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Speaker 1: wherever you get your podcast. On April four, Dr Martin
Speaker 1: Luther King was shot and killed in Memphis. A petty
Speaker 1: criminal named James Earl Ray was arrested. Case closed right.
Speaker 1: James Sylvy was upon for the official story. Some of
Speaker 1: the evidence, as far as I was concerned, did not
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Speaker 1: episodes are available now. Listen on the I Heart Radio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Behind the Police, a production of I Heart Radio Depressing Ship.
Speaker 1: I mean hello, I'm Robert Evans and this is Behind
Speaker 1: the Police, the podcast that's normally Behind the Bastards, but
Speaker 1: is for this week, last week, and next week, giving
Speaker 1: a detailed history about the you know, the cops and such,
Speaker 1: the systemic manifestation of white supremacy. Yeah, a bastardy Yeah.
Speaker 1: And the voice that you heard that's not mine, justin
Speaker 1: is Jason Petty, better known as the hip hop artist propaganda. Jason,
Speaker 1: how are you continuing to do? Pulling a ham sandwich
Speaker 1: out the damn cabinet? There we go, There we go.
Speaker 1: I don't Yeah, I'm sorry. No, No, it's been hours, guys.
Speaker 1: There hasn't been enough freestyling on this podcast because I
Speaker 1: can't and shouldn't yeah, and and and I should not
Speaker 1: let me go right to something that would be incredible,
Speaker 1: that would be very fun. You and like Glue Network
Speaker 1: as annalists like you guys just do a song and
Speaker 1: then just all of a sudden, Robert Evans just raps.
Speaker 1: Oh man, if I had any musical talent, that would
Speaker 1: be that would be cool. But yeah, yeah, we all
Speaker 1: have our gifts, and my gift is reading things that
Speaker 1: are really depressing for I don't know, another ninety minutes
Speaker 1: or so, um, which is a kind of music. But yeah, anyway, Uh,
Speaker 1: we don't talk nearly enough about lynching um today and
Speaker 1: and that's starting to change because of the recent you know, lynchings.
Speaker 1: I think we're at six right now, possible lynchings. Um.
Speaker 1: But lynching has a long and well, proud is the
Speaker 1: wrong word. I should have put proud in there. But
Speaker 1: it's a long history in the United States, and the
Speaker 1: history of lynching in the US is not entirely a
Speaker 1: racist what I mentioned this before, but actually the term
Speaker 1: came out of like people hanging British tax collectors by
Speaker 1: their thumbs and stuff. Um. Yeah, so like the first
Speaker 1: lynching victims were British people, um, and kind of had
Speaker 1: it coming because they were they were being dicks colonialistics. Um.
Speaker 1: Obviously nobody thinks of British people when they think about
Speaker 1: lynching victims. UM. It's also fair like worth noting that
Speaker 1: during the period where lynching was most common in the
Speaker 1: United States UM, like the late eighteen hundreds to the
Speaker 1: mid nineteen hundreds, UM, not every person lynched was black,
Speaker 1: although the vast majority were. UM. Lynching was used to
Speaker 1: enforce racial terror from whites against blacks, but it was
Speaker 1: also a really common method of what we'd call, you know,
Speaker 1: thinking back to our first episode public spirit law enforcement,
Speaker 1: you know, communities dealing with people that they saw as problematic,
Speaker 1: some of whom were surely guilty, some of them probably
Speaker 1: who certainly weren't. I found one analysis of four thousand,
Speaker 1: four hundred and sixty seven lynching victims from eighteen eighty
Speaker 1: three to nineteen forty one. Four thousand and twenty seven
Speaker 1: victims were men, ninety nine were women, in three hundred
Speaker 1: and forty one were of unknown or more accurately, nobody
Speaker 1: wrote down what the gender was. Three thousand, two hundred
Speaker 1: and sixty five of these four thousand, four hundred sixty
Speaker 1: seven victims were black, one thousand and eighty two were white,
Speaker 1: seventy one were Mexican, and thirty eight were American Indian,
Speaker 1: while ten were Chinese, and one was Japanese. All of
Speaker 1: these numbers are, of course likely somewhat low, because we'll
Speaker 1: never know the total number of people who were lynching victims.
