How The Police Defeated Lynching Via Torture

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
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 is for this week, last week, and
next week, giving the tailed history about the you know,

(00:26):
the cops and such, the systemic manifestation of white supremacy. Yeah,
and bastard. Yeah. And the voice that you heard that's
not mine, justin 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

(00:48):
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, No one's and shouldn't yeah,
and and and I should not go right to something
that would be incredible, that would be very fun you

(01:09):
and like Glue Network asked annalists like you guys, just
do a song and then just all of a sudden,
Robert Evans just wraps. Oh, man, if I had any
musical talent that would be that would be cool. But yeah,
we all have our gifts and My gift is reading
things that are really depressing for I don't know, another

(01:31):
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. 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

(01:52):
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 it coming because they were they
were being dicks colonialistics. Um. Obviously nobody thinks of British

(02:16):
people and 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 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,

(02:37):
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 three to ninety one. Four thousand
and twenty seven victims were men, were women, in three

(02:59):
forty 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, while
ten were Chinese and one was Japanese. All of these
numbers are, of course, likely somewhat low, because we'll never

(03:19):
know the total number of people who were lynching victims UM. Now,
historians who studied 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 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.

(03:40):
And then there was the slavery regime, which was found
in former slave states were 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 the lynching
period in the U S history kind of come come
down to. Uh. Um. Now, in all of these cases,

(04:02):
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.
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 some of this was just like, well,

(04:25):
I don't want to die. Yeah, there's one of me,
and I got a real shitty six gun, like okay, yeah,
this worth it? Yeah. There there was a lot of that.
Um yeah yeah. Um. Now, this was often the case
police kind of backing away because they didn't want the
jail to get burned down and to get killed themselves.
This was often the case with lynchings in Oklahoma. Oklahoma's

(04:48):
fucking loved vigilante violence, still kind of do. But like,
oh man, historians who study this are like Oklahoma, those
are like the yeah. Um. And this was particularly the
case in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Now, the Sooner State was in
general a big lynching state. It was number eleven in

(05:10):
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 riot of nine
in a bit and the burning a black Law Street, um,
Wall Street and on Law Street. Um yeah. 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

(05:32):
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 the
sheriff actually got fired for kind of well 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

(05:53):
race riot or racist riot of nineteen 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 racist riot in ninety
one was really it was shocking to a lot of
people because yet hadn't happened before ul Yeah, and and

(06:15):
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 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

(06:37):
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 ven diagram of like racism
and capitalism and just normal friendship to where you're like,

(06:58):
I don't know, this rest the run is just it's
good food. So I came down here. Yeah, they're way
better at my Yeah, yeah, it's better. It turns out,
contrary to what my uncle Dave told me, that's a
nice lady, that's a nice food networks here. I don't know.
It's kind of cool. It's good food, it's good company.

(07:20):
I don't understand the problem. You know. I'm starting to
think racism might not be the right call. I'm starting
to think maybe we benefit from having these folks in
our community. Now now, now we're time to shoot, I guess. So. Yeah. So,
in the years after World War Two, large numbers of
veterans of both races had come back to Tulsa and

(07:40):
armed themselves in fear of escalating interracial tensions in Muskogee.
In nineteen sixteen, an armed black crowd had stopped a lynching.
In May of nineteen 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 lynchings of black men nationwide were justified because the

(08:02):
crowd accused the black man of rape or sexual assault
in some way. Now, only about two percent of incarcerated
black people nationwidehead 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, and
Tulsa later in reinforces this suggestion. On Monday, a young

(08:24):
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, but white
black guy walks into an elevator with a white woman.
White woman screams, black guy runs away. He gets tracked

(08:46):
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 predace sessor had let happened,
and Willier didn't want to make the same mistake. So
a crowd of angry white folks formed outside the jail,

(09:07):
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 Gustafsson, warned
the sheriff to take Roland out of town. H The
sheriff refused, 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

(09:28):
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 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 rioters gutting down black people. Black people shooting back

(09:50):
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. Like, Yeah,
there are a couple 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

(10:13):
particular moment is like just this idea of like weaponizing
the white woman, you know, and um, in a in a,
in a, it's just this 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

