May 11, 2023 • 40 mins
Robert sits down with Ali Winston, co-author of The Riders Come Out At Night, a book about the Oakland police.
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Welcome to It could Happen Here. This is Robert Evans,
and It Could Happen Here is a podcast about things
falling apart and you know, sometimes about making them better. Today,
we're talking both about something that is implicated in a
number of you know, aspects of what we call the
crumbles here in the United States, which is the police.
(00:27):
And we're also talking about the the tremendous difficulty that
people encounter whenever they try to improve this particular aspect
of American society, the near impossibility of reform within the police.
And to talk with me about that, and to talk
with me about their incredible new book, The Writers Come
Out at Night is Ali Winston. Ali co wrote this
(00:50):
book with Darwin bond Gram and it covers particularly the
Oakland Police and a scandal that kind of happened at
around the same time as the rampart scandal in Los Angeles,
focused around a group of Oakland police officers called the
Writers who Well, I'm gonna let Ali tell you about that.
(01:12):
It's a it's a pretty pretty shocking and.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
Bleak story though.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
Ali, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
Hither How are you doing?
Speaker 1 (01:17):
I'm doing good? How are you today?
Speaker 2 (01:19):
Lovely lovely Ali.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
This is a great book. It's it's very deeply reported.
I want to talk a little bit about kind of
the the what sort of brought you into this story,
because this is something that kind of happened around the
turn of the last century, and it's kind of adjacent
to a lot of issues that are still very much
(01:43):
relevant in kind of the problems we have with policing,
both kind of the the thin blue line code of silence,
the way in which police departments act in a very
gang like fashion to protect bad actors, the way in
which kind of ill thought out form policies targeted at
kind of assuaging the fears of business owners lead to
(02:08):
policies of tremendous violence. A lot of things that are
still very much kind of at play all around the country.
It's fascinating to me.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
So we came at this book both kind of independently.
Speaker 3 (02:21):
We came out this as two reporters who'd worked kind
of handing glove together for about ten well since twenty twelve.
When we signed our contract, it was twenty twenty, but
I'd started reporting on the Oakland Police Department in two
thousand and eight when I moved to the Bay Area
(02:41):
for graduate school at cal Gobert's, and I'd kind of
dove right into the topic of police and police conduct
in Oakland because I'd wanted to. I've been messing around
with criminal justice reporting when I was back east in
New York and North New Jersey where I was working,
(03:02):
and there really was there were some really egregious shootings
at that point in time, in the early two thousands,
mid two thousands, late two thousands OPD about average, I
think eight to fourteen officer involved shootings police shootings a year.
Invariably there would be one or two or three or four,
(03:22):
depending on the years, maybe more that involves someone who's
unarmed fleeing it was an awful but lawful shoot, or
maybe just an awful shoot that the DA didn't charge
or didn't properly investigate. And at that time, it was
really tough to get information about police shootings in California
because of a combination of laws and Supreme Court California
(03:43):
Supreme Court decisions that intersected and kind of shut the
door on any sort of record you could get from
about police disciplinary action or their past histories. So you
kind of had to mine the civil courts and look
for back doors and through the DA's offices and just
kind of or source up really well to try and
report out these incidents. And Darwin and I met about
(04:07):
around twenty twelve. We started interrogating questions about power and
the political economy of law enforcement. We started to raise
questions about the percentage of budgetary allocation that OPD receives.
It's about forty percent of the city's billion dollar budget
give or takes, so we're talking three hundred and fifty
four hundred million dollars every year. The result, the net
(04:31):
result for public safety is questionable.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
At best.
Speaker 3 (04:35):
Doesn't really tie into increase in police funding, increase in menpower,
decreasing crime. Oakland is a very violent city, often ranks
in the top ten or top five nationally in per
capita crime per one hundred thousand residents.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
And you know, it's.
Speaker 3 (04:50):
Also been under this reform program forever, and this is
the backdrop to all our reporting. There was always this
backdrop of court ordered reforms. There's external oversight. The external
oversight is oftentimes how the public and the press became
aware of some very deep seated issues in the department
and how they would get addressed because the politicians here, Affeckless,
(05:11):
were inexperienced, or complicit.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
Or all the above.
Speaker 3 (05:15):
So we over the course of our reporting together kind
of yoked together. Around a decade eight years or so,
we kind of realized, Okay, we have a paragraph in
each one of our stories that explains the backdrop, or
maybe a little bit more, depending.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
On how legalistic appease it was. We need to peel
all this back.
Speaker 3 (05:34):
We need to explain to people because this is the
longest running oversight regime in the country, right two decades now,
over two decades since the consent degree, the negotiated settlement
agreement was signed, and we just needed to explain to
people why this city had gone so far, why it
was an edge case, why it was an outlier. And
in order to do that, we couldn't use five thousand words.
(05:57):
We needed one hundred and twenty thousand, hundred and six.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
Yeah, this is a dense book in a way that's
still intensely readable, And I think part of what makes
it readable is it goes to a tremendous amount of
effort laying out things that people kind of know in
broad and a good example of this would be people
talk a lot about you know, the kind of concept
(06:22):
of you know, the bad apples that you know, there's
both on the side of people defending police departments that
it's a few bad apples, and then kind of and
you find this more on sort of people on the
left criticizing police as an institution, the idea that, like, well,
the fact that those bad apples are supported and defended
by the rest of the department kind of means that
they're all but bad. You get this these kind of
(06:43):
like broad you know, discussions about that phenomenon. What you
do in this in this book is kind of get
very granular with the way in which that actually functions
on the ground. I'm thinking about a specific point where
you've got one of the characters, you know, one of
the people that is a major source kind of for
this book and a major source for this scandal was
(07:04):
a police officer who effectively turned on his fellow officers
and reported all of this illegal violence being done by
this this gang. And there's a point where this guy,
after he's kind of become thoroughly horrified and disillusioned by what,
you know, he's the guys that he's writing with are doing,
goes to other people in the department who are like, yeah,
(07:25):
those guys are like messed up and it's it's bad,
and you just kind of have to you should just
kind of like, you know, try to try to move on,
but don't make waves about it, right, And it's this,
it's this, the kind of the fact, the degree to
which other people cannot just know in the department what's
happening but be disgusted by it, and still when I'm
kind of the shit hits the fan, fundamentally defend the
(07:49):
officers doing it, right, Like the fact that they're able
to warn other officers away from you know, being around
those guys doesn't mean that they won't like absolutely throw
down to defend them, which is, you know, something I
think people are kind of broadly aware of. But the
kind of going into the actual personal dynamics is I
(08:09):
think really valuable, and you do a very good job
of capturing that at the ground level.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
Well, what we wanted to do is explain how so.
Speaker 3 (08:20):
It's not a bad apple theory I think is Yeah, honestly,
it's a distraction and frankly it's an excuse. What you're
dealing with is culture, right, and culture eats politics and policy.
For lunch, breakfast, lunch, dinner, and all the meals in between,
every single time.
Speaker 2 (08:39):
You can't change culture unless you understand it.
Speaker 3 (08:42):
So what we wanted to do, and we were able
to do this because we had very good sourcing, not
only inside and around the department, current former officers. We
had reams of records. I mean we sued for I
want to say, hundreds of thousands of pages of records, videos,
audio files, got old court trains, scripts, cassette tapes of
old internal affairs interviews backstop those by talking to the
(09:05):
people there and involved, and we were really able to
We were able to kind of reconstruct, not just the
initial scandal of the writers of which stemmed from this
young officer, Keith Batt, who is from a city from Sebastopol,
which is a bit north of Oakland, very different place, rural,
(09:26):
a bit crunchy, quite crunchy, not nearly the real rough
and tumble grit of Oakland around the turn.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
Of the millennium. And Keith comes in.
Speaker 3 (09:39):
He's a criminal justice major in college, really idealistic, wanted
to join an active police department, applied to dozens of apartments,
to several departments around the area, and the first one
that took him was Oakland, and Oakland had a good
reputation among police culture.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
It was an active department.
Speaker 3 (09:54):
The cops worked hard, they were well trained, they were
decently paid, and it wasn't a you know in the
Bay Area like the two departments that people look to
are like are the Oakland Police Department in SFPD, and
SFPD is a closed shot.
Speaker 2 (10:10):
It is a legacy.
Speaker 3 (10:10):
Department is run by an intense old boy network of
Italian and Irish folks, some Chinese, some Asian immigrants that
are kind of led into that now, but it is
just it's such an insular place. OPD is actually typically
more welcoming of recruits from outside, and they really like
people who are hard chargers, active, willing to learn. And
(10:31):
Keith finished the top of his near the top of
his academy, excellent shot, really sharp on the uptake. His
instructors liked him, and right when he was about to
go on the street, they one of his instructors pulled
him aside and said, hey, I hear you got aside
to chuck to Clarence Mabtang, who was his field training officer.