Speaker 1: Um Now. Historians who study lynching generally divided into three
Speaker 1: separate regimes. The Wild West, where lynching was mostly white
Speaker 1: people lynching a lot of other white people in areas
Speaker 1: where there just wasn't law enforcement in a way, so
Speaker 1: like this was like how you dealt with people who
Speaker 1: were a problem. Um. And then there was the slavery regime,
Speaker 1: which was found in former slave states where lynching existed
Speaker 1: as a form of social control against black people. And
Speaker 1: then a smaller regime of lynching on the Texas Mexican border,
Speaker 1: where Latinos were lynched by white Texans. So there's a
Speaker 1: kind of the three broad areas that most lynchings during
Speaker 1: the lynching period in the U s kind of come
Speaker 1: come down to. Um Now. In all of these cases,
Speaker 1: law enforcement was about as likely to support any given
Speaker 1: lynching as it was to oppose it. Uh. There are
Speaker 1: many cases and the lynchings of white and black people
Speaker 1: alike where police officers would just hand over their keys
Speaker 1: to an angry mob to let them in the jail.
Speaker 1: Sometimes this was due to the officers supporting the crowd's efforts.
Speaker 1: A lot of times it was simple pragmatism, because a
Speaker 1: ton of lynch mobs would burn down jails when the
Speaker 1: police resisted them. Um. So of this was just like, well,
Speaker 1: I don't want to die. Yeah, there's one of me,
Speaker 1: and I got a real shitty six gun, Like okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: this job, they're worth it. Yeah. There there was a
Speaker 1: lot of that, um yeah yeah, um. Now, this was
Speaker 1: often the case police kind of backing away because they
Speaker 1: didn't want their jail to get burned down and to
Speaker 1: get killed themselves. This was often the case with lynchings
Speaker 1: in Oklahoma. Oklahoma's fucking loved vigilante violence, still kind of do.
Speaker 1: But like, oh man, historians who study this are like,
Speaker 1: fucking Oklahoma, those are like yeah um. And this was
Speaker 1: particularly the case in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Now, the Sooner State
Speaker 1: was in general a big lynching state. It was number
Speaker 1: eleven in the nation for lynchings, and Oklahoma was famous
Speaker 1: for having a public that loved taking justice into its
Speaker 1: own hands. We're gonna talk about the Tulsa race right
Speaker 1: of in a bit and the burning of black Law Street,
Speaker 1: Um yeah, Wall Street and on Law Street, um yeah.
Speaker 1: And and obviously this is in the consciousness of a
Speaker 1: lot more white folks recently because the TV show Watchman
Speaker 1: featured it. But the year before that all happened, a
Speaker 1: mob of white Tulson's rushed the county courthouse to lynch
Speaker 1: a prisoner, a white prisoner. The local sheriff's department did nothing,
Speaker 1: and the local police were supportive. The chief called the
Speaker 1: lynching of real benefit to Tulsa and the vicinity, But
Speaker 1: the sheriff actually got fired for kind of well that
Speaker 1: you're not fired, like we're called for standing down, uh
Speaker 1: to this lynching. And again, historians will often note that
Speaker 1: prior to the race riot or racist riot of Tulsa
Speaker 1: had relatively minimal history of mass violence from white people
Speaker 1: against black people. Right, We're not gonna say it was
Speaker 1: like congenial friendly relations between the races, but like the
Speaker 1: racist riot in nineteen one was really it was shocking
Speaker 1: to a lot of people because yet hadn't happened before
Speaker 1: in Tulsa. Yeah. And and if you think about it,
Speaker 1: like it's logical because the black community had time to
Speaker 1: develop infrastructure and flourish and stuff like that, because they're
Speaker 1: relatively just like, look, you stay over there, we stay
Speaker 1: over here, we'll figure this out. And yeah. One of
Speaker 1: the kind of actually one of the precipitating factors of
Speaker 1: that is that, like in the weeks before the racist riots,
Speaker 1: some like local white preachers and stuff had started getting
Speaker 1: very very angry about the fact that white people were
Speaker 1: starting to hang out with black people in parts of
Speaker 1: town and like developing friendships and like using it like
Speaker 1: and that was like they were like, this has to stop. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like the weird part of like the Venn diagram
Speaker 1: of like racism and capitalism and just normal friendship to
Speaker 1: where you're like, I don't know, this restaurant is just
Speaker 1: it's good food. So I came down here. Yeah they're
Speaker 1: way better at Yeah, yeah, foods better. It turns out,
Speaker 1: contrary to what my uncle Dave told me, that's a
Speaker 1: nice lady, that's a nice food that works here. I
Speaker 1: don't know. It's kind of cool. It's good food, it's
Speaker 1: good company. I don't understand the problem. You know. I'm
Speaker 1: starting to thank racism now either, right, Cole. I'm starting
Speaker 1: to think maybe we benefit from having these folks in
Speaker 1: our community. Oh now, now, now we're time to shoot.
