American Boond was a literal Nazi organization in the United
States that was funded by the Nazi Party in Germany.

(27:46):
The Boond waved swatsticka banners at mass rallies. They gave
the fascist salute and moss to giant portraits of Hitler.
Their initial funding, again came from the Nazi government. Fritz Koon,
the leader of the Boond, summed up the group's ideology
in a speech he gave at Madison Square Garden in
nineteen thirty nine. If you ask what we are actively
fighting for under our charter. First, a socially just white,

(28:08):
gentile ruled United States. Second, gentile controlled labor unions free
from Jewish Moscow directed dominance. So this is meeting faces
that you doesn't work for podcasting. And I'm just like
the first president of the Portland Police Association, a literal Nazi.

(28:29):
It's good stuff. Boond rallies featured banners with catchy slogans
like stop Jewish Domination of Christian Americans and wake up America,
smash Jewish communist. Oh my god, God, it's good stuff.
It's not subtle, no, no, and you have to love that.
The Portland Police Association's biography of itself just says like

(28:52):
he was interested in his German heritage. No, dude was
a Nazi. The branding of that is just yeah, it's great,
good stuff. It's rude to Germany because it conflates the two.
It's like, if you have German heritage, it just means
you love like to be a Nazi. You know. It's like,

(29:13):
we can separate those two things. We can separate them. Yeah,
the p PA can't. I can I enjoy the aspects
of German heritage that are, for example, creative sausages. Yeah
later osen fine, Yeah, no one has any issues with
that part now. Um, yeah, so it would be fair
to call miners and Nazi. Now. There were some German

(29:34):
Americans who joined the boond not really knowing what it was,
but those folks tended to leave pretty quickly once they
saw the swastika banners and heard all the talk about
the Jews. Miners remained in the boond until it was
forcibly disbanded after the outbreak of US involvement in World
War Two, which would you know, suggest he was pretty
fucking committed. And now he was the first president of
the Portland Police Association. Good stuff, good guy. So the

(29:58):
p p as first big victory came that October when
it succeeded in getting its officers time and a half
pay for working on Halloween. It also got officers overtime
pay for working security at ball games, which they'd previously
done on a volunteer basis. I'm not sure if this
was the first time police anywhere in the nation got
overtime pay. It might have been, but it was the
first time that a police union succeeded in getting a

(30:19):
blanket overtime agreement out of a city in the United States.
This is like the start of police overtime. Um. Thanks, yeah,
and now it is like bankrupting the city of Portland. Yeah,
it's so good. So President Miners the Nazi learned in
nineteen forty three that some of his officers were still
working at ball games for free as actual volunteers out

(30:40):
of I don't know, some sense of civic responsibility or something,
and discussed ball games are nice. He was disgusted by this.
He told the union that these men were playing into
the hands of the opposition, and I have to credit
him for not saying the Jews there. Um. He actually

(31:01):
read the badge numbers of these men allowed to the union,
so that like people would know who were the I
guess that the traders within their midst um, which they
could really mad at us when we read their badge numbers.
But that's a great point. Nobody's allowed to bad numbers anymore. Yeah,
uh yeah. It was kind of a dip move from
the president of the union, but you know, in fairness

(31:21):
to him, ninety three was kind of a rough year
for Nazis, so maybe Miners was just in a mood. Now,
at this time, the police were not the only force
providing law and order type services to the city of Portland.
There was also the Veterans Guard and Patrol. Now, this
was a group of World War One vets who had
formed to defend their homeland while younger men fought fascism abroad.

(31:44):
These guys worked for free, protecting their neighborhoods and guarding
their community with skills honed in deadly battle. Now, some
people might consider this kind of a win win because
it didn't cost anyone anything, and these guys clearly knew
what they were doing. I'm sure they were as racist
as everyone else back then, but I haven't heard anything
that would suggest they were worse than the police, and
they were probably broadly speaking more competent. Uh. Yeah. But

(32:06):
Miners hated this because again, the veterans guard were not
getting paid, and he was all about getting more money
for cops as pickets, pistols and politics notes. In the
view of the police union, the veteran guard and patrol
simply made it more difficult for professional police to get
their demands met by the city. After all, many police
services were being performed for free by these patriotic veterans.