He said, okay, listen, you need to keep your mouth
(10:55):
shut and you need to keep your eyes open. You're
going to see some crazy shit. But just go along
to get along, you know, just keep your head down. Yeah,
And Keith was like, wait, what are you talking about?
Like that's that's some wild that's a wild shit, Like
that's not what I'm expecting.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
It's a little bit odd. And these are older officers
who he respected.
Speaker 3 (11:16):
He goes out and gets in the car with Chuck,
and Chuck is this little, you know, very very intense,
buzz cut Filipino dude. And he's like, all right, I'm
gonna teach you. I gonna take take you out and
toughen you up, like this is not the academy anymore.
I'm gonna teach you how to be in the streets.
We're gonna get a fight, and we're gonna get in
a fight tonight. This is beast, first jot night on
(11:37):
the job, first time stepping into a Crown of Victoria
patrol car with his FTO.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
And he's like what.
Speaker 3 (11:45):
And sure enough, Chuck gets in a confrontation that very
night with someone drunk in front of his own house,
just drunk in front of his own house, threatens to
shoot the guy's dog takes the guy in after beating
him up.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
And Keith is like, wait, what you shoot dogs? And yeah,
they told him that.
Speaker 3 (12:01):
You know, every now and then they would encounter somebody
with the dog and they would shoot the dog and
then cut the leash in order to make it seem
like the dog was going to attack them.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
And that was just his introduction to it.
Speaker 3 (12:14):
And over the two weeks that he worked with several
officers on shift, there were three other officers who kind
of made up this little click of of free wheeling
cops that they called themselves the Riders, and they were
Jude Siapno, Frank Vasquez, and Matt Hornung And those three
(12:39):
were kind of at the center of it, and they
would they basically took it on themselves.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
They were not in a task force. They were just
patrol officers.
Speaker 3 (12:46):
They would kind of roam around West Oakland going out
and looking for people to arrest, just jumping out on
random folks.
Speaker 2 (12:51):
They were pro not reactive, they were proactive.
Speaker 3 (12:54):
So they actually ended up kidnapping people, planning drugs on
them when they didn't find drugs, beating the tar out
of them, torturing them. Sap, Who's nickname was the foot
Doctor because he had a habit of taking his asss
retractable batime and beating detainees on the soles of their
feet till they couldn't walk.
Speaker 2 (13:11):
Yeah, their bruises were so painful.
Speaker 1 (13:13):
For some reference, that's that was called bastinado by the
Spanish inquisition, who loved to do the exact same thing.
Speaker 3 (13:21):
Yeah, no, it's it's really it's grim. It's really really
grim shit. So Keith sees.
Speaker 2 (13:28):
All this stuff.
Speaker 3 (13:28):
It's just like two weeks of like training day that film,
it's two weeks of that, it's not just one week.
Speaker 2 (13:35):
And he's like, I.
Speaker 3 (13:38):
Can't do this. This can't be the way policing is.
And he keeps going, you know, kind of casting around
for help. And the cash twenty two that he's in
is that anybody who he tells about this behavior is
obligated by OPDS regulations to then report said misconduct, and
if they don't, then they're guilty of failing to report misconduct.
(13:58):
So he has to kind of hedge his words and
you know, talk around these issues. And his friends who
work in OPD, who work in CHP California and highway patrol,
and he tells about this stuff in this roundabout way.
Are all giving him the same advice? You know, I
don't know, like do you want to write out your career?
Like can you do this? Is there a way you
can switch out? Is there a way that you can
(14:20):
thread the needle? And it gets to be too much,
and so one day, after two weeks, he decides, I
can't do this anymore. I can't put more I can't
put in this in people in jail. I can't forge
paperwork for my supervisors. I can't forge their overtime. You know,
I can't help them steal money from the taxpayers like this.
So he goes into the you know, he confronts them
(14:42):
in a parking garage in front of a church in
right north of downtown Oakland. These guys called the light
Cave that they would hang out at, and he's telling Chuck, listen,
you know, I can't do this.
Speaker 2 (14:54):
This isn't the right way. And Maven x as well,
you know you have a problem. No, No, I don't
think you're really getting this.
Speaker 3 (14:59):
He's trying to like talking past it, and then Keith
keeps bringing up Frank Fasquez and Frank he'd seen Frank
choke people. He'd see Frank empty, can't pepper spray into
somebody's mouth, puts his fingers into their eyes like a
bowling ball.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
He said, oh, well, if you have a problem with Frank,
you can talk to him.
Speaker 3 (15:16):
Fasquez comes over and you know drives over there that
have a conversation about that.
Speaker 2 (15:21):
And Keith at this point is so wired up and
so terrified.
Speaker 3 (15:25):
He's looking at Mabadag and looking at Fasquez and thinking
to himself, Okay, can I get to my pistol before
they get to theirs if they want to hurt me?
And if we have a shootout, how's it going to
look if three Oakland cops are bucking led at each
other in uniform on shift right, He's running this calculus
(15:46):
in his head.
Speaker 2 (15:48):
Doesn't come to that.
Speaker 3 (15:49):
In the end, Mabini convinces him to go in and
sign a resignation letter, and when he does that at
OPD headquarters, one of his supervisors from the academy gets
hold of him, gets a hold of him, says, no, no, no,
this isn't what's happened. This is not you what's going on?
And they convinced him to go upstairs and talk to
internal affairs, and then he spills the beans on the
(16:10):
what he's seen the past two weeks, and that blows
the Lid office scandal.
Speaker 1 (16:24):
There had been a number of people who had attempted
to kind of like victims of this particular gang of
guys who had that's like, attempted to complain, attempted to
come forward. But yeah, it's not really until this officer
on the inside, with a very good record is willing
to say something that anything starts to happen.
Speaker 3 (16:45):
So you have to remember the context here. I'm sorry
for cutting in, but he I was remiss on this.
So the context of Oakland in late nineteen nineties early
two thousands is that it's in the middle of New
York style urban renewal. Jerry Brown, who later became governor
of California, was kind of on his way back up
the political rung, and Oakland was his first stop.
Speaker 2 (17:04):
He was re elected mayor in nineteen ninety eight.
Speaker 3 (17:07):
I believe on this kind of ecotopian platform where he
could he was going to turn Oakland into this socialist,
you know, environmental friendly metropolis. But he gets into office,
he starts going to community meetings and he realizes public
safety is the number one concerns. So he becomes Rudy
Giuliani West, as one of his former employees put it
(17:28):
to us, pushes a massive building program in downtown Oakland
for new residential market rate housing and enlists his police
department to go on a clean up the streets spree
by any means necessary, and he would go into the
lineup and cheer them on route them on, say listen,
you know, I got your back, all back your play,
(17:49):
you know, just take back those corners from these dealers.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
That's what those officers, That's what.
Speaker 3 (17:53):
Mabinang, Hornoggs, Siapno, and Vasquez were responding to. They were
responding to the instructions from their supervisor, from their chief,
from their mayor that came down the command chain to
clean up the streets and do this sort of stuff.
And they were actually, you know, Maminag and Vazquez in particular,
were very highly valued officers. They were proactive. They made
(18:14):
their supervisors look good. It was this kind of one
hand washes the other bit.
Speaker 1 (18:18):
Yeah, and I one of the things that I found
particularly kind of impactful is the way in which you
describe both the kind the violence, the absolute like horrifying
cruelty of what these guys are getting up to and
how that intersects with Jerry Brown's political career, with the
kind of promises he's making to clean up the city
(18:41):
and the kind of metrics that are established, you know,
to provide basically evidence that this plan is succeeding.
Speaker 2 (18:48):
You know.
Speaker 1 (18:48):
It's it really like kind of gives on the ground
context to what this kind of broken windows style policing,
what it actually means in terms of a human cost,
and it's it's devastating. And equally devastating is the lawsuit
that kind of comes afterwards when this all gets exposed.
(19:10):
One of the things that was most shocking to me
because I was I was only kind of broadly aware
of this case at all, is when these guys, the
officers in this in this gang, get you know, go
on trial or sort of when that process starts, one
of them, this guy Vasquez, like goes on the run,
steals an AR fifteen from his department and fucking disappears
(19:34):
and he's still in the wind. No one's ever found
this guy.
Speaker 2 (19:37):
Yeah, he was most likely in Mexico. He's from Mexico.
Speaker 3 (19:40):
He's born down there and has family around media.
Speaker 2 (19:44):
The theory is that he I mean, you know, he
was stopped by a cop.
Speaker 3 (19:48):
That's when, Yeah, the people realized that he had been
that he'd stolen a gun from the department. But he
kind of badges his way out of this encounter with
a cop in so which is a Delta town near
where he lived and are near his house, and that
was the last anybody had seen of him, has seen
of him. The theory a theory that's rattled around quite often,
(20:12):
and there's more often than there's probably some hef to
it is that somebody from the either the department or
the police union helped him down to the border in
Chula Vista and he walked across. So the odds are
that he's in Mexico estensively. The FBI are still looking
for him. He's a fugitive, but he's never never been found.