Speaker 1: I guess so. Yeah. So. In the years after World
Speaker 1: War Two, large numbers of veterans of both races had
Speaker 1: come back to Tulsa and armed themselves in fear of
Speaker 1: escalating interracial tensions. In Muskogee in nineteen sixteen, and armed
Speaker 1: black crowd had stopped a lynching in May of nineteen
Speaker 1: twenty one. Prior to the Big Racist Riot, an armed
Speaker 1: group of black citizens had again stopped the lynching of
Speaker 1: a black man for an alleged rape. Now, about of
Speaker 1: lynchings of black men nationwide were justified because the crowd
Speaker 1: accused the black man of rape or sexual assault in
Speaker 1: some way. Now, only about two percent of incarcerated black
Speaker 1: people nationwide head were actually convicted of rape. So we
Speaker 1: can assume that the vast majority of these lynchings um
Speaker 1: were unjust right um because the anyway. What occurred in
Speaker 1: Tulsa later in May nine reinforces this suggestion. On Monday,
Speaker 1: MA young black man named Dick Rowland gotten to an
Speaker 1: elevator that also contained a young white woman. We will
Speaker 1: never know exactly what happened. The most common story here
Speaker 1: is that he likely tripped and bumped into her, and
Speaker 1: she freaked out and the police were called. There's a
Speaker 1: bunch of different stories around this. Nobody knows what happened.
Speaker 1: But white black guy walks into an elevator with a
Speaker 1: white woman. White woman screams, black guy runs away. He
Speaker 1: gets tracked down and arrested by two officers, one of
Speaker 1: whom was black. And these men were sheriff's deputies. So
Speaker 1: Dick wound up in the care of the sheriff's office.
Speaker 1: And the sheriff was a guy named Williard McCullough. He'd
Speaker 1: gotten his job as a result of the lynching of
Speaker 1: that white guy a year earlier, which his predecessor had
Speaker 1: let happened, and Williard didn't want to make the same mistake.
Speaker 1: So a crowd of angry white folks formed outside the jail,
Speaker 1: which is pretty much standard procedure in Oklahoma when a
Speaker 1: black man was accused of this kind of crime. The
Speaker 1: police chief and again there's a police chief, and there's
Speaker 1: a sheriff. The police chief, a guy named Gustafson, warned
Speaker 1: the sheriff to take Rowland out of town. The sheriff refused,
Speaker 1: arguing that the kid was safer in jail than in
Speaker 1: an open car, and he may have been right about that.
Speaker 1: The police chief felt that moving him out of town
Speaker 1: would disperse the crowd, and he may have been right
Speaker 1: about that. Um, we don't know exactly how it started,
Speaker 1: but you know, basically, a black crowd with a lot
Speaker 1: of guns showed up next to the white crowd who
Speaker 1: had a lot of guns, and at some point there
Speaker 1: was a struggle between an armed black guy and a
Speaker 1: white guy, and the black fella's gun went off or
Speaker 1: he fired it again, we don't know. But it turned
Speaker 1: into a giant, fucking mob of of white writers gutting
Speaker 1: down black people, black people shooting back in self defense.
Speaker 1: And it will continue to talk about how it gets worse.