(32:27):
We gotta shut that shut down now. The police union
succeeded in pushing down any attempt to form like a
civic safety patrol not made up of a tiny cadra
of unaccountable men paid increasingly vast sums of money to
do violence. That task accomplished in five Miners set himself
to the job of fighting another scourge to civic order Hollywood.

(32:48):
See the end of World War Two was the start
of a gangster revolution in Hollywood films. The gangster air
of the twenties and thirties was distant enough that people
could make good movies about it now, and police around
the country were horrified to see their mortal enemies turned
into heroes on the silver screen. Now, at this point,
unionization was still very rare for police officers. It was
not just Portland's, but they were one of the few.

(33:10):
So the cause of opposing gangster movies on behalf of
law men everywhere fell upon the Portland Police Association. The
Portland Police publicized the release of a resolution stating that
the United States and foreign nations were quote to be
flooded with a series of gangster motion pictures. Now, the
PPA was concerned with the influence of such pictures on
the impressionable alliscent mind, and argued that Hollywood producers and

(33:33):
again got a credit miners for not just saying Jews
there were responsible for any harms that this caused. Such
films can be motivated only by greed and can feel
no concern for the welfare of our country or its youth. Wait,
I'm obsessed with them being like this is motivated by greed,
when like they are the ones that are like everyone
has to get paid all the time, no volunteering at
the baseball game. Yeah, it is funny that he accuses

(33:57):
them of being greedy. Ye. Now, I don't want to
lean too much on the Nazi stuff, but it is
telling that one of the things this literal Nazi president
of the p p A makes one of his first
priorities is to attack Hollywood producers. Um a little bit
of a tell, little bit of a tell. Uh Yeah. Anyway,
the resolution concluded by proposing an investigation of Hollywood producers

(34:21):
by the House un American Activities Committee, which absolutely did
happen and culminated in the second Red Square. Now a
lot went into that. I'm not going to give the
pp A credit for all of it, but they were
a force in sparking the second red scare. You know
that's cool. Okay, let's scare the first said square. I'm
like the red square, the red Okay, cool. Now that's

(34:42):
just like a communist who wears a suit. Well, anyway,
good job for doing the red scare. Yeah, thanks guys,
thanks for starting the ball ball rolling on ruining the
lives of people in Hollywood who happened to think that
socialism might be a ideam ahead of the curve Trailblazers.

(35:06):
That's where the basketball team gets its name, Yeah Yeah,
from the p PA's hatred of people having opinions. Now,
in Portland Police Association terms, most of the late nineteen
forties and nineteen fifties were a set of labor rights improvements.
Police won a forty hour work week, they want expanded
sick days, and they want better and more comfortable uniforms
that they didn't have to pay for. This is mostly

(35:26):
stuff that, if you assume police should exist, is not
really that problematic, pretty basic, like workers rights. The p
p A pooled its bargaining power with the firefighters union
to get a proper pension system set up, and actually
the firefighters were critical in allowing the PPA to survive
because in the early days, again there was a lot
of resistance and they weren't recognized for years by the

(35:47):
city of Portland itself. It was the firefighters who first
gave them legitimacy by saying like, hey, will we will
bargain with you, and that way they'll have to deal
with you, because they have to deal with firefighters. The
p PA's biography says something about this that I think
is very telling a quote. The thinking was that the
firefighters had a better chance of winning the voters favor.
They were, after all, the good guys in the public's view,

(36:08):
the ones who saved people instead of bossing them around.
It's fun that cops recognize that, Yes, we do like
firefighters better than you because their only job is to
save people. Yeah, they're help They're actually helping people. Their
job is undebatably necessary, whereas you are cops. So there