Speaker 1 (20:33):
No, and he when this happens, because his buddies and
the writers are all all do in fact, go on trial.
And you know, you might think the fact that one
of them like bounced and fled the country after stealing
a gun would have an impact on things, but no, no,
in court, they're not you know, the prosecutors aren't allowed
(20:55):
to tell the jury what happened with Fasquez because there
it's worried that it might prejudice them, which is wild
to me.
Speaker 3 (21:02):
Well, in the first trial, so there were two trials.
Fast forward a little bit, all three cops in their
first trial. There's hung juries in them. I think there
were one or two holdouts maybe, And from the reporting
that we.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
Did, the interview that we did with the.
Speaker 3 (21:15):
ADA on the case, Dave Holliser, it seemed that these
were people who were convinced that these were good cops
and the ends justified the means or therefore, you know,
this kind of noble noble cause corruption actually has an
audience among some segments of the population around here.
Speaker 2 (21:33):
I mean it.
Speaker 3 (21:34):
I'm sure you see this across the Bay now in
San Francisco. There's all these people who were, you know,
kind of advocating the sort of vigilante violence that that
former fire commissioner was committed any and so against homeless folks, unhoused.
Speaker 1 (21:45):
Yeah, for folks who aren't aware the fire commissioner of
San Francisco. This was a couple of months ago, right
around the time that there was a big wave of
San Francisco has collapsed into anarchy sort of stories.
Speaker 2 (21:57):
Which happened every ten years, which yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:59):
Yeah, and then you know, it happened at the same
time that that tech CEO was stabbed to death. Turns
out by another tech founder. But yeah, this story that
the fire commissioner had been attacked and there's this video
of him getting brutally beaten by a homeless man. It
turns out he had been going around at night and
macing homeless people at random.
Speaker 3 (22:17):
One of the yeah, hairspring, it was crazy, it was
awful ship. Yeah, and then someone attacked him with the
homeless with a with a crowbar. But all that those
facts were emitted anyway. So the bottom line is with
the with Horning of Horning, Vasquez and Sap they're they're
hung on the first trial, and then the second trial
(22:38):
they're acquitted. Uh, they're Horning is acquitted of some charges
and there's hung juries in the rest of his charges
and those first Syap know and Mabinang. But in the
second trial. The first trial the defense was, well, they
didn't do with Keith, did Keith's bad as lying? The
second trial was well, the defense turned to a strategy
of well, actually Frank Ivasquez was the leader, So it's
all Frank's fault.
Speaker 1 (23:02):
Yeah, it's easy to throw that guy under the bus
because he's gone.
Speaker 2 (23:04):
Exactly, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3 (23:06):
And you know, to say he was the ringleader is
absurd because everyone knew in OPD and outside OPD that
Mabdang was the shot.
Speaker 2 (23:13):
Caller in that little gang.
Speaker 3 (23:15):
What's interesting is the lawsuit, So there's a little vegary
here about the criminal investigation into the Riders. The police
department and the police department's internal affairs investigators and the
police chief made a decision from day one from on
high that the investigation would only be limited to what
Keith Bat saw, that it would not expand out beyond
(23:37):
his two weeks on the job and the incidents that
he witnessed personally, and that they were able to corroborate
with other people. And there was another cop, Scott Huson,
who did corroborate some of this stuff. Once it came
out that he'd falsified some reports, he decided to save
his on skin.
Speaker 2 (23:54):
So he also caught some of.
Speaker 3 (23:55):
The flak that Bat did, but not nearly the same
sort of death threat type shit that Keith caught. So
with regard to the broader, the broader lay of the land,
the criminal the investigation didn't go into a broader pattern
of what else was happening on these shifts, what are
their cops were involved because the writers, you know, there's
(24:16):
a ball that they actually signed for each other, and
there's several names on that ball.
Speaker 2 (24:21):
It's not just those four cops.
Speaker 3 (24:23):
So the civil suit, there was a civil suit brought
by two civil rights two attorneys in the area, John
Burris and Jim Channon, who had been suing the department
for years.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
They'd actually received walkins.
Speaker 3 (24:35):
The victims that you'd mentioned earlier over the years, alleging
that they'd been arrested, beaten up, framed up, tortured by
these cops in West Oakland. And when the news of
Keith Batt blowing the whistle on the writers hit the newspapers,
it clicked for them and they realized they'd been seeing
(24:55):
this pattern. So they opened up their own pattern and
practice investigation and did their own investigation of complaints and
canvassed neighborhoods and got names from people who'd filed complaints
and alleged similar patterns of misconduct, and came up with
one hundred and nineteen plaintiffs who who laid out a
(25:19):
pattern of abuses that spanned much more of the city,
the downtown area, other parts of West Oakland, even as
far as East Oakland, and a much broader time frame
stretching back almost basically to nineteen ninety five, five years prior.
Speaker 2 (25:33):
So.
Speaker 3 (25:34):
The reality of opd's abuses and their kind of deep
corruption in that period of time was far larger than
the criminal case against those four riders would have it.
And I should say that these civil attorneys took up
the challenge where both the state Attorney general and the
(25:58):
federal authorities both you a United States attorney and federal
and civil rights in main justice dropped the ball. They
did not open pattern and practice investigations into OPD. And
we have it from the ADA himself, who's in the
room when he presented their case, because they were cross
designated as as their cross editor as designated as US
(26:21):
attorneys during their whole investigation, and vice versa. He presented
the case to the city United States Attorney at the time,
one Robert Mueller, who should be familiar to your listeners
as the former head of the.
Speaker 1 (26:34):
FBI twice over swinging Bob Miller, that's right.
Speaker 3 (26:38):
And you know, Miller flipped through the pages and was looking,
you know, trying to see if any connections to Russia and.
Speaker 2 (26:45):
Alpha Bank and so on.
Speaker 3 (26:47):
But no, actually, I mean he's flipping through and he
pulls out these files and he looks at the long
rap sheet of some of these witnesses, and these were
people in the street. These were people who had been
arrested before, had been involved in narcotic sales, petty assaults,
that robbery's, burglaries, what have you like. They were people
who were not They were not kids, they were not
clean sheets. And he handed the file back to Hollister,
(27:10):
to the ADA and said, I wish you the best
of luck. It's important to note that this was a
different era. A CoP's word was very, very very hard
to impeach on the stand. There was no body camera video.
There were no cell phoned videos at the time. You
would maybe have a rough camcorder every now and then
if somebody shooting like a little video on the street,
kind of grainy digital cameras, and they were The sound
(27:32):
wasn't great, but there wasn't much beyond eyewitness testimony. And
that's why Keith's words were so important. Why his testimony
was so critical is that you had a cop coming
out and blowing the whistle on his department and saying, no,
this is not right.
Speaker 2 (27:48):
This is what they're doing. They should be punished for it.
Speaker 1 (28:01):
You know, I can't help it thinking about the story
that's kind of blown up right now about there's a
man on the subway recently in New York City who was,
you know, acting kind of erradically yelling and stuff, but
had not done any violence to anyone, and a bystander
straphanger restrained him, put him in a headlock for fifteen minutes,
(28:21):
and he died. And kind of the response that I'm
seeing from guys like Matt Walsh, the Daily Wire crew,
you know, particularly in right wing media, is well, this
guy had been arrested, you know, forty times or whatever.
It's like, well, that's not germane to anything that's happening.
Speaker 2 (28:35):
Doesn't give you the right to lynch someone.
Speaker 1 (28:36):
Yeah, exactly like that, Like, the penalty for having been
arrested in the past is not getting strangled to death.
That's not the way the system is. That's not the
way any of this is supposed to work. And it's
it's interesting. There's a degree to which I guess it
hasn't changed, and there's a degree to which I'm kind
of worried that the sort of nature of social media
(28:58):
means that we're a lot more open about the kind
of violence we're willing to accept.
Speaker 2 (29:02):
For I agree with it, Yeah, I agree with that entirely.
Speaker 3 (29:04):
I mean, that's unfortunately the backlash to a lot of
to both Black Lives Matter cycles in twenty fourteen, fifteen,
and the current cycle is a lot more virulent then
you'd have it if you just watched kind of the
soft focus PBS frontline documentary versions of it. There's a
(29:25):
lot of really naked justification and support for.
Speaker 2 (29:33):
Extra legal violence.
Speaker 3 (29:34):
And that is part of the issue with you know,
law enforcement and holding them accountable. There is always going
to be a segment, small, sometimes vocal, sometimes not, of
the society that supports violence beyond the extent of the law,
beyond the constraints of our system. And that's why oversight,
(29:58):
why running the rule over law enforcement and making sure
that they behave according to the laws and that they
are operating within the baluands of their limits. In so
far as we have set them out for them and
in so far as like it. Look, this book is
not a book questioning whether or not police should exist.