Speaker 1: This is not an episode about the burning of Black
Speaker 1: Wall Street. We will have to cover that in more
Speaker 1: detail one of these days. Yeah, there are a couple
Speaker 1: of points I should make. Um, I will say this
Speaker 1: before you get to this point, like there's an interesting
Speaker 1: thing that happened there all the way to Emmett Till
Speaker 1: and to like, um, this this particular moment is like
Speaker 1: just this idea of like weaponizing the white woman, you know,
Speaker 1: and um, in a in a in it's just this
Speaker 1: weird mix of just how social and supremacy and stuff
Speaker 1: like that works where it's like you can use her fear,
Speaker 1: you know that was implanted in her, you know what
Speaker 1: I'm saying, uh, as an excuse to carry out violence
Speaker 1: towards black men, right, and play the whole damsel and
Speaker 1: distress thing, you know what I'm saying, And then them
Speaker 1: being their own white women having their own versions of oppression,
Speaker 1: right and misogyny, being like, well, this is a way
Speaker 1: to get these men to do something for me, like
Speaker 1: a position of power which evolves into the Karen's you
Speaker 1: know what I'm saying. But it's just essentially like just
Speaker 1: you're you're It's almost like yo, your oppressor has weaponized you,
Speaker 1: and now you've become that, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: So just the like the awareness of just that a
Speaker 1: mind scramble that which is it's like I said, it's
Speaker 1: your own unique thing. Just this idea like the voice
Speaker 1: of the white woman, you know that is like there's
Speaker 1: there's history there, like Karen, don't come out of nowhere.
Speaker 1: And but Karen, don't understand that you're being leveraged, you
Speaker 1: know what I'm saying. To carry out voices of of
Speaker 1: of violence, and then now it's almost like now you're
Speaker 1: participating in that same violence, you know what I'm saying,
Speaker 1: So like, I don't know. It's just such an interesting thing,
Speaker 1: like how interlocking systems of oppression work, you know what
Speaker 1: I mean, and like and how it all like keeps
Speaker 1: power in the same place, interlocking system That's a really
Speaker 1: important term, um because I do think there is a
Speaker 1: tendency and a lot of groups to like, Oh, no,
Speaker 1: racism is rooted in capitalism. Racism is rooted in you know, religion,
Speaker 1: Racism is readed in class. Racism rooted this or that
Speaker 1: racism is rooted has a lot of roots. It's less
Speaker 1: it's like a hedgerow. That's why it's so hard to like,
Speaker 1: you had dynamite like hedgerows with these gigantics sometimes centuries old,
Speaker 1: like huge fucking plant walls that existed in the exists
Speaker 1: in a bunch of places, specifically like in France during
Speaker 1: World War Two. They were used as like to stop tanks.
Speaker 1: And the only way to get rid of a fucking hedgerow,
Speaker 1: because there's so many roots and they're so deep and
Speaker 1: so tough, is to fucking dynamite it like up right,
Speaker 1: yeah yeah. So again, this is not an episode about
Speaker 1: the burning up Black Wall Street and Tulsa, but there
Speaker 1: are a couple of points I should make about Tulsa
Speaker 1: in this period. Uh, it was unusual for having a
Speaker 1: large organized black community that controlled a really sizeable section
Speaker 1: of town Greenwood, um and that you know black Wall
Speaker 1: Street is it was called, had its own banks, its
Speaker 1: own theaters, a vibrant business community, good schools, and this
Speaker 1: relative prosperity was really unusual for black communities in the South,
Speaker 1: which is why it was called black Wall Street. Another
Speaker 1: thing I should note is what historian Carol Anderson wrote
Speaker 1: in her book White Rage quote the trigger for white
Speaker 1: rage inevitably is black advancement. It is not the mirror
Speaker 1: presence of black people that is the problem. Rather, it
Speaker 1: is blackness with ambition, with drive, with purpose, with aspirations,
Speaker 1: and with demands for full and equal citizenship. So powerful, man, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's powerful. Yeah. Yeah. The comedian clip that would I
Speaker 1: Forget Home his name that was going around that where
Speaker 1: where he was just like, look, man, we're asking for
Speaker 1: the bare minimum. Like even the civil rights movement that
Speaker 1: wasn't even equal rights were just like just just civil Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, just just basically I'm just saying black lives matter. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like not like they're not I'm not saying they're in important.