(10:38):
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 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,

(10:59):
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 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

(11:21):
like the awareness of just that, the mind scramble that
which is it's like I said, it's your own unique thing,
just this idea like the voice of the white woman.
You know, that's 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

(11:45):
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. 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

(12:08):
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, Racism is rooted
in class, Racism rooted this or that. Racism is rooted
has a lot of roots. It's like it's like a hedgerow.
That's why it's so hard to remove, Like you dynamite
like hedgerows by these gigantic, sometimes centuries old, like huge

(12:29):
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. 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

(12:50):
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 of Town, Greenwood, Um,
and that you know black Wall Street is it was
called had its own banks, its own theaters, of vibrant
business community, good schools, and this relative prosperity was really
unusual for black communities in the South, which is why

(13:12):
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 rage inevitably is
black advancement. It is not the mere presence of black
people that is the problem. Rather, it is blackness with ambition,
with drive, with purpose, with aspirations, and with demands for

(13:32):
full and equal citizenship. So powerful, man, Yeah good, it's powerful.
Yeah yeah. Yeah. The comedian clip that would I 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,

(13:56):
you know, just just basic. I'm just saying black lives matter, yeah,
like not like they're not. I'm not saying they're in important.
I'm not saying they matter more than you're. It's just
just just matter, you know. So like you said, like
just and and and and the ambition of Black America

(14:17):
sparked so much rage. Michael Chase Special Yeah, yeah, yeah,
and 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

(14:38):
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 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 that's so funny.

(15:01):
The over when this all are ups into violence. The
overall response of Tulsa's police to the massacre followed like
kind of 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

(15:21):
riot barricaded in the jail defending Roland. You know, his
black prisoner um so hard to I'm not gonna call
him a great dude or like particularly wokeradating, but like
does broadly what you'd consider to be the right thing here. Meanwhile,
the police chief, Gausetabson 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

(15:43):
any 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 not
the same as the sheriff here. Um. Now. One of
the first things that happened after the riot was that
large numbers of ang gree white dudes gathered outside of
the National Guard armory to demand guns. The National Guard

(16:05):
was like, that's not how this works. You can't get
we do have some stone, We don't just hand out
guns to crowds. Dude, why can't somebody be that guy, Like,
why can't we interview that guy when they got to
the door and and being like, Nah, no, I'm not
gonna keep what are you talking about? What are you

(16:25):
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 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 worsen, the

(16:47):
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 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,

(17:08):
police and members of the National Guard, numbering fiftundred, invaded
Black Wall Street from two directions. They took unarmed black
people into protective custody. They killed anyone who resisted. Once again,
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.

(17:30):
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
of six J and four biplane aircraft. They claimed these
were four reconnaissance purposes, but there is evidence that the
planes were used to firebomb and stray civilians in Greenwood.

(17:53):
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,
a black deputy sheriff, was rousted from his home by
a white traffic officer named Pittman, who then joined in
setting fire to Bostick's house. I. J. Buck, a white

(18:15):
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 hundred black men, women and
children were murdered during the Tulsa racist riot. We will
never know. They are currently in the process of excavating
and what they think might be a mass grave in Tulsa. Um,

(18:35):
but we will never know how many people died. Probably
hopefully we'll get a better count 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
run a barbershop, you at church, and a US military

(18:57):
plane well all own country, you know what I'm saying,
Like a civilion plane that the police that the police
were had common deered. Yeah, okay, yes, billion playing at
the police common deer. Like it's just just a like
you just bombed my church. Yeah, Like just try to
like get your brain around net you know. Yeah, yep, yep,

(19:22):
um yeah, it's pretty yeah, like this is sitting bad.
Yeah yeah yeah. And I wonder how many listeners, uh
of all races have never heard this, you know what
I'm saying, Like that's the part that blow Mama's black
people that don't notice. You know, it's pretty fucking wild. Um.