Speaker 2 (30:17):
It's a history.
Speaker 3 (30:18):
They do exist, They have existed. This is what it
has looked like to date. Right If other people want
to make those cases and look at you know, hypotheticals
or envisioned a different future, that's totally fine. What we're
trying to do is lay out the ways in which
people have pushed back on one of the most egregious
departments in the country consistently for over a century and
(30:42):
actually had some sort of lasting impact on it. And
there have been some impacts that have really changed because
of Look, they don't there a there's no more public
strip searching of people in the streets that happen in
Oakland on the regular every day.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
As late as.
Speaker 3 (31:01):
Twenty nine and ten, it was common that the cops
would say, look, I'm going in your ass for rocks.
You'd better not have anything there, right in the middle
of the morning, on a crowded street, in front of
people driving by on the way to work. That sort
of civil rights violation would happen all the time. The
department no longer shoots shoots, maybe about three or four
(31:21):
people a year. That's way down from fourteen to fifteen
a year a decade twelve years ago. That's because they've
changed their chase policy, their pursuit policy. They used to
pursue people with an intent to catch them at all costs.
That ended up resulting in cops chasing people down blind
alleys or ending up way too close to a suspect
and pulling out their weapon and opening up fire, regardless
(31:42):
of whether or not they actually had the suspect had
a firearm or another weapon, or whether the cops were
under threat. The change in the pursuit policy has led
to more of the instruction now is to contain, don't
pursue close call for backup, set a perimeter, preserve life.
That's not been that change was not something in department
(32:04):
submitted to voluntarily. They are brought, they are kicking and screaming.
But because there has been this outside imposition of court
oversight for so long, because it hasn't gone away, because
it's not overseen by the Justice Department or the state
Attorney General. So you know, some of the political figure
can't like they can't there can't be a deal cut
(32:25):
in the back room between a senator's staffer and the
federal Department of Justice, or the mayor and the state attorney.
Speaker 2 (32:31):
General and their wife or whatever like.
Speaker 3 (32:34):
That sort of thing doesn't really happen when the plaintiff's
attorneys aren't hoholding to anybody other than themselves, and when
the federal district court judge kind of lets the situation
play out as it will and whole and both judges
on this case have actually been very by the book
and very stringent on how the oversight has gone. So
(32:56):
that's why it's gone on for twenty years, and it
actually has resulted in good changes. There are a lot
of people who bitch about it, who cry that, oh, well,
we need to be out from there. To this oversight,
it's hammering the police. They can't do their job as
they will. Well, do you want to go back to
twenty years ago? Do you really want that? Do you
want that sort of abuse?
Speaker 2 (33:14):
No?
Speaker 3 (33:14):
And that's why there is a constituency in Oakland that
did manage to change a lot of things around. There's
a police commission here that now oversees the department. It's
not perfect, it's very much in the infancy, but that's
a body that existed to take control away from the
mayor and move it more towards civilian control of a
police department. And this is Yeah, it's a long arc,
(33:37):
but the bottom line is that it's not about a
one or a zero.
Speaker 2 (33:41):
There's no linear progress here.
Speaker 3 (33:42):
It's kind of goes in ways, but there has been progress,
which is a crazy thing to say when.
Speaker 2 (33:46):
You look at the the shit that's in the book.
Speaker 1 (33:48):
Yeah. Yeah, but it is, like, it's important both, you know,
I think our our audience is definitely much more of
our audiences in the constituency of you know, get rid
of the police entirely, even if you're coming at it
from that, I mean, especially if you're coming at from
that standpoint. Actually, I think kind of one of the
mistakes that a lot of people who are are on
(34:09):
that side of things, which is generally where I find myself,
is using that as an excuse to not actually understand
how the police function, using their sort of distaste for
the institution as an excuse to not understand how the
institution works, why it's resilient, and the ways in which
you know, both harms can to an extent be mitigated,
(34:30):
but also kind of just on a strategic level, how
it functions to defend itself, and I think that this
book does an exceptional job of going through that in
a way that's nuanced and detailed, but also compelling and readable,
like you're not going to have to I do really
recommend your book. People are not going to have like
trouble getting into it, Like I was drawn in from
(34:54):
the first page. So I really do think this is
something folks should look into. No matter where you live
in the United States, even if you've never been to Oakland,
you will. You will get a lot out of this.
Speaker 3 (35:05):
I would say that we didn't make an explicit attempt
to make the city the main character, so to draw
people into Oakland and kind of cast it in the
same way that Mike Davis cast Los Angeles in the
City of Courts. May he rest in peace. It was
a great inspiration for us. But more than anything else,
there are tons of parallels in Oakland to other places.
(35:26):
It's not a unique plate. I mean, it is a
unique place, but it's also very typical for an American
city like Los Angeles and New York and Chicago are
completely atypical. They're huge, they don't most American cities are
like four hundred to six hundred thousand people large. Oakland's
racial balance is almost thirty thirty thirty white, Latino, Black,
(35:48):
ten percent Asian, and roughly eight to ten percent Asian.
Speaker 2 (35:52):
Then everyone else thrown in there.
Speaker 3 (35:55):
It's really balanced out and in some ways it's very representative,
and it's also you know, rust belt city in certain respects,
although that's changed a lot with the tech boom.
Speaker 2 (36:05):
We could be going back the other way.
Speaker 3 (36:06):
Yeah, but it really there are echoes in stuff that's
happened in New York and Los Angeles, in Cleveland, in
New Orleans, in Portland and Seattle. It's the experience that
we've had here, particularly with police oversight and reform. I
mean Portland and Seattle are two other cities that have
actually undergone very similar programs with departments that.
Speaker 2 (36:30):
Are more alike to OPD than not.
Speaker 1 (36:32):
Yeah, well, Allie, is there anything else you wanted to
make sure to get into in this conversation or Yeah.
Speaker 3 (36:41):
I think your point about I just wanted to touch
on your point about where people come out for the institution.
I think it's really important, even regardless of what you
believe about where we should and shouldn't be with law enforcement.
Speaker 2 (36:52):
You've got to understand it.
Speaker 3 (36:54):
Yeah, because it's such a huge institution in our society.
It is basically the main point of contact most people
have with the state now in many American cities, because
we've stripped down so many other aspects of our societies.
Mental hospitals are gone, our schools are failing, public housing
barely exists, our healthcare system is decimated, and cops essentially
(37:18):
catch a lot of the end product of those problems.
Speaker 2 (37:21):
It's one of the reasons why I started.
Speaker 3 (37:22):
Reporting our criminal justice because you can look at so
many other issues of American society through that system. And
also you can see ways in which like political agendas,
the way that police departments lobby, and the messaging that
they push out. They don't do it in isolated fashion.
It's coordinated, like there are these big swings that happen
(37:42):
on the national political stage, if you will. We were
at one moment with police reform and abolishing the police,
defunding them with Black Lives matters. The immediate pushback within
six months was there's a crime wave.
Speaker 2 (37:56):
There's a crime wave. There's a crime wave we need
to support.
Speaker 3 (38:00):
And now we're at the point where people are taking
act or basically committing acts of vigilante violence because they
have it in their head that things are so out
of control. In New York, homeless man's choked to death
because he's he's having an episode on the train.
Speaker 2 (38:15):
San Francisco.
Speaker 3 (38:16):
This fire commissioner is going around bare spring people who
are camping out on in the streets. This is the
sort of back and forth swing that oftentimes starts with
people who are trying to protect their budget line, who
are trying to protect their political power, and it ends
up with consequences like that where people take it to
(38:37):
that level. And I think that looking at law enforcement
as a political actor is really important for understanding how
we are where we are in this society and also
understanding the ways in which you can try and rain
them back in and keep your boot on their neck,
because realistically they will if you let if there's no oversight,
(38:57):
if oversight is pulled back. There's a reactionary at the
heart of American law enforcement. It's always been there. We
document it back basically to the turn of the century
in Oakland in Justice one City, which is a newer
city in the States. And if you don't if you
let that go that core will rise up and basically
take over the department. That's what happened with the writers,
(39:17):
That's what they were. They were a representation of a
hard core that had existed in Oakland for decades. And
I think that that's really a really I think that's
a critical takeaway for readers from this book.
Speaker 1 (39:29):
Yeah, I would absolutely agree. Well, folks, the book is
called The Writers Come Out at Night, Brutality, Corruption and
cover Up in Oakland. It's by Ali Winston, who you've
just been listening to, and Darwin Bond Graham. I can't
recommend it enough. Ali, thank you so much for being
on the show.
Speaker 2 (39:48):
Thank you so much, Robert. It could Happen here as
a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from
cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zonemedia dot com,
or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Speaker 1 (40:05):
You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated
monthly at Coolzonemedia dot com slash sources.