Speaker 1: I'm not saying they matter more than your It's just
Speaker 1: just just matter, you know. So, like you said, like
Speaker 1: just and and and the ambition of black America sparked
Speaker 1: so much rage Michael Chase Special Yeah, yeah, yeah, and
Speaker 1: that's yeah. So two large mobs gather at the courthouse again,
Speaker 1: one white, one black. The white mob clearly wanted to
Speaker 1: just murder Roland, who was the kid who you know
Speaker 1: got in trouble. Uh. And you know, they were in
Speaker 1: the mood to burn down the courthouse if the cops
Speaker 1: tried to stop them. The black mob obviously wanted to
Speaker 1: save their guy. Um. And this was a tricky situation
Speaker 1: for the police, particularly since two weeks earlier, the state
Speaker 1: Attorney General had finished an investigation that described the Tulsa
Speaker 1: police as corrupt, poorly lead, and so poorly equipped that
Speaker 1: they had to borrow cars from their civilian friends to
Speaker 1: get to crime scenes they were hitching rides to like
Speaker 1: not a great police force. So so funny the over
Speaker 1: when this all are ups into violence. The overall response
Speaker 1: of Tulsa's police to the massacre followed like kind of
Speaker 1: perfectly encapsulates the different ways US cops responded to lynching. Overall,
Speaker 1: Sheriff McCullough seems to have been probably kind of your
Speaker 1: best case scenario for a white cop in this period.
Speaker 1: He had black deputies. He seems to have listened to
Speaker 1: their advice, and he basically spent the riot barricaded in
Speaker 1: the jail defending Roland. You know, his black prisoner um
Speaker 1: so hard to I'm not gonna call him a great
Speaker 1: dude or like particularly woken anything, but like does broadly
Speaker 1: what you'd consider to be the right thing here. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: the police chief, Gaustabson was pretty close to the worst
Speaker 1: case scenario. Before the riot even started. He looked out
Speaker 1: at a huge crowd of armed and angry white people
Speaker 1: an a much smaller crowd of armed black people, and
Speaker 1: he called the National Guard to ask for their help
Speaker 1: to quote clear the streets of negros So police chief
Speaker 1: not the same as the sheriff here. Um. Now, one
Speaker 1: of the first things that happened after the riot was
Speaker 1: that large numbers of angry white dudes gathered outside of
Speaker 1: the National Guard armory to demand guns. The National Guard
Speaker 1: was like, that's not how this works. You can't get
Speaker 1: We do have some stars. We don't just hand out
Speaker 1: guns to crowds. Dude, why can't somebody be that guy? Like,
Speaker 1: why can't we interview that guy? When they got to
Speaker 1: the door and him being like, nah, Nona, keep what
Speaker 1: are you talking about? What are you talking about? So
Speaker 1: this crowd, which included a number of uniformed police officers,
Speaker 1: went over to a local sporting goods store. This particular
Speaker 1: store sold ammunition to the police department, so the cops
Speaker 1: in the crowd knew that it was a good place
Speaker 1: to go to get guns and ammo. They broke in
Speaker 1: and looted it so that they could go murder black people.
Speaker 1: As the looting and killing worsened, the police chief called
Speaker 1: in his entire department and began commissioning special deputies, some
Speaker 1: four hundred random white dudes who were given guns and
Speaker 1: legal authority by the police to go commit acts of
Speaker 1: horrific violence. By dawn the next day, the black community
Speaker 1: of Tulsa had pulled back to defend Greenwood, their neighborhood.
Speaker 1: A massive army of angry white dudes, described in media
Speaker 1: at the time as a force of citizens, police and
Speaker 1: members of the National Guard, numbering fifteen hundred, invaded Black
Speaker 1: Wall Street from two directions. They took unarmed black people
Speaker 1: into protective custody. They killed anyone who resisted. Once again,
Speaker 1: what had started as white violence had been portrayed by
Speaker 1: authorities as a Negro uprising, which is how like the
Speaker 1: local press covered it. And now this uprising was being squashed.