(36:31):
was initially consensus among union leadership that the pp A
should not donate to directly or back directly political candidates,
that it would be wrong for them to get political.
Getting involved in partisan politics would be unseemly for a
group of men and women who are supposed to be
civil servants protecting all citizens. Uh. This would last until
the seventies, but we'll talk about that story a little
bit later. For right now, we need to turn away

(36:52):
from pickets, pistols, and politics, which has been the source
for everything but the stuff about the Red Squad and
the boond and turned to a slightly better source because shockingly,
for a book written at the behest of a police union, Pickets, Pistols,
and Politics, says almost nothing about race with relations in
Portland or police behavior towards black Portlanders. Um. It does
occasionally mentioned that, like civil rights groups had problems with

(37:15):
Portland police, but it will make statements like black activists
believe that police showed a racial bias. And that's kind
of the most that you'll get out of out of
the book. Uh So, for this next bit of the episode,
I'm going to turn to a dissertation written by Catherine
Nelson at Portland State University. Its title is on the
Murder of Ricky Johnson, the Portland Police Bureau, Deadly Force,
and the Struggle for civil rights in Oregon. And it's

(37:36):
a really good read um like a very I would
I would recommend it above the union's propaganda book, um,
although they both have some interesting stuff in them. So legally,
Oregon didn't have segregation in the nineteen forties or fifties
or sixties, right, like we were not one of the
if you like google like maps of states that had segregation,
Oregan's right there with California as like, uh, discriminatetion for

(38:00):
race or color forbidden by law. State. But that that's
not really true. Um, that's just like there wasn't legal segregation.
It did absolutely happen. As historian Elizabeth McLagan notes, black
people in Portland were regularly refused admission to restaurants, theaters,
and hotels. Medical care was difficult to obtain. Unions barred
blacks from membership, employment practices confined them to certain jobs,

(38:21):
and integrated housing was resisted. According to a long time
black resident, Oregon was a clan state, a hell whole.
It's not it was not a not nice I think
is a good way to sum that up. Henry Stevenson
was a black World War Two veteran who moved to
Portland in nineteen sixty. Here's how he described his experience.
Living in Portland at that time was almost like living

(38:42):
in Alabama. Black folks had at rough the system, especially
the police had a whole lot of feat on black
people's necks. It was nothing for a cop to just
shoot a brother. When this did happen, there was no consequences.
The cops weren't afraid of being reprimanded in any way. Well,
I hasn't changed, no, not really. The Portland police did
have a disciplinary board, but officer reprimands were complaint driven,

(39:05):
and the Portland Police didn't listen to complaints if they
weren't made by white people. The traditionally black neighborhood of
Albina received way more policing than any other neighborhood in
the city. And again that hasn't really changed. Um, I'm
here right now, I can tell you it has not changed. Yeah. Uh,
this is a bad time to go into an ad break.

(39:27):
You're going to choose now, this is what you're choosing.
You know, I'm not even gonna capitalism. We've returned. So yeah,

(39:48):
Portland police, Uh, pretty bad on on race relations and
and such. Lee Anderson, a black Portlander, commented in that
we are surrounded by a prejudice that you do not
find in our neighboring states. Forty five years later, in
nineteen sixty seven, a young black man commented to a
local newspaper, where else but Albaiana do cops hang around

(40:08):
streets and parks all day like plantation overseers, Which is
pretty strong statement, yep. In her dissertation for PSU, Katherine
Nelson sites sociologist Robert Staples, who studied the Portland Police
Bureau and noted that throughout its history it had acted
as a quote colonial force that acted as agents to
enforce the status quo and protect the property of the

(40:31):
colonizers who live outside black communities. Hell yeah, yeah, yep,
not hell yeah. That it's good. It's just like a
well phrased state. Hell yeah for the accuracy for you know,
colonialism yea yeah, not hell yet a colonialism um. The
bureau quote the bureau focused their f and this is