Speaker 2 (40:10):
Thanks for listening,
Welcome to It could Happen Here. This is Robert Evans,
and It Could Happen Here is a podcast about things
falling apart and you know, sometimes about making them better. Today,
we're talking both about something that is implicated in a
number of you know, aspects of what we call the
crumbles here in the United States, which is the police.
(00:27):
And we're also talking about the the tremendous difficulty that
people encounter whenever they try to improve this particular aspect
of American society, the near impossibility of reform within the police.
And to talk with me about that, and to talk
with me about their incredible new book, The Writers Come
Out at Night is Ali Winston. Ali co wrote this
(00:50):
book with Darwin bond Gram and it covers particularly the
Oakland Police and a scandal that kind of happened at
around the same time as the rampart scandal in Los Angeles,
focused around a group of Oakland police officers called the
Writers who Well, I'm gonna let Ali tell you about that.
(01:12):
It's a it's a pretty pretty shocking and.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
Bleak story though.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
Ali, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
Hither How are you doing?
Speaker 1 (01:17):
I'm doing good? How are you today?
Speaker 2 (01:19):
Lovely lovely Ali.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
This is a great book. It's it's very deeply reported.
I want to talk a little bit about kind of
the the what sort of brought you into this story,
because this is something that kind of happened around the
turn of the last century, and it's kind of adjacent
to a lot of issues that are still very much
(01:43):
relevant in kind of the problems we have with policing,
both kind of the the thin blue line code of silence,
the way in which police departments act in a very
gang like fashion to protect bad actors, the way in
which kind of ill thought out form policies targeted at
kind of assuaging the fears of business owners lead to
(02:08):
policies of tremendous violence. A lot of things that are
still very much kind of at play all around the country.
It's fascinating to me.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
So we came at this book both kind of independently.
Speaker 3 (02:21):
We came out this as two reporters who'd worked kind
of handing glove together for about ten well since twenty twelve.
When we signed our contract, it was twenty twenty, but
I'd started reporting on the Oakland Police Department in two
thousand and eight when I moved to the Bay Area
(02:41):
for graduate school at cal Gobert's, and I'd kind of
dove right into the topic of police and police conduct
in Oakland because I'd wanted to. I've been messing around
with criminal justice reporting when I was back east in
New York and North New Jersey where I was working,
(03:02):
and there really was there were some really egregious shootings
at that point in time, in the early two thousands,
mid two thousands, late two thousands OPD about average, I
think eight to fourteen officer involved shootings police shootings a year.
Invariably there would be one or two or three or four,
(03:22):
depending on the years, maybe more that involves someone who's
unarmed fleeing it was an awful but lawful shoot, or
maybe just an awful shoot that the DA didn't charge
or didn't properly investigate. And at that time, it was
really tough to get information about police shootings in California
because of a combination of laws and Supreme Court California
(03:43):
Supreme Court decisions that intersected and kind of shut the
door on any sort of record you could get from
about police disciplinary action or their past histories. So you
kind of had to mine the civil courts and look
for back doors and through the DA's offices and just
kind of or source up really well to try and
report out these incidents. And Darwin and I met about
(04:07):
around twenty twelve. We started interrogating questions about power and
the political economy of law enforcement. We started to raise
questions about the percentage of budgetary allocation that OPD receives.
It's about forty percent of the city's billion dollar budget
give or takes, so we're talking three hundred and fifty
four hundred million dollars every year. The result, the net
(04:31):
result for public safety is questionable.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
At best.
Speaker 3 (04:35):
Doesn't really tie into increase in police funding, increase in menpower,
decreasing crime. Oakland is a very violent city, often ranks
in the top ten or top five nationally in per
capita crime per one hundred thousand residents.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
And you know, it's.
Speaker 3 (04:50):
Also been under this reform program forever, and this is
the backdrop to all our reporting. There was always this
backdrop of court ordered reforms. There's external oversight. The external
oversight is oftentimes how the public and the press became
aware of some very deep seated issues in the department
and how they would get addressed because the politicians here, Affeckless,
(05:11):
were inexperienced, or complicit.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
Or all the above.
Speaker 3 (05:15):
So we over the course of our reporting together kind
of yoked together. Around a decade eight years or so,
we kind of realized, Okay, we have a paragraph in
each one of our stories that explains the backdrop, or
maybe a little bit more, depending.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
On how legalistic appease it was. We need to peel
all this back.
Speaker 3 (05:34):
We need to explain to people because this is the
longest running oversight regime in the country, right two decades now,
over two decades since the consent degree, the negotiated settlement
agreement was signed, and we just needed to explain to
people why this city had gone so far, why it
was an edge case, why it was an outlier. And
in order to do that, we couldn't use five thousand words.
(05:57):
We needed one hundred and twenty thousand, hundred and six.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
Yeah, this is a dense book in a way that's
still intensely readable, And I think part of what makes
it readable is it goes to a tremendous amount of
effort laying out things that people kind of know in
broad and a good example of this would be people
talk a lot about you know, the kind of concept
(06:22):
of you know, the bad apples that you know, there's
both on the side of people defending police departments that
it's a few bad apples, and then kind of and
you find this more on sort of people on the
left criticizing police as an institution, the idea that, like, well,
the fact that those bad apples are supported and defended
by the rest of the department kind of means that
they're all but bad. You get this these kind of
(06:43):
like broad you know, discussions about that phenomenon. What you
do in this in this book is kind of get
very granular with the way in which that actually functions
on the ground. I'm thinking about a specific point where
you've got one of the characters, you know, one of
the people that is a major source kind of for
this book and a major source for this scandal was
(07:04):
a police officer who effectively turned on his fellow officers
and reported all of this illegal violence being done by
this this gang. And there's a point where this guy,
after he's kind of become thoroughly horrified and disillusioned by what,
you know, he's the guys that he's writing with are doing,
goes to other people in the department who are like, yeah,
(07:25):
those guys are like messed up and it's it's bad,
and you just kind of have to you should just
kind of like, you know, try to try to move on,
but don't make waves about it, right, And it's this,
it's this, the kind of the fact, the degree to
which other people cannot just know in the department what's
happening but be disgusted by it, and still when I'm
kind of the shit hits the fan, fundamentally defend the
(07:49):
officers doing it, right, Like the fact that they're able
to warn other officers away from you know, being around
those guys doesn't mean that they won't like absolutely throw
down to defend them, which is, you know, something I
think people are kind of broadly aware of. But the
kind of going into the actual personal dynamics is I
(08:09):
think really valuable, and you do a very good job
of capturing that at the ground level.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
Well, what we wanted to do is explain how so.
Speaker 3 (08:20):
It's not a bad apple theory I think is Yeah, honestly,
it's a distraction and frankly it's an excuse. What you're
dealing with is culture, right, and culture eats politics and policy.
For lunch, breakfast, lunch, dinner, and all the meals in between,
every single time.
Speaker 2 (08:39):
You can't change culture unless you understand it.
Speaker 3 (08:42):
So what we wanted to do, and we were able
to do this because we had very good sourcing, not
only inside and around the department, current former officers. We
had reams of records. I mean we sued for I
want to say, hundreds of thousands of pages of records, videos,
audio files, got old court trains, scripts, cassette tapes of
old internal affairs interviews backstop those by talking to the
(09:05):
people there and involved, and we were really able to
We were able to kind of reconstruct, not just the
initial scandal of the writers of which stemmed from this
young officer, Keith Batt, who is from a city from Sebastopol,
which is a bit north of Oakland, very different place, rural,
(09:26):
a bit crunchy, quite crunchy, not nearly the real rough
and tumble grit of Oakland around the turn.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
Of the millennium. And Keith comes in.
Speaker 3 (09:39):
He's a criminal justice major in college, really idealistic, wanted
to join an active police department, applied to dozens of apartments,
to several departments around the area, and the first one
that took him was Oakland, and Oakland had a good
reputation among police culture.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
It was an active department.
Speaker 3 (09:54):
The cops worked hard, they were well trained, they were
decently paid, and it wasn't a you know in the
Bay Area like the two departments that people look to
are like are the Oakland Police Department in SFPD, and
SFPD is a closed shot.
Speaker 2 (10:10):
It is a legacy.
Speaker 3 (10:10):
Department is run by an intense old boy network of
Italian and Irish folks, some Chinese, some Asian immigrants that
are kind of led into that now, but it is
just it's such an insular place. OPD is actually typically
more welcoming of recruits from outside, and they really like
people who are hard chargers, active, willing to learn. And
(10:31):
Keith finished the top of his near the top of
his academy, excellent shot, really sharp on the uptake. His
instructors liked him, and right when he was about to
go on the street, they one of his instructors pulled
him aside and said, hey, I hear you got aside
to chuck to Clarence Mabtang, who was his field training officer.