(19:44):
And you know, 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, nineteen attack on Pearl Harbor. And it is
the attack on Black Wall Street and the attack on
the white you well, no, actually not just white, um,

(20:04):
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 was used to kill Americans. Um yeah, by Americans, Yeah,

(20:26):
by Americans, sure yeah um so uh 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 clan Tulsa becomes like the fucking headquarters of the
Oklahoma Ku Klux Klan in the wake of the racist riot,

(20:49):
and before much longer, Tulsa got a new clan backed
sheriff a claimed back police chief, as did many cities
in Oklahoma, clan members of the city council, and of
course the clan brought with it violence not just against
black people, but against Catholic and Jewish Oklahoma's The governor
of Oklahoma eventually had to bring the National Guard in
again to deal with the Ku Klux Klan. So yeah, yeah,

(21:11):
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
mad at Catholic and Jews? Like when when did they
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

(21:32):
over here. We don't 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. 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

(21:56):
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 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

(22:17):
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 this. Uh, yep. So like
we want segregation, okay, cool, we don't want you to
use our money, Okay cool. Damn y'all segregated and using
your own money. I guess we'll kill you. I guess

(22:39):
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 throughout the
nineteen hundreds. Of the nineteen twenties were a pretty bad
time for lynching. Most historians will tell you that lynching

(22:59):
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. Victims
were usually tortured to extract confessions um and the crowd
generally took souvenirs and posed with the body of the

(23:21):
murdered black person. These were often family gatherings that were
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 I just finished. What you think picnic?
What the end of that? What that's probably your short for? Yeah, Okay,
go on. I'm gonna quote next from a book that

(23:43):
will be a major source for this part of the episode,
The Color of the Third Degree by Sylvan Niedermeyer, 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 lynching.
This changed attitude was the result of the economic modernization
taking place in the region, which was accompanied by efforts
to bolster the business and political ties between the southern

(24:04):
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
activists work primarily in church circles and their tireless work

(24:26):
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.
Good yeah, yeah, good work, good ally ship, or whatever
you wanna call it. Uh. Nineteen twenty was actually the
first year in which more lynchings were averted by law

(24:49):
enforcement than carried out. Between nineteen thirty two and ninety two,
two hundred and ninety lynchings were stopped by police. The
activism of groups like as WHIPPLE helped helped your do
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 nineteen thirties, and for
most of the last few decades, the anti lynching campaigns

(25:11):
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, law enforcement authorities

(25:31):
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 spawned those mobs
still had to be sated, and police sayd it by

(25:54):
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 of the twentieth
century continually rose, while the number of lynchings steadily declined

(26:15):
during the same period. Likewise, the findings of the political
scientist James W. Clark show a clear correlation in the
nineteen twenties and thirties between the declining lynching 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 the United States between
nineteen thirty and nineteen seventy also suggests the dwindling number

(26:37):
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 the early twentieth century.
See that is dizzying, Yeah, caught it. It's so diggery.

(27:01):
It's it's like because I 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 and they're like, no,
this is I'm They're just you just want to control
of your county and you just like So, the point

(27:21):
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 low key, 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

(27:41):
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 signs we're talk
about the other ones, that mass incarceration and the deputy
and the law for just it's same ease. This is

(28:02):
what we're trying to say. And here is right in
your history it's SAME's. 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. Badis apples, Yes,
they're piss apples. You keep going away individual piss apples,

(28:22):
hoping and then trying to point out 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, I've never heard of the term piss apple.

(28:44):
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.
We're back, all right, Um? Cool? Uh all right. So

(29:10):
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

(29:32):
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

(29:53):
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

(30:13):
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 avoid uncivilized violence. Local journalists supported the state and
its massively increased rate of executions, seeing them as a

(30:34):
victory for law and order. Yo, when I was so
nice to teach high school that's a 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 hundred

(30:54):
and fifty fourteen year old, right, So I had me
and an other 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

(31:19):
at 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

(31:39):
stop you. And Loki, it seems kind of fun. I'm
not gonna lie to you. 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 make sure

(32:00):
that no one gets 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 mama gonna kill me if I lose one of y'all, right,

(32:22):
and 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 Gladdie
is one of the funniest things. I really got reprimanded
by the vice principle. But then the principal was like,

(32:45):
you're brilliant. Yeah, it's like that again. Uh detty problematic
cop 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 for 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 the wrong call, you know, like yeah, yeah,