(40:52):
from Kathleen's paper. The bureau focus their efforts on protecting
property largely owned by whites within the black community and
serving the white community while providing few benefits and little
protection to Portland's black community. The PPB rarely protected the
rights of Portland's black citizens, yet they routinely tolerated vigilante
um union protection, organized crime, and police brutality within the bureau. Now,

(41:12):
this is another thing that the p p AS book
tends to leave out. It does note a few occasions
in which the police looked the other way while unions
they were outlied with committed crimes, but it does not
go into detail about how extensive this relationship was. So
we're going to go into detail about some of that stuff. Um. Yeah,
it's it's it's it's bad stuff. Yeah. Um, But first

(41:37):
we're going to go into detail about something else. Um.
In ve a black man named Irvin Jones was shot
through the window of his house by a Portland police
officer who assumed the victim was someone he had a warrant.
For the fact that he suspected someone might have a
warrant out and then immediately opened fire should tell you
something about the bureau's use of force procedures during this time.
A coroner's inquest was held and the jury decided that

(41:59):
officers involved were not guilty and no one was charged. Um. Again,
we're going to talk about this happening a lot. Uh.
This is kind of at least the first case of
this I was able to find. Now, throughout the nineteen forties,
Portland's black community increased from two thousand to more than
twenty two people. Um. And this again happened right around
the same time the nineteen forties that the PPB created

(42:21):
the us is first successful police union. So as Portland's
black population increased, Portland's police force got more protections and
became basically immune to being criticized by or at least
two being punished by the city government. UM. During the
nineteen fifties, UH, African Americans in Portland achieved a number
of civil rights victories, including the Public Accommodation Act of

(42:42):
nineteen fifty three, which illegalized public discrimination. UH. And at
the same time, the PPB further their reputation as you know,
UM police force that was willing to turn a blind
idle organized crime. By the nineteen sixties, the p p
B had implemented a tough on crime mentality UH and
this meant that they were mainly targeting Portland's black neighborhoods
as areas of quote miscreant behavior. By adopting a tough

(43:04):
on crime stance, the PPB saw a rise in police
related shootings, and for those living in Portland's black community,
it seemed as if young men were getting shot more
often than you know, basically any other group of people.
UH and the statistics kind of bear this out now.
At around the same time, enterprising Portland police officers developed
what was called the payoff system, which is what it
sounds like. Racketeers would run out licensed bars, brothels, and

(43:26):
casinos that all bribed officers for the right to exist.
Since any complaints about in potential disciplinary actions had to
go through the p p A, no officers were punished
for taking bribes to allow crime. The local government was
fine with this as long as all the illegal activity
was kept confined to North Portland's a k a. Albina.
So you see what's happening here. The Portland police are
allowing criminals and gangs and whatnot, often organized by the Teamsters,

(43:50):
which is a union that supported them, and they supported
the Teamsters running criminal rackets as long as those criminal
enterprises were run in Albina um. And at the same
time they were increasing their patrols of Albinia and justifying
it by saying, this is where all the crime happens. Yeah,
it's um pretty dark when you look at it like that.

(44:14):
Don't worry. They put salt and straws in Albina now,
so it's all gentrified, thank god. So up until ninety six,
the PPB had only hired two black officers in its
entire history. This situation had improved by the nineteen sixties,
but not by much. About one percent of the forces
seven twenty officers were black. When people started to notice

(44:35):
that this was maybe a problem. The police personnel director
asked Captain Bill Taylor if he could be listed as
Native American. Taylor had a small fraction of Indigenous ancestry,
although he did not quite identify as Indigenous. Still, the
PPB made the change to his identity in the paperwork
and started bragging at Portland had hired its first Native
American police captain. Yes, this is literally like textbook attending