He said, okay, listen, you need to keep your mouth
(10:55):
shut and you need to keep your eyes open. You're
going to see some crazy shit. But just go along
to get along, you know, just keep your head down. Yeah,
And Keith was like, wait, what are you talking about?
Like that's that's some wild that's a wild shit, Like
that's not what I'm expecting.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
It's a little bit odd. And these are older officers
who he respected.
Speaker 3 (11:16):
He goes out and gets in the car with Chuck,
and Chuck is this little, you know, very very intense,
buzz cut Filipino dude. And he's like, all right, I'm
gonna teach you. I gonna take take you out and
toughen you up, like this is not the academy anymore.
I'm gonna teach you how to be in the streets.
We're gonna get a fight, and we're gonna get in
a fight tonight. This is beast, first jot night on
(11:37):
the job, first time stepping into a Crown of Victoria
patrol car with his FTO.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
And he's like what.
Speaker 3 (11:45):
And sure enough, Chuck gets in a confrontation that very
night with someone drunk in front of his own house,
just drunk in front of his own house, threatens to
shoot the guy's dog takes the guy in after beating
him up.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
And Keith is like, wait, what you shoot dogs? And yeah,
they told him that.
Speaker 3 (12:01):
You know, every now and then they would encounter somebody
with the dog and they would shoot the dog and
then cut the leash in order to make it seem
like the dog was going to attack them.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
And that was just his introduction to it.
Speaker 3 (12:14):
And over the two weeks that he worked with several
officers on shift, there were three other officers who kind
of made up this little click of of free wheeling
cops that they called themselves the Riders, and they were
Jude Siapno, Frank Vasquez, and Matt Hornung And those three
(12:39):
were kind of at the center of it, and they
would they basically took it on themselves.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
They were not in a task force. They were just
patrol officers.
Speaker 3 (12:46):
They would kind of roam around West Oakland going out
and looking for people to arrest, just jumping out on
random folks.
Speaker 2 (12:51):
They were pro not reactive, they were proactive.
Speaker 3 (12:54):
So they actually ended up kidnapping people, planning drugs on
them when they didn't find drugs, beating the tar out
of them, torturing them. Sap, Who's nickname was the foot
Doctor because he had a habit of taking his asss
retractable batime and beating detainees on the soles of their
feet till they couldn't walk.
Speaker 2 (13:11):
Yeah, their bruises were so painful.
Speaker 1 (13:13):
For some reference, that's that was called bastinado by the
Spanish inquisition, who loved to do the exact same thing.
Speaker 3 (13:21):
Yeah, no, it's it's really it's grim. It's really really
grim shit. So Keith sees.
Speaker 2 (13:28):
All this stuff.
Speaker 3 (13:28):
It's just like two weeks of like training day that film,
it's two weeks of that, it's not just one week.
Speaker 2 (13:35):
And he's like, I.
Speaker 3 (13:38):
Can't do this. This can't be the way policing is.
And he keeps going, you know, kind of casting around
for help. And the cash twenty two that he's in
is that anybody who he tells about this behavior is
obligated by OPDS regulations to then report said misconduct, and
if they don't, then they're guilty of failing to report misconduct.
(13:58):
So he has to kind of hedge his words and
you know, talk around these issues. And his friends who
work in OPD, who work in CHP California and highway patrol,
and he tells about this stuff in this roundabout way.
Are all giving him the same advice? You know, I
don't know, like do you want to write out your career?
Like can you do this? Is there a way you
can switch out? Is there a way that you can
(14:20):
thread the needle? And it gets to be too much,
and so one day, after two weeks, he decides, I
can't do this anymore. I can't put more I can't
put in this in people in jail. I can't forge
paperwork for my supervisors. I can't forge their overtime. You know,
I can't help them steal money from the taxpayers like this.
So he goes into the you know, he confronts them
(14:42):
in a parking garage in front of a church in
right north of downtown Oakland. These guys called the light
Cave that they would hang out at, and he's telling Chuck, listen,
you know, I can't do this.
Speaker 2 (14:54):
This isn't the right way. And Maven x as well,
you know you have a problem. No, No, I don't
think you're really getting this.
Speaker 3 (14:59):
He's trying to like talking past it, and then Keith
keeps bringing up Frank Fasquez and Frank he'd seen Frank
choke people. He'd see Frank empty, can't pepper spray into
somebody's mouth, puts his fingers into their eyes like a
bowling ball.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
He said, oh, well, if you have a problem with Frank,
you can talk to him.
Speaker 3 (15:16):
Fasquez comes over and you know drives over there that
have a conversation about that.
Speaker 2 (15:21):
And Keith at this point is so wired up and
so terrified.
Speaker 3 (15:25):
He's looking at Mabadag and looking at Fasquez and thinking
to himself, Okay, can I get to my pistol before
they get to theirs if they want to hurt me?
And if we have a shootout, how's it going to
look if three Oakland cops are bucking led at each
other in uniform on shift right, He's running this calculus
(15:46):
in his head.
Speaker 2 (15:48):
Doesn't come to that.
Speaker 3 (15:49):
In the end, Mabini convinces him to go in and
sign a resignation letter, and when he does that at
OPD headquarters, one of his supervisors from the academy gets
hold of him, gets a hold of him, says, no, no, no,
this isn't what's happened. This is not you what's going on?
And they convinced him to go upstairs and talk to
internal affairs, and then he spills the beans on the
(16:10):
what he's seen the past two weeks, and that blows
the Lid office scandal.
Speaker 1 (16:24):
There had been a number of people who had attempted
to kind of like victims of this particular gang of
guys who had that's like, attempted to complain, attempted to
come forward. But yeah, it's not really until this officer
on the inside, with a very good record is willing
to say something that anything starts to happen.
Speaker 3 (16:45):
So you have to remember the context here. I'm sorry
for cutting in, but he I was remiss on this.
So the context of Oakland in late nineteen nineties early
two thousands is that it's in the middle of New
York style urban renewal. Jerry Brown, who later became governor
of California, was kind of on his way back up
the political rung, and Oakland was his first stop.
Speaker 2 (17:04):
He was re elected mayor in nineteen ninety eight.
Speaker 3 (17:07):
I believe on this kind of ecotopian platform where he
could he was going to turn Oakland into this socialist,
you know, environmental friendly metropolis. But he gets into office,
he starts going to community meetings and he realizes public
safety is the number one concerns. So he becomes Rudy
Giuliani West, as one of his former employees put it
(17:28):
to us, pushes a massive building program in downtown Oakland
for new residential market rate housing and enlists his police
department to go on a clean up the streets spree
by any means necessary, and he would go into the
lineup and cheer them on route them on, say listen,
you know, I got your back, all back your play,
(17:49):
you know, just take back those corners from these dealers.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
That's what those officers, That's what.
Speaker 3 (17:53):
Mabinang, Hornoggs, Siapno, and Vasquez were responding to. They were
responding to the instructions from their supervisor, from their chief,
from their mayor that came down the command chain to
clean up the streets and do this sort of stuff.
And they were actually, you know, Maminag and Vazquez in particular,
were very highly valued officers. They were proactive. They made
(18:14):
their supervisors look good. It was this kind of one
hand washes the other bit.
Speaker 1 (18:18):
Yeah, and I one of the things that I found
particularly kind of impactful is the way in which you
describe both the kind the violence, the absolute like horrifying
cruelty of what these guys are getting up to and
how that intersects with Jerry Brown's political career, with the
kind of promises he's making to clean up the city
(18:41):
and the kind of metrics that are established, you know,
to provide basically evidence that this plan is succeeding.
Speaker 2 (18:48):
You know.
Speaker 1 (18:48):
It's it really like kind of gives on the ground
context to what this kind of broken windows style policing,
what it actually means in terms of a human cost,
and it's it's devastating. And equally devastating is the lawsuit
that kind of comes afterwards when this all gets exposed.
(19:10):
One of the things that was most shocking to me
because I was I was only kind of broadly aware
of this case at all, is when these guys, the
officers in this in this gang, get you know, go
on trial or sort of when that process starts, one
of them, this guy Vasquez, like goes on the run,
steals an AR fifteen from his department and fucking disappears
(19:34):
and he's still in the wind. No one's ever found
this guy.
Speaker 2 (19:37):
Yeah, he was most likely in Mexico. He's from Mexico.
Speaker 3 (19:40):
He's born down there and has family around media.
Speaker 2 (19:44):
The theory is that he I mean, you know, he
was stopped by a cop.
Speaker 3 (19:48):
That's when, Yeah, the people realized that he had been
that he'd stolen a gun from the department. But he
kind of badges his way out of this encounter with
a cop in so which is a Delta town near
where he lived and are near his house, and that
was the last anybody had seen of him, has seen
of him. The theory a theory that's rattled around quite often,
(20:12):
and there's more often than there's probably some hef to
it is that somebody from the either the department or
the police union helped him down to the border in
Chula Vista and he walked across. So the odds are
that he's in Mexico estensively. The FBI are still looking
for him. He's a fugitive, but he's never never been found.