(33:09):
um yeah. This also dovetails into. I won't go on
to 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, I'm very pro

(33:29):
hammer man. 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 come up

(33:52):
with the best pulley system to tear down a Confederate statue. Yeah,
the person I could do it with the where the
smallest little person in my row 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, you've figured this out,

(34:17):
and so did the Egyptians. Yea, so did the Egyptians. Alright, alright, alright,
we gotta get back to the subject. So in nine three, yeah,
Arthur Raper published a study again like yeah, basically that
the southern politicians came to rely on the death penalty's
a way to appease the mob and avoid uncivilized violence. Now,
you can't easily get a swift conviction if you have
a real trial. Obviously, remember the data we have suggests

(34:40):
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 it, like if
it if you were if you were doing this the
way police are supposed to handle cases like this, it
would take a lot of time and then it might
be yeah, it might be off. And it's way easier

(35:01):
if you go into court with a confession, because then
you're 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 fifty one cases of forced confessions
in Southern States. These were a tiny fraction of the

(35:22):
total number of cases, which numbered in the hundreds of
the thousands. The d a 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 of these cases
were either alleged murders or rapes. The color of the

(35:45):
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 nineteen thirty four. Stewart was a prominent
white farmer and landowner, and he was found dead in
his home in Kimber County, Mississippi. There were signs of
a struggle. Almost as soon as the news got out,
two hundred people gathered in front of his home to
look for the officers. Three young black men were eventually arrested.

(36:08):
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 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

(36:30):
young defendants began to complain that his confession had been
forced out of him. Near to 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 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

(36:50):
I said, I declare I didn't kill Mr Raymond. He said,
come on in 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 had to say yes, sir.
Mr Cliff Dial said give the strap to me, I

(37:11):
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 will show you. There are places
all the way up. Question did you bleed any? Answer?

(37:31):
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 kill me because I said that,
But I ain't never harmed Mr Raymond. Afterward, Henry Shields

(37:54):
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 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,

(38:16):
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 roughly twenty people, several of whom were employees
of the sheriff, including the previously mentioned Cliff Dial. He

(38:36):
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, you know, from a practical standpoint,
like hey, you know, um, you know, rocket scientists shareff

(39:01):
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. Rocket science. And then secondly,
I think remember that the 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,

(39:22):
you know, and when they bullied him into saying something
just so they bullied him in to say it. Yeah.
We'll talk about um that in a bit, because that
there's yeah that ties into 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,

(39:48):
if you treated your domestic partner the way that police
routinely treat people in interrogations, they would have easy legal
standing to get a restraining order against you and take
your guns away if you own guns. Yeah, Like yes,
it's emotional abuse. So um, it's worth noting that further
on in their testimony, uh, these boys made statements to

(40:10):
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, 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

(40:32):
jails under questioning. Officer Dial did eventually admit to having
beaten the boys. He said that it 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

(40:54):
what I'm getting into. This is part of a very
long standing trend in in not just law enforcement, but
white racism, the idea that black will feel les 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.

(41:15):
It's it's so deeply woven into the fabric of our society,
the idea that black people feel pain somehow less than
white people. Yep, yeah, I don't even maybe that's there. Yeah, yeah,
I 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,

(41:38):
And you can draw a direct line from the whipping
of slaves in the pre war South and like justifications
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 an Hispanic people
are fifty likelier in the United States to experience non
lethal use of force from police. Yeah, yep, all tied together,

(42:03):
yeah yeah. Diale and his fellow officers insisted 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

(42:25):
boys as darkies. Um yeah, yeah, unbiased religious official there. Yeah.
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,

(42:45):
particularly in the South, had similar participated in similar things.
This was the norm, This was a common occurrence. Um yeah,
uh uh. If they didn't participate, like officer dial, they
were aware of other officers doing it. That's probably more

(43:06):
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 the person you talk to, the sociopath,
you know what I'm saying, So like the fear of

(43:26):
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, this is 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. He was a He was enforcing
white supremacy through violence in a way that was effective