(45:00):
is um like, it's like just like just exactly what
every Indigenous person is talking about. What they're talking about
pretendians is nause It's great. So the whole situation did
eventually get bad enough that the Federal Bureau of Investigation
looked into the p p B, and the publicized nature
of this whole case gave Portland a reputation as a
city of vice and sin. The men of the p

(45:22):
p A generally viewed their police chief and appointee as
the enemy of their ability to milk as much money
out of the job as possible. Charles Pray was the
chief from nineteen nineteen fifty one, and he had a
mandate to clamp down on the outrageous corruption in the bureau. Unfortunately,
he had no influence over the p p A because
the chief is not a member of the union, and
the p p A was kind of the nexus of

(45:43):
police corruption. Pray complained that everybody at the police station
seemed to know where gambling was conducted, but that no
one would talk to him. It turns out that even
cops are too smart to talk to cops. That's so interesting,
just that dynamic of the police chief being like, what
if we weren't, oh bad, and then everyone's at the
union holl being like, We're gonna go gambling and we

(46:03):
will tell you where it is. Yeah, what if we
weren't actual criminals while arresting people? And the union was
not cool with that. In nineteen fifty four, Perennial Bastards
Pods side character the FBI carried out a massive wire
tapping operation on Portland's gambling dens, brothels, and illegal bars,
many of which were operated by teamsters allied with the

(46:25):
p p A. Their investigation revealed that by nineteen fifty four,
both the mayor and the police chief, Jim Purcel, were
actively protecting criminal enterprises. Purcell was indicted for incompetence in
criminal behavior. A grand jury was convened, and from August
nineteen fifty six to September of nineteen fifty seven, more
than a hundred and fifteen indictments were issued against Portland
police officers. Uh, that's good stuff. Wait for what for?

(46:52):
You know, operating illegal gambling dens and brothels. There was
a hundred and fifteen of those doing Wow, Okay, at
least a hundred and fifteen officers that were implicated in
that sort of behavior. How many officers did they have
last time I heard there were seven? It's like a
couple hundred. Like it was such a high percentage wild
well in the way that the text makes it seem.

(47:14):
Basically everyone was on the take to one extent or another.
These were just the ones that the FBI. Like, the
FBI was not going to indict the entire police bureau.
They had to pick the most egregious examples. And this
is the last time the FBI will be the good
guys in this story, because it turns out they were fine.
We'll get to that. By the nineteen sixties, Portland's black

(47:34):
population had decreased to just fifteen thousand. Remember, they hit
their height at about twenty two thousand people in the
nineteen forties. Right, So all of this, both the police
like directly encouraging crime in the black neighborhood and also
the police massively increasing patrols in Albina um led to
about a seven thousand person decrease in the black population

(47:56):
of Portland's, might of whom lived in Albino, which was
about two and a half square miles at that point
in time. In nineteen sixty eight, Kenneth Gervais released a
study on the Portland Police Bureau. He interviewed a number
of Portland police officers during this time and found that
they believed political radicals, professional criminals, negroes, and civil rights
groups all ought to be subjected to intense police surveillance.

(48:19):
Um interesting the groups that he classifies as basically the same.
Um Yeah. The Red Squad morphed into the Intelligence Unit,
which mostly spied on black activists like the city's nascent
Black Panthers chapter and I'm gonna quote from Katherine Nelson here.
The intelligence units spied on black activists and used the
gathered information to spread rumors that were meant to spark

(48:40):
opposition from the community. Police often used a relevant information
to support their charges, and many of the targets were
previous victims of police brutality. Police perpetuated a false image
of what black activists and citizens were advocating for by
painting them as anti government, radicals or communists. The greater
community often aided in this surveillance work and would report
seemingly innocent behavior is potentially malicious activist work. It's all

(49:04):
different now. In the summer of nineteen sixty seven, a
group of young black Portlanders through rocks and bottles at
nearby police officers. This eventually turned into a riot known
as the Irving Park Riot, where fires were set, windows broken,
and a local stereo store looted. Not one specific instance