Speaker 1: The last resistance in Greenwood happened at the newly built
Speaker 1: Mountain Zion Baptist Church when the armed black men barricaded
Speaker 1: inside refused to leave, the police and the guardsmen burned
Speaker 1: it down. The Tulsa Police department also enlisted the help
Speaker 1: of six J and four biplane aircraft. They claimed these
Speaker 1: were four reconnaissance purposes, but there is evidence that the
Speaker 1: planes were used to fire bomb and stray civilians in Greenwood.
Speaker 1: And yeah, I'm gonna quote now from Tulsa World and
Speaker 1: a write up of the riot quote. Tulsa police also
Speaker 1: seemed to have been involved in the mayhem. More than
Speaker 1: one witness identified officers, usually out of uniform, among the arsonists. V. B. Bostick,
Speaker 1: a black deputy sheriff was rousted from his home by
Speaker 1: a white traffic officer named Pittman, who then joined in
Speaker 1: setting fire to Bostis House. I. J. Buck, a white
Speaker 1: Greenwood property owner, set of policemen turned him aside. When
Speaker 1: Buck tried to save one of his buildings, he said,
Speaker 1: you ain't got no business building buildings for negroes. Buck
Speaker 1: testified in court some three black men, women and children
Speaker 1: were murdered during the Tulsa racist riot. We will never know.
Speaker 1: They are currently in the process of excavating and what
Speaker 1: they think might be a mass grave in Tulsa. Um,
Speaker 1: but we will never know how many people died. Probably
Speaker 1: hopefully we'll get a better account soon. But yeah, and
Speaker 1: like just try to like try to get your brain
Speaker 1: around the humanity of the moment. Like you're just you're
Speaker 1: running barbershop, you at church, and a US military plane,
Speaker 1: well owned country, you know what I'm saying, Like a
Speaker 1: civilian plane that the police that the police were had
Speaker 1: common deered. Yeah, okay, yes, a billion playing at the
Speaker 1: police common deer. Like it's just just a like you
Speaker 1: just bombed my church. Yeah, Like just try to like
Speaker 1: get your brain around net you know. Yeah, yep, yep.
Speaker 1: Um yeah, it's pretty yeah, like this is sad, yeah
Speaker 1: yeah yeah. And I wonder how many listeners, uh of
Speaker 1: all races have never heard this, you know what I'm saying, Like,
Speaker 1: that's the part that blow Mama's black people that don't notice,
Speaker 1: you know, it's pretty fucking wild. Um. And you know,
Speaker 1: there there are two cases that I'm aware of of
Speaker 1: air power bombing, like of of people on American soil
Speaker 1: being bombed by armed airplanes prior to uh December seventh,
Speaker 1: ninety attack on Pearl Harbor. And it is the attack
Speaker 1: on Black Wall Street and the attack on the white
Speaker 1: you well no, actually not just white, um, largely white,
Speaker 1: but definitely mixed race union miners in Blair Mountain during
Speaker 1: the the Union uprising there they were also bombed and
Speaker 1: had gas bombs dropped on them too. So those are
Speaker 1: the two cases before fucking Pearl Harbor that air power
Speaker 1: was used to kill Americans. Um yeah, by Americans. Yeah,
Speaker 1: by Americans. Sure yeah um so yeah. In the months
Speaker 1: that followed the racist riot in Tulsa, Tulsa became the
Speaker 1: nexus of KKK organizing in the state. There's a debate
Speaker 1: about how much role they played in an actually the
Speaker 1: racist riot. It was probably not super huge, but the
Speaker 1: clan Tulsa becomes like the fucking headquarters of the Oklahoma
Speaker 1: Ku Klux Klan in the wake of the racist riot,
Speaker 1: and before much longer, Tulsa got a new clan backed sheriff,
Speaker 1: a claned back police chief, as did many cities in Oklahoma.