Speaker 1 (20:33):
No, and he when this happens, because his buddies and
the writers are all all do in fact, go on trial.
And you know, you might think the fact that one
of them like bounced and fled the country after stealing
a gun would have an impact on things, but no, no,
in court, they're not you know, the prosecutors aren't allowed
(20:55):
to tell the jury what happened with Fasquez because there
it's worried that it might prejudice them, which is wild
to me.
Speaker 3 (21:02):
Well, in the first trial, so there were two trials.
Fast forward a little bit, all three cops in their
first trial. There's hung juries in them. I think there
were one or two holdouts maybe, And from the reporting
that we.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
Did, the interview that we did with the.
Speaker 3 (21:15):
ADA on the case, Dave Holliser, it seemed that these
were people who were convinced that these were good cops
and the ends justified the means or therefore, you know,
this kind of noble noble cause corruption actually has an
audience among some segments of the population around here.
Speaker 2 (21:33):
I mean it.
Speaker 3 (21:34):
I'm sure you see this across the Bay now in
San Francisco. There's all these people who were, you know,
kind of advocating the sort of vigilante violence that that
former fire commissioner was committed any and so against homeless folks, unhoused.
Speaker 1 (21:45):
Yeah, for folks who aren't aware the fire commissioner of
San Francisco. This was a couple of months ago, right
around the time that there was a big wave of
San Francisco has collapsed into anarchy sort of stories.
Speaker 2 (21:57):
Which happened every ten years, which yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:59):
Yeah, and then you know, it happened at the same
time that that tech CEO was stabbed to death. Turns
out by another tech founder. But yeah, this story that
the fire commissioner had been attacked and there's this video
of him getting brutally beaten by a homeless man. It
turns out he had been going around at night and
macing homeless people at random.
Speaker 3 (22:17):
One of the yeah, hairspring, it was crazy, it was
awful ship. Yeah, and then someone attacked him with the
homeless with a with a crowbar. But all that those
facts were emitted anyway. So the bottom line is with
the with Horning of Horning, Vasquez and Sap they're they're
hung on the first trial, and then the second trial
(22:38):
they're acquitted. Uh, they're Horning is acquitted of some charges
and there's hung juries in the rest of his charges
and those first Syap know and Mabinang. But in the
second trial. The first trial the defense was, well, they
didn't do with Keith, did Keith's bad as lying? The
second trial was well, the defense turned to a strategy
of well, actually Frank Ivasquez was the leader, So it's
all Frank's fault.
Speaker 1 (23:02):
Yeah, it's easy to throw that guy under the bus
because he's gone.
Speaker 2 (23:04):
Exactly, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3 (23:06):
And you know, to say he was the ringleader is
absurd because everyone knew in OPD and outside OPD that
Mabdang was the shot.
Speaker 2 (23:13):
Caller in that little gang.
Speaker 3 (23:15):
What's interesting is the lawsuit, So there's a little vegary
here about the criminal investigation into the Riders. The police
department and the police department's internal affairs investigators and the
police chief made a decision from day one from on
high that the investigation would only be limited to what
Keith Bat saw, that it would not expand out beyond
(23:37):
his two weeks on the job and the incidents that
he witnessed personally, and that they were able to corroborate
with other people. And there was another cop, Scott Huson,
who did corroborate some of this stuff. Once it came
out that he'd falsified some reports, he decided to save
his on skin.
Speaker 2 (23:54):
So he also caught some of.
Speaker 3 (23:55):
The flak that Bat did, but not nearly the same
sort of death threat type shit that Keith caught. So
with regard to the broader, the broader lay of the land,
the criminal the investigation didn't go into a broader pattern
of what else was happening on these shifts, what are
their cops were involved because the writers, you know, there's
(24:16):
a ball that they actually signed for each other, and
there's several names on that ball.
Speaker 2 (24:21):
It's not just those four cops.
Speaker 3 (24:23):
So the civil suit, there was a civil suit brought
by two civil rights two attorneys in the area, John
Burris and Jim Channon, who had been suing the department
for years.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
They'd actually received walkins.
Speaker 3 (24:35):
The victims that you'd mentioned earlier over the years, alleging
that they'd been arrested, beaten up, framed up, tortured by
these cops in West Oakland. And when the news of
Keith Batt blowing the whistle on the writers hit the newspapers,
it clicked for them and they realized they'd been seeing
(24:55):
this pattern. So they opened up their own pattern and
practice investigation and did their own investigation of complaints and
canvassed neighborhoods and got names from people who'd filed complaints
and alleged similar patterns of misconduct, and came up with
one hundred and nineteen plaintiffs who who laid out a
(25:19):
pattern of abuses that spanned much more of the city,
the downtown area, other parts of West Oakland, even as
far as East Oakland, and a much broader time frame
stretching back almost basically to nineteen ninety five, five years prior.
Speaker 2 (25:33):
So.
Speaker 3 (25:34):
The reality of opd's abuses and their kind of deep
corruption in that period of time was far larger than
the criminal case against those four riders would have it.
And I should say that these civil attorneys took up
the challenge where both the state Attorney general and the
(25:58):
federal authorities both you a United States attorney and federal
and civil rights in main justice dropped the ball. They
did not open pattern and practice investigations into OPD. And
we have it from the ADA himself, who's in the
room when he presented their case, because they were cross
designated as as their cross editor as designated as US
(26:21):
attorneys during their whole investigation, and vice versa. He presented
the case to the city United States Attorney at the time,
one Robert Mueller, who should be familiar to your listeners
as the former head of the.
Speaker 1 (26:34):
FBI twice over swinging Bob Miller, that's right.
Speaker 3 (26:38):
And you know, Miller flipped through the pages and was looking,
you know, trying to see if any connections to Russia and.
Speaker 2 (26:45):
Alpha Bank and so on.
Speaker 3 (26:47):
But no, actually, I mean he's flipping through and he
pulls out these files and he looks at the long
rap sheet of some of these witnesses, and these were
people in the street. These were people who had been
arrested before, had been involved in narcotic sales, petty assaults,
that robbery's, burglaries, what have you like. They were people
who were not They were not kids, they were not
clean sheets. And he handed the file back to Hollister,
(27:10):
to the ADA and said, I wish you the best
of luck. It's important to note that this was a
different era. A CoP's word was very, very very hard
to impeach on the stand. There was no body camera video.
There were no cell phoned videos at the time. You
would maybe have a rough camcorder every now and then
if somebody shooting like a little video on the street,
kind of grainy digital cameras, and they were The sound
(27:32):
wasn't great, but there wasn't much beyond eyewitness testimony. And
that's why Keith's words were so important. Why his testimony
was so critical is that you had a cop coming
out and blowing the whistle on his department and saying, no,
this is not right.
Speaker 2 (27:48):
This is what they're doing. They should be punished for it.
Speaker 1 (28:01):
You know, I can't help it thinking about the story
that's kind of blown up right now about there's a
man on the subway recently in New York City who was,
you know, acting kind of erradically yelling and stuff, but
had not done any violence to anyone, and a bystander
straphanger restrained him, put him in a headlock for fifteen minutes,
(28:21):
and he died. And kind of the response that I'm
seeing from guys like Matt Walsh, the Daily Wire crew,
you know, particularly in right wing media, is well, this
guy had been arrested, you know, forty times or whatever.
It's like, well, that's not germane to anything that's happening.
Speaker 2 (28:35):
Doesn't give you the right to lynch someone.
Speaker 1 (28:36):
Yeah, exactly like that, Like, the penalty for having been
arrested in the past is not getting strangled to death.
That's not the way the system is. That's not the
way any of this is supposed to work. And it's
it's interesting. There's a degree to which I guess it
hasn't changed, and there's a degree to which I'm kind
of worried that the sort of nature of social media
(28:58):
means that we're a lot more open about the kind
of violence we're willing to accept.
Speaker 2 (29:02):
For I agree with it, Yeah, I agree with that entirely.
Speaker 3 (29:04):
I mean, that's unfortunately the backlash to a lot of
to both Black Lives Matter cycles in twenty fourteen, fifteen,
and the current cycle is a lot more virulent then
you'd have it if you just watched kind of the
soft focus PBS frontline documentary versions of it. There's a
(29:25):
lot of really naked justification and support for.
Speaker 2 (29:33):
Extra legal violence.
Speaker 3 (29:34):
And that is part of the issue with you know,
law enforcement and holding them accountable. There is always going
to be a segment, small, sometimes vocal, sometimes not, of
the society that supports violence beyond the extent of the law,
beyond the constraints of our system. And that's why oversight,
(29:58):
why running the rule over law enforcement and making sure
that they behave according to the laws and that they
are operating within the baluands of their limits. In so
far as we have set them out for them and
in so far as like it. Look, this book is
not a book questioning whether or not police should exist.