(49:25):
initiated the Irving Park Riot. Instead, black citizens felt frustrated
with unsolicited police presence in Albina. The Irving Park Riot
took place during the long hot summer, which witnessed urban
rebellions in African American neighborhoods in Boston, Chicago, and Portland
at the same time that a white middle class hippie
movement enjoyed what they termed the Summer of Love. Often,
these riots had no instigating factor, which left police and

(49:47):
city officials puzzled. In Milwaukee's black community, heavy police surveillance
of a school program caused the youth to riot. Milwaukee
Police Chief John Paulson claimed that a hardcore group of
young hoodlums was to blame. Again, very different, and we're
talking about the Milwaukee that's a suburb of Portland, Wisconsin. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

(50:07):
So the Bureau used the Irving Park. The Portland Police Bereau,
not the federal one, used the Irving Park riot as
an excuse to intensify surveillance in Albina. This time they
were aided by the FBI, who hated illegal gambling and
prostitution but loved them some disrupting a civil rights movement. Now,
we talked about comteal Pro FBI director Hoover standing order

(50:29):
to infiltrate, discredit, and disrupt left wing civil rights and
civil rights organizations. The FBI sent co intal Pro agents
to Portland, and they encouraged the PPB to engage in
factory One sabotage effort involved FBI agents suddenly threatening local
doctors to stop them from volunteering their time at the
Portland Black Panthers Free Health critic It's just that kind

(50:50):
of ship where I'm like how do you do that?
And you're like, I am the good guy in this scenario,
preventing healthcare. This is gonna be so popular are in
the future. Go home to your wife. Would she do today?
Threaten some doctors? Feeling great they were going to help
some poor children. Not anymore, they're not not after the

(51:12):
Bureau got on the case. Just imagining Joe Friday threatening
a doctor, it's so um yeah. The FBI co Inteal
pro Unit also got the PPB to lie about Black
nationalists who were police informants, like pretending people. They actually
would set up meetings with people who were police informants

(51:33):
and Black nationalist leaders so that they could then discredit
them within the community as police informants. At one point,
they even put out fake information about anti Semitism from
Portland's Black nationalists to lower their support from the Jewish community,
who was otherwise very supportive of their causes. Um good stuff.
While the FBI was forced to disband their co intal

(51:54):
proteins after nineteen one, the PPB continued to carry out
similar programs in order to harm black liberal Asian organizations.
One example of this would be the work of Detective Brown,
a leading member of the PPBS Red Squad. Brown also
happened to be the American Legion's top Red hunter, and
he successfully badgered the school board into denying civil rights
groups the use of high school auditorians. I mean again,

(52:17):
like the phrases civil rights. Anyone who's like this is
objectively bad rights? No, absolutely not. It's fun you say that, Tuck,
because in the nineteen sixties, another study into the Portland
Police Bureau noted that six percent of its officers felt
that the civil rights movement was moving much too fast.

(52:39):
Can't have too many rights? What will we do? We
will have anything to police because people will be allowed
to do things. But who will we shoot a police?
Don't worry, they figure it out. The study concluded that
quote the feeling that the public does not respect the
police officer or holds him in contempt will most certainly
affect the officer's attitude and behave towards the citizen. Officers,

(53:02):
the report noted, wanted to emphasize to black people that
complacent behavior was incredibly important if they wanted to remain safe.
Oh my god, I hate this. Uh, they didn't have
masks back then, Like, they don't have much of a
mask now, but they didn't have any at all back then. Right,
Oh my god. I just think about and you're talking

(53:23):
about cointelpro and like spreading rumors about each other, and
like it's so nice that they don't have to do
that now because we just have Twitter, you know, like
they're like, oh, we can just chill, like they will
just just do it to each other. Yeah, they're very
very fun people in general. Yeah. So throughout the nineteen sixties,
the pp A grew in influence, not just in Portland

(53:45):
but nationwide. They helped found a National Police Union, which
provided some unity to all the different unions that had
been spawned by the success of the p p A.
In nineteen sixty nine, the p p A had voted,
along with thirty other delegates, that police strikes would remain
banned under the National Union Charter. When Jualette, Illinois officers
had gone on strike in nineteen sixty seven, aft ME
had provoked their charter and the p PA had condemned them.