(43:47):
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 double a CP managed
to get involved in time. They appealed and the lives
of all three young men were saved. So as happy
and ending as a story of torture can happen. Um,
there's a there's a trial like right before Brown versus

(44:10):
Board of Education that uh missed, missed all the missed
all the fame because of Brown versus Board 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 after this case,

(44:31):
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 all white jury,
they're like, but they're still looking at a Mexican dude

(44:54):
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, but 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 about
this case, like you said, is like, there's clear evidence,

(45:15):
there's obvious evidence. They the dude that did it said
he did it, and then the jury acquitted. You know
what I'm saying, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. Um. And
the case that I just related to you was only
exceptional because some version of justice was eventually done. Thanks
to the hard work of the end of a cp

(45:37):
unknowable numbers of black men and boys were tortured and
executed without the end of 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 the problem of torture enforced confessions by
US law enforcement until ninety two. And the Bureau does

(46:00):
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 the history of police torture, and this is
where we get into stuff that's both white and black history. Um,

(46:22):
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 that was as hard to prove as you might suspect.
Some states had laws to prohibit the use of violence

(46:42):
to force confessions, but that was not an across the
board sort of thing, near to Miyer notes quote as
investigative reports from that date. From this period reveal, however,
penalties were rarely imposed because district attorneys, judges, and jury
members were highly reluctant to limit the power and authority
of law enforcement officials. While the white press in the
South generally avoided using the term torture and its reporting

(47:03):
on cases of police violence during interrogations, the term was
purposefully used by the Black press to expose and announce
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
twentieth century. And I'm gonna guess most people know this term, right,

(47:27):
that's yeah, as I say from the TV from the choree,
and what that means is I'm going to torture the
ship out of Yeah. Yeah, it's bad. Um yeah, so yeah,
and it is like it. It is a term that
was used to justify police, to dress up police torture

(47:49):
something else. Torture sounds like a crime. Giving them the
third degree is something that like a 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 alongside a massive increase in police use of torture.
In ninety one, President Herbert Hoover established the National Commission

(48:11):
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
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

(48:34):
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
crime to rise. Yeah. Yeah, they have one tool and

(48:54):
they use it real well. You know, yeah, well, you know,
you know, if you do this, then you're gonna 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, yes, yes,
so yeah. For a long time, historians thought that government

(49:16):
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 kgier 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 suspects who were brutalized

(49:39):
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. Thirty six percent of
New York Police Department torture victims were black men, and

(49:59):
black 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,

(50:20):
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,

(50:44):
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 to where you're like, well, yeah,

(51:07):
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

(51:28):
actually torture fools? We have to figure out other ways
to do it, you know, we just Yeah, it's got
so you're continuing the problem. 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

(51:49):
when you're a liar. Believe us we're the cops. Yes, uh,
and it gets it gets, it gets worse. I'm gonna
quote again Fromniedermeyer Um. The report by the Wickership commit
Should 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

(52:12):
forerunner to water boarding that US soldiers used during the
Philippine American War eighteen 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,

(52:34):
which was used until nineteen twenty nine 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

(52:55):
South was already commonplace before nineteen thirty. Diverse historical studies
could afirmed that this practice could 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 or visionists in the sense

(53:17):
to say that this is a uniquely black experience. That's
not to say that black have had Blacks have had
a unique experience in this. 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. Nobody is safe. That's part of the

(53:40):
that's part of 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, like safe,
if you give them the right to violently oppress one
group of people, they will start fucking with you. Yes,

(54:01):
it's the whole, it's the whole. First, they came for
the communist and I was not a communist. 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, we're back. Okay,

(54:34):
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

(54:56):
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 reign and when black
people would fight back and gain the upper hand. However,
briefly in this struggle, police were the most reliable tool

(55:18):
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

(55:40):
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 and tried. Yes, and yes, I love the idea

(56:03):
that 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.