Speaker 2 (30:17):
It's a history.
Speaker 3 (30:18):
They do exist, They have existed. This is what it
has looked like to date. Right If other people want
to make those cases and look at you know, hypotheticals
or envisioned a different future, that's totally fine. What we're
trying to do is lay out the ways in which
people have pushed back on one of the most egregious
departments in the country consistently for over a century and
(30:42):
actually had some sort of lasting impact on it. And
there have been some impacts that have really changed because
of Look, they don't there a there's no more public
strip searching of people in the streets that happen in
Oakland on the regular every day.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
As late as.
Speaker 3 (31:01):
Twenty nine and ten, it was common that the cops
would say, look, I'm going in your ass for rocks.
You'd better not have anything there, right in the middle
of the morning, on a crowded street, in front of
people driving by on the way to work. That sort
of civil rights violation would happen all the time. The
department no longer shoots shoots, maybe about three or four
(31:21):
people a year. That's way down from fourteen to fifteen
a year a decade twelve years ago. That's because they've
changed their chase policy, their pursuit policy. They used to
pursue people with an intent to catch them at all costs.
That ended up resulting in cops chasing people down blind
alleys or ending up way too close to a suspect
and pulling out their weapon and opening up fire, regardless
(31:42):
of whether or not they actually had the suspect had
a firearm or another weapon, or whether the cops were
under threat. The change in the pursuit policy has led
to more of the instruction now is to contain, don't
pursue close call for backup, set a perimeter, preserve life.
That's not been that change was not something in department
(32:04):
submitted to voluntarily. They are brought, they are kicking and screaming.
But because there has been this outside imposition of court
oversight for so long, because it hasn't gone away, because
it's not overseen by the Justice Department or the state
Attorney General. So you know, some of the political figure
can't like they can't there can't be a deal cut
(32:25):
in the back room between a senator's staffer and the
federal Department of Justice, or the mayor and the state attorney.
Speaker 2 (32:31):
General and their wife or whatever like.
Speaker 3 (32:34):
That sort of thing doesn't really happen when the plaintiff's
attorneys aren't hoholding to anybody other than themselves, and when
the federal district court judge kind of lets the situation
play out as it will and whole and both judges
on this case have actually been very by the book
and very stringent on how the oversight has gone. So
(32:56):
that's why it's gone on for twenty years, and it
actually has resulted in good changes. There are a lot
of people who bitch about it, who cry that, oh, well,
we need to be out from there. To this oversight,
it's hammering the police. They can't do their job as
they will. Well, do you want to go back to
twenty years ago? Do you really want that? Do you
want that sort of abuse?
Speaker 2 (33:14):
No?
Speaker 3 (33:14):
And that's why there is a constituency in Oakland that
did manage to change a lot of things around. There's
a police commission here that now oversees the department. It's
not perfect, it's very much in the infancy, but that's
a body that existed to take control away from the
mayor and move it more towards civilian control of a
police department. And this is Yeah, it's a long arc,
(33:37):
but the bottom line is that it's not about a
one or a zero.
Speaker 2 (33:41):
There's no linear progress here.
Speaker 3 (33:42):
It's kind of goes in ways, but there has been progress,
which is a crazy thing to say when.
Speaker 2 (33:46):
You look at the the shit that's in the book.
Speaker 1 (33:48):
Yeah. Yeah, but it is, like, it's important both, you know,
I think our our audience is definitely much more of
our audiences in the constituency of you know, get rid
of the police entirely, even if you're coming at it
from that, I mean, especially if you're coming at from
that standpoint. Actually, I think kind of one of the
mistakes that a lot of people who are are on
(34:09):
that side of things, which is generally where I find myself,
is using that as an excuse to not actually understand
how the police function, using their sort of distaste for
the institution as an excuse to not understand how the
institution works, why it's resilient, and the ways in which
you know, both harms can to an extent be mitigated,
(34:30):
but also kind of just on a strategic level, how
it functions to defend itself, and I think that this
book does an exceptional job of going through that in
a way that's nuanced and detailed, but also compelling and readable,
like you're not going to have to I do really
recommend your book. People are not going to have like
trouble getting into it, Like I was drawn in from
(34:54):
the first page. So I really do think this is
something folks should look into. No matter where you live
in the United States, even if you've never been to Oakland,
you will. You will get a lot out of this.
Speaker 3 (35:05):
I would say that we didn't make an explicit attempt
to make the city the main character, so to draw
people into Oakland and kind of cast it in the
same way that Mike Davis cast Los Angeles in the
City of Courts. May he rest in peace. It was
a great inspiration for us. But more than anything else,
there are tons of parallels in Oakland to other places.
(35:26):
It's not a unique plate. I mean, it is a
unique place, but it's also very typical for an American
city like Los Angeles and New York and Chicago are
completely atypical. They're huge, they don't most American cities are
like four hundred to six hundred thousand people large. Oakland's
racial balance is almost thirty thirty thirty white, Latino, Black,
(35:48):
ten percent Asian, and roughly eight to ten percent Asian.
Speaker 2 (35:52):
Then everyone else thrown in there.
Speaker 3 (35:55):
It's really balanced out and in some ways it's very representative,
and it's also you know, rust belt city in certain respects,
although that's changed a lot with the tech boom.
Speaker 2 (36:05):
We could be going back the other way.
Speaker 3 (36:06):
Yeah, but it really there are echoes in stuff that's
happened in New York and Los Angeles, in Cleveland, in
New Orleans, in Portland and Seattle. It's the experience that
we've had here, particularly with police oversight and reform. I
mean Portland and Seattle are two other cities that have
actually undergone very similar programs with departments that.
Speaker 2 (36:30):
Are more alike to OPD than not.
Speaker 1 (36:32):
Yeah, well, Allie, is there anything else you wanted to
make sure to get into in this conversation or Yeah.
Speaker 3 (36:41):
I think your point about I just wanted to touch
on your point about where people come out for the institution.
I think it's really important, even regardless of what you
believe about where we should and shouldn't be with law enforcement.
Speaker 2 (36:52):
You've got to understand it.
Speaker 3 (36:54):
Yeah, because it's such a huge institution in our society.
It is basically the main point of contact most people
have with the state now in many American cities, because
we've stripped down so many other aspects of our societies.
Mental hospitals are gone, our schools are failing, public housing
barely exists, our healthcare system is decimated, and cops essentially
(37:18):
catch a lot of the end product of those problems.
Speaker 2 (37:21):
It's one of the reasons why I started.
Speaker 3 (37:22):
Reporting our criminal justice because you can look at so
many other issues of American society through that system. And
also you can see ways in which like political agendas,
the way that police departments lobby, and the messaging that
they push out. They don't do it in isolated fashion.
It's coordinated, like there are these big swings that happen
(37:42):
on the national political stage, if you will. We were
at one moment with police reform and abolishing the police,
defunding them with Black Lives matters. The immediate pushback within
six months was there's a crime wave.
Speaker 2 (37:56):
There's a crime wave. There's a crime wave we need
to support.
Speaker 3 (38:00):
And now we're at the point where people are taking
act or basically committing acts of vigilante violence because they
have it in their head that things are so out
of control. In New York, homeless man's choked to death
because he's he's having an episode on the train.
Speaker 2 (38:15):
San Francisco.
Speaker 3 (38:16):
This fire commissioner is going around bare spring people who
are camping out on in the streets. This is the
sort of back and forth swing that oftentimes starts with
people who are trying to protect their budget line, who
are trying to protect their political power, and it ends
up with consequences like that where people take it to
(38:37):
that level. And I think that looking at law enforcement
as a political actor is really important for understanding how
we are where we are in this society and also
understanding the ways in which you can try and rain
them back in and keep your boot on their neck,
because realistically they will if you let if there's no oversight,
(38:57):
if oversight is pulled back. There's a reactionary at the
heart of American law enforcement. It's always been there. We
document it back basically to the turn of the century
in Oakland in Justice one City, which is a newer
city in the States. And if you don't if you
let that go that core will rise up and basically
take over the department. That's what happened with the writers,
(39:17):
That's what they were. They were a representation of a
hard core that had existed in Oakland for decades. And
I think that that's really a really I think that's
a critical takeaway for readers from this book.
Speaker 1 (39:29):
Yeah, I would absolutely agree. Well, folks, the book is
called The Writers Come Out at Night, Brutality, Corruption and
cover Up in Oakland. It's by Ali Winston, who you've
just been listening to, and Darwin Bond Graham. I can't
recommend it enough. Ali, thank you so much for being
on the show.
Speaker 2 (39:48):
Thank you so much, Robert. It could Happen here as
a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from
cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zonemedia dot com,
or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Speaker 1 (40:05):
You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated
monthly at Coolzonemedia dot com slash sources.
Speaker 2 (40:10):
Thanks for listening,
It Could Happen Here News
Host
Robert Evans
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