(54:07):
But in late nineteen sixty nine, contract negotiations between the
p PA and the City of Portland broke down. In
nineteen sixty eight, the Portland City Council finally declared the
city a public employer and bargaining agent and had voted
to allow collective bargaining for city employees. The p p
A UH was officially declared a chartered Police Union UM,
and again this was like its first official recognition from

(54:28):
the city. Now. The president at the time was a
guy named David Callison UM, and he wound up becoming
the first p p A president to sign a Portland
Police contract. The p PA sat down to negotiate in
the spring of nineteen sixty eight. The city wanted to
establish a set of ground rules that all seven of
the unions recognized by the city would have to abide by.
The p p A complained about this because they didn't

(54:49):
think that the rules that bound everyone else should apply
to them. Now. They did have some justification for this UH,
mainly the fact that they had a no strike clause
and other unions were allowed to strike, So if they're
not allowed a strike, why should they have to abide
by the same conditions as every other union UM Now.
In the first round of negotiations, the other six employee groups,
including the firefighters union, agreed to new contracts and signed

(55:11):
with the city. The Portland Police did not, though this
was considered odd since traditionally Portland's firefighters and its police
officers had drawn the same base pay. Since the firefighters
union had backed the police union and establishing it in
the first place, there was a sense that both groups
ought to stand together, but the Portland police felt they
deserved more money than firefighters, so they left the firefighters

(55:31):
behind and demanded more money. The city refused this, and
negotiations ground on for months and well into nineteen sixty nine.
I'm gonna quote again from pickets, pistols and politics. Callison
decided to try to break the impass in a more
subtle fashion. He started waging psychological warfare, and this way
Callison managed to scare away at least one member of
the city's negotiating team. Callison ran the man's name through

(55:54):
police uh like like databases and stuff and found his
criminal record. He called a friend who worked at the
Oregonian and asked him to check the newspaper's library, and
the friends sent along a few clippings of articles about
the man in question, news of promotion, social activities, and
other innocent doings. The guy was apparently purest snow, but
Callison went ahead and put the information in a file folder.
He neatly printed the man's name on the tab. At

(56:16):
the beginning of the next negotiating session, he put the
file in a prominent place as he spread out his papers.
The folder caught the man's eyes sometime during the session.
He couldnot stop glancing nervously, they added, as it sat
conspicuously within Callison's reach. Finally, he could not stand it
any longer. What is this, he demanded, Oh, Callison said, smiling,
This is my file on you. Callison kept smiling at him,

(56:36):
while thinking craftily to himself that surely one of the
joys of being a police officer was that he could
make people feel guilty even when they were not. The
man excused himself and never returned to the negotiations. The
joys of policing he could make innocent people feel guilty.
That's why I go to work every day personally, is
to make innocent people feel bad. I love that that

(56:59):
story and all some first illegally using the police record
system to try to dig up dirt on somebody, and
then when he couldn't find dirt on the person, he
just lies and pretends that he hasn't in order it
does seem like sort of a useful tactic just for
us all to know, like, oh, if you can't do
the work, you just make a file and you label
it in the work and you put it on the table.