(56:25):
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 double a CP. These cases
helped to drum up both public awareness of the problem
and public support for changes to the system. You could
draw an elect line between the double a CP spending

(56:46):
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 a c P 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 way

(57:07):
to Mike Brown. This. Yeah, there'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 yere yeah so um yeah. And again, the

(57:27):
up eventually was successful through a number of cases, in
in getting a series of Supreme Court decisions that significantly
regulated and reduced the admissibility of 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

(57:49):
the third degree. It again just inspired the police to
get subtler yes. 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 fifty of these cases, police induced

(58:09):
false confessions were involved. Overall, twelve percent of overturned wrongful
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

(58:30):
like you have a fender bender in traffic, Like I
confess to rape. I'm so sorry. That was my like
totally he just 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 that Tuesday, I thought you saw my Tuesday. Yeah. No, no, no, No,

(58:52):
I didn't say I admit to murder. I said I
liked Fox Molder. I've been watching rewatching the X Files recently.
It's my bad. It's you know what I'm saying, Like
I fumbled my words. Yeah. The most shocking example of
this might be the case of the Central Park five,
also in nineteen nine. In this case, a white female
jogger was beaten and raped. Five black and Hispanic children,

(59:13):
all between fourteen and sixteen years old, were taken into custody.
All five confessed, and then all 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

(59:33):
were convicted and sent to prison. Donald Trump, then a
prominent con man, repeatedly urged that the boy should be executed.
In two thousand two, the real rapist confessed and DNA
evidence confirmed his guilt in 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

(59:57):
familiar with you, because just because a certain uh uh,
certain elected official was invested in 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.

(01:00:19):
What the Central Park five endured is much subtler, but
some people might call it torture. 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 around the same time
the Supreme Court said, y'all got to stop forcing people

(01:00:39):
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 to get confessions rather than violence.
The origin of his technique came from a nineteen fifty
five 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

(01:01:01):
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, 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.

(01:01:24):
After nine hours of interrogation, Parker broke down and confessed.
He recanted the next day, but a jury found him
guilty of murder and sentenced him to life in prison.
Now Read was like, Oh, this is the way we
should always do interrogations. Uh, and he refined his strategy
into a technique which generally boils down to elaborately accusing

(01:01:44):
the suspect of committing a detailed crime. After hours and
hours of interrogation. Read opened a consulting company which, by
two thousand 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
any brags that the people that trains get their suspects
to confess of the time, bro just think, think about

(01:02:07):
what we're telling you right now, you have to be
a absolute like Navy seal level mental agility and fortitude
to defend yourself when you're innocent, like when I actually
didn't do the thing. I have to be this skilled,

(01:02:30):
you said, which is why you wait for your lawyer,
which is why you have a right to remain silent.
Shut the fuck. Uh. Yeah, 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 h and its president will say that that

(01:02:52):
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
there is of abuse or misuse of the technique because
the technique has safeguards in it to make sure that
no false confessions are obtained by it. So when people
who are trained in the Read technique get confessions from

(01:03:12):
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 be great to
be able to just like to be able to just
with a straight face and no like soul conviction. Your

(01:03:35):
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, and then some
people fire into the crowds with assault rifles. Clearly none
of that's my Like, I have nothing to do with that.
The heads I've fled fire told you shoot over the head. Yeah,

(01:03:56):
there's a safeguard to make sure no one gets hit. Uh. Yeah.
So the read technique has started to fall out of
favor in the last really in the last few years,
and seventeen was 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

(01:04:16):
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 very common, still widely in use. But
the tide might seems to be turning on the read technique.

(01:04:37):
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 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

(01:04:58):
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,
it was gonna be one of the two, right, Yeah, yeah, yeah.

(01:05:20):
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 yeah,
so yeah, like a little a little side note especially

(01:05:44):
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, hey, did you hear about
the shooting on Fourth Street? And you're like yeah, and

(01:06:08):
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 confessed to information. They
said he had information about the crime. And because you

(01:06:29):
it's like, I didn't say shooting. You said shooting. Well 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, you know
what I'm saying, Like somebody saying, hey, you hear the
liquor store got robbed out. Hey you heard about that

(01:06:50):
liquor store robbed Like I had to learn to be like, nah,
I ain't heard ship, I don't heard nothing. I mean,
I don't know, you know what I'm saying. What mean
you don't know? You're not your 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, you know, just like you have
to like be Yeah. Anyway, all that to say, this

(01:07:12):
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,
which is why you don't talk and you wait for
your fucking lawyer. Yes yeah. John, John motherfucking birds, John

(01:07:36):
Burge is proof that the old 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 investigator during
that conflict. After the war, he returned to Chicago and
became a cop. In nineteen seventy two. He was promoted

(01:07:56):
to detective one year later. In nineteen seventy three, he
tortured his 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
area to investigation room and went to find Burge. A
few minutes later, Bird strolled into the interrogation room with

(01:08:17):
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
I want to know. He fastened the alligator clamps and
pulled a plastic bag down over Holmes's head, warning him

(01:08:38):
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
to torture man. Department rumors stated that he had learned
the techniques he employed during his time in Vietnam on

(01:08:59):
the bodies of North Vietnamese po ws. You call we
call this fucos boomerang, the tactics used in colonial wars overseas.
Coming back to the United States, Birge 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 quickly perfected what he called his inward box, which

(01:09:19):
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 Birch did to 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 black genitalia with It's very common in lynching,

(01:09:40):
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 No, I appreciate it like that
not being mentioned. Yeah, yeah, it's a thing because of

(01:10:00):
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 sergent and then to lieutenant and eventually
to commander. John Burge's behavior was not hidden from other
men in the Chicago Police. He kept his inward box
out on open display at a table in the police station.

(01:10:21):
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 and cigarettes. They put plastic bags over the
heads of others and suffocated them. This went on for

(01:10:42):
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 Burge and his men, though,

(01:11:05):
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 Burge's 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 most notably Richard M. Daley,

(01:11:29):
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 that after seventeen years of

(01:11:51):
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 voice mails after
a law year 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.

(01:12:12):
Burge was eventually accused of 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 because
been a lot of these guys were executed, a lot
of them died in prison. In the Chicago Police Board

(01:12:34):
voted to fire John Burge. This interrupted plans the local
Fraternal Order of Police had made that same year to
honor Burge and four of their officers with a parade float.
All of the other four officers were also accused of
torturing people, but 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

(01:12:57):
two thousand fourteen. 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

(01:13:18):
union issued a statement on 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 Reternal 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 that Burge
put a lot of bad guys in prison two thousand eighteen.

(01:13:42):
The cops who believe this are still on the force.
Just guys there, most of the force. Ah, yeah, guys. Yeah. Yeah,
you're asking you're asking us to respect you, and it's
like I would love to I would love to respect. Yeah,

(01:14:06):
just do respectable things. Yeah. Yeah. You know who I respect.
My my neighbor across the street who has never tortured
several hundred people. That guy, 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

(01:14:26):
not hard 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 Burge's victims, and this guy
had an extensive violent criminal record when he wound up
in Burge's hands. He had done bad things, and John

(01:14:48):
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 sh Ago Police Department in 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

(01:15:11):
law 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 are 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

(01:15:32):
like interview them, 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 to social scientists find a
reason for concern three decades of research have shown that

(01:15:53):
nonverbal signals so prized by the red trainers, bear no
relation to deception. In fact, people have little more and
coin flipping odds of guessing if someone is telling the truth,
and numerous surveys have shown that police do know better. Aldert,
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

(01:16:16):
they paid close attention 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.

(01:16:38):
Cops will always tell you they know how to spot
a liar they are lying. Wow, 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

(01:16:58):
I don't think I have a criminal record. Maybe you
know what I'm saying. But in all of the interactions
I've had, whether it was overtly racist or very aggressive,
or the guy was being a nice guy, or you
just meet like like you guys playing a nice carrier,
or you just meet like a he's just like he's

(01:17:18):
like really a good dude that really doesn't care. He's
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 it's sometimes I'm like, why are we playing

(01:17:39):
this game right now? Like this is your you're horrible actors.
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 initial interview,
and I know this dude is 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

(01:18:03):
you're doing. Like I know what you're doing. Okay, what
time of day 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 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 addists riggamo, Yeah, I'm ranting. Yea.