(57:19):
So I'll try it. We could talk about how Alex
Jones does his show. It is basically the safe strip.
So despite the psychological warfare, the city wouldn't budge. It
became clear to the union that a strike was their
only option. The p PA charter expressly banned strikes. They'd
condemned the other departments for considering strikes like so basically

(57:40):
previous to this, the p p A had told other
departments that you have to have no strike clauses in
your union contracts uh. And they helped to form a
national police union, and they forbade members of that union
from striking. But now they needed to strike in order
to get more money, so they strong armed asked ME
into releasing the p PA from its no strike clause,
which was removed first from their contract and then from

(58:01):
the International Brotherhood of Police Officers constitutions. Subsequently, the p
p A has always been the bellweather of US police unions,
and when they succeeded the rest of the nation's cops
copied them. Uh so when they decided striking was cool,
suddenly police unions across the country were able to strike
again and strike the Portland police did, marching around city
Hall with signs that said crime pays, police work doesn't,

(58:22):
No pay, No pigs and other rib ticklers. Yeah, they
called themselves pigs there. Yeah, yeah, it's yeah, it's great.
Through their crooked arrangements to look the other way at
criminal enterprises run by teamsters and longshoremen. Over the years,
they were able to get both unions to abide by
the picket lines and refused to cross them. The police

(58:44):
then started picketing the docks, which effectively locked down all
trade within the city of Portland. This cratered the local
economy and the city government was forced to come to
the table and give the p p A the rays
they thought it's that they deserved. Not only did the
Portland Police come the highest paid civil servants in the city,
they gained retroactive pay hikes for the previous seventeen months

(59:05):
that they'd worked without a contract. The whole process had
taken nearly two years of negotiation, but as the p
PA's own Biography states the result was a contract that
would serve as the model for police groups around the country.
I don't have any like cute comments. I'm just like
so mad. It's a period, right, Like they're even fucking

(59:25):
over other cops because for years they would like throw
other cops under the bus when they tried to strike.
But as soon as Portland's cops want more money, like
striking is good now, it's amazing. It's so craven. And
they held the city hostage. They threatened to destroy the
city's economy, which is like seems sort of like what
criminals would do, you know, just like blackmail a whole

(59:46):
city for money. We're good. It does seem illegal, but
I'm not a law nowhere guy, not a law doer
or nowhere. You have basic common sense. Yeah, it seems
I don't know, super unethical what the Portland police did,
but they're the police. Who's who's gonna arrest them. They're

(01:00:09):
on strike, you know, Like, yeah, the FBI is not
going to funk with them. Now. They needed to help
screw with the black panthers, right, gotta like interrupt those
free breakfast programs like it can have doctors helping people know, Look,
we'd love to stop the police from holding the city hostage,
but we've got a lot of doctors to threaten. Uh talk.

(01:00:33):
That is the end of part one. Do you have
any plug doubles that you'd like to plug? Oh? Gosh, yeah.
So I make a podcast called Gender Reveals about trans people,
and while we're making the show, we also raise money
to support trans people, specifically trans people of color. And
we're recording this on Trans Day of Remembrance, So even
though you're not listening to it, then you can retroactively

(01:00:55):
commemorate Trans Day of Remembrance by donating to the Gender
Reveal Patreon at patreo dot com slash gender. And then
we take that money and give it to black and
indigenous trans people and trans people of color. So, you know,
almost as fun as funding cops for like hundreds of
thousands of dollars a year, you can give trans people
like ten dollars, which yeah, might might probably will not

(01:01:17):
be used to tear gas you. Um, I feel confident
in making that statement. What was that? What was that link? Again?
That is patreon dot com slash gender. I got that handle.
Apparently no one's ever done gender before, so Patreon dot
com slash gender. That's great, Patreon dot com slash gender,
give give some bucks if you've got some bucks. And

(01:01:40):
that is I think the note that we're going to
end episode one on when we come back, we'll talk
had some real, some real bleak ship to be honest. Great.
I cannot wait to try to make that fun. Yeah.
I actually completely forgot to plug the new podcast about
Portland's and the Portland Police that this two part of
episode was made in part to promote because I'm a

(01:02:02):
hacking of fraud. So check out Uprising a Guide from
Portland on all of the podcast places, all the places
you know where the pods and they're casted, all the
all the different spots. There's two episodes. It's called Uprising
a Guide from Portland. There's a colon after the word uprising.
Maybe not our best call title wise anyway. Uh yea