(01:18:27):
So I 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
a system that was built almost completely during a period
of time where either slavery black codes or Jim Crow
laws were the rule. In Minneapolis, where black people make

(01:18:51):
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 night two and 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 at night, when the gap shrinks considerably

(01:19:12):
Black people, because again, the cops can't tell what race
you are is easily 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 contraband on them. I could go on and on,

(01:19:32):
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
anything more than their skin color. And this is persistent

(01:19:54):
through every single level of law enforcement in our country.
Over the decades, activists and good lawyer in 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 gym Crow laws that
provided legal justification for a lot of police aggression, and
yet the aggression is still there. We have learned to

(01:20:16):
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.
I'll say this in like period. I say this's like

(01:20:39):
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 is just you know,
our families work. My little brothers is a California highway patrolment,
so confession I got law enforcement in my family. My
brothers worked there for ten fits years. He's never pulled

(01:21:01):
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 lass ons. He does it after school, he's living,
he's in the valley, doesnt after school programs, runs a
basketball league like the people know him. So like so
so there's that my father. You know, we talked about

(01:21:23):
my father. My father was a black panther. After he
left the Black Panther Party because they killed it, right,
he moved they be in the FBI. My father was
l a county probation officer. He worked with like underage defenders.
Retired from there, right, so worked in a special handling unit.
He wanted to deal with the violent ist of young

(01:21:44):
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
a child, like going to King Saneras and and and

(01:22:07):
g D g D like graduations and stuff like that.
But 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,
do not send this kid to prison, do not send
him to prison. The cops doing the same thing. The

(01:22:28):
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 caseload and then
watching that food go to prison. You know what I'm saying.
So when you, when you, when you even in us
bring all those things up to say this is that
even if you find good men and good women, the

(01:22:53):
system is flawed. And this is what we're trying to
get to. The structure is wrong. Yes, the the these
statement all cops are bastards, I think has been traditional,
like historically kind of unproductive in terms of actually getting
people to to u confront the real issues of of
of law enforcement. But what people mean by it is

(01:23:15):
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
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 further a system that

(01:23:37):
is fundamentally abusive and enforces very supremacy and a period
we are not what what we're not saying is that
all cops should never have a job in that 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

(01:23:57):
murders because it's good. Yeah, yes, 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 broadly similar
a lot of the same things they're doing. But there
shouldn't be I talked to cops a lot. I've talked
to a lot of cops will talk about like being

(01:24:18):
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 We decided as a as
a species that just following orders is not a justification
for violating people's civil rights. Yes, think about when we

(01:24:39):
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 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

(01:24:59):
they got some by you on the 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 this
it's the the whole like it's what you're trying to say,
It's like the whole thing needs a grenade. Because again,

(01:25:22):
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
a hit. Don't kill the guy, like just I just
want him out my house. And you know what, I

(01:25:42):
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, 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 cost the state less money to
give homeless people homes, then it costs to police and
incarceraate them. It costs less money to give drug addicts

(01:26:05):
drugs than to police them and to deal with the
results of them stealing ship for drugs they found out
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 you're like I try

(01:26:27):
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 than say here's some tail and all, like you
would be like, that's ridiculous. You've had 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. It's like,

(01:26:50):
this is what 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
pop dot com for poetry, rap, for some podcasts, for

(01:27:13):
some sustainable merch, some cups, some coffee if you want to,
you want to support non corporate coffee. I'm 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
and I am. I'm gonna keep reading and writing about

(01:27:37):
police for another week or so. Um then, um, I
don't know. We'll talk about Bill Cooper or something at
some point. Yeah, we have you all for some like
for something like like a like a dictator. Yeah yeah, yeah,
talk about somebody, somebody fun, you know, well, somebody not
connected to my own safety. And yeah, well we'll do

(01:27:58):
We'll talk about chairman now or somebody here. Yeah, everybody
loves a good chairman mouse story, Oh my dad, or
maybe Tito Tito. 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,
well we'll do something more lighthearted, but um, you can

(01:28:18):
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,
the end up policing is very easy reading. The Color
of the Third Degree is some rough ship. Um. Yeah,

(01:28:40):
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, Amen, shall we collect? Offering? Behind the

(01:29:02):
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.

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Robert Evans

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