Speaker 1: Clan members of the city council, and of course the
Speaker 1: clan bought brought with it violence not just against black people,
Speaker 1: but against Catholic and Jewish Oklahoma's The governor of Oklahoma
Speaker 1: eventually had to bring the National Guard in again to
Speaker 1: deal with the Ku Klux Klan. So yeah, yeah, that's
Speaker 1: yeah Tulsa. Uh and again like again, it goes to
Speaker 1: like the like God, the clans all over the place,
Speaker 1: Like why how all of a sudden, why are we
Speaker 1: met at Catholic and Jews? Like when when did day
Speaker 1: become a card of the conversation like that, even just
Speaker 1: even you hearing even hearing you say, it makes sense
Speaker 1: to me that the clan is like, Yo, it's cracking
Speaker 1: over here. We'll go over here and get it, get it,
Speaker 1: get it cracking. Let's take over the city. And while
Speaker 1: we're at it, you know the Catholics, like the Catholics. Yeah,
Speaker 1: what the hell that got to do with anything? You know? Yep, yeah, yep.
Speaker 1: Uh so lynching and again I think really one of
Speaker 1: the ways to look at the racist right and told
Speaker 1: you this is a mass a mass lynching. Yeah, they
Speaker 1: lynched the entirety of Black Wall Street because they were angry.
Speaker 1: You know. The that young woman screaming was the excuse,
Speaker 1: but it was anger over black success in organization. And
Speaker 1: there's stories of like black or white people looting Greenwood
Speaker 1: after they you know, arrested all of the black people
Speaker 1: in town and as they were burning it down and
Speaker 1: coming out of black houses with like furniture and property
Speaker 1: and like angrily yelling like these inwards have nicer things
Speaker 1: than a lot of white people. Like that. That was
Speaker 1: a big part of why they did the um yep.
Speaker 1: So like we want segregation, okay, cool, we don't want
Speaker 1: you to use our money, okay cool. Damn y'all segregated
Speaker 1: and using your own money. I guess we'll kill you.
Speaker 1: I guess I hate that, man. What do you want?
Speaker 1: I think it's pretty clear what they want. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: um lynch Ng's peak was probably in the eighteen nineties,
Speaker 1: but it continued to be a massive problem. I mean
Speaker 1: throughout the nineteen hundreds. Of the nineteen twenties were a
Speaker 1: pretty bad time for lynching. Most historians will tell you
Speaker 1: that lynching is best seen as a sort of non
Speaker 1: state uh auxiliary to Jim Crow, the civilian side of
Speaker 1: the enforcement of white supremacist laws. When the law fell
Speaker 1: short in the eyes of racists, it was time for
Speaker 1: a massive mob spectacle. Lynching generally was not just about murder.
Speaker 1: Victims were usually tortured to extract confessions um and the
Speaker 1: crowd generally took souvenirs and posed with the body of
Speaker 1: the murdered black person. These were often family gatherings that
Speaker 1: we're announced on the radio. Now I'm gonna quote picnics. Yeah,
Speaker 1: picnics very kind. Yeah, go ahead and finish in your brain.
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna say, just finished. What you think picnic?
Speaker 1: What the end of that? What that's probably your short for? Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: go on. I'm gonna quote next from a book that
Speaker 1: will be a major source for this part of the episode,
Speaker 1: The Color of the Third Degree by Sylvan peder Meyer,
Speaker 1: and he writes quote during the nineteen tens, into a
Speaker 1: greater degree from nineteen twenty on, where the white elite
Speaker 1: of the South voiced growing criticism of the practice of lending.
Speaker 1: This changed attitude was the result of the economic modernization
Speaker 1: taking place in the region, which was accompanied by efforts
Speaker 1: to bolster the business and political ties between the southern
Speaker 1: and northern states, along with an increasing orientation among the
Speaker 1: Southern white middle and upper classes towards the cultural values
Speaker 1: of the North. This led in nineteen thirty to the
Speaker 1: establishment of the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention
Speaker 1: of Lynching a s w P l or as Whipple.
Speaker 1: Under the leadership at Jesse Daniel Lames. These white women
Speaker 1: activists work prime merrily in church circles and their tireless
Speaker 1: work against lynching. These women disputed the traditional rationalization of
Speaker 1: this form of violence as a means of protecting white women,
Speaker 1: and argued that white men were using the code of
Speaker 1: chivalry merely as a pretext to justify violence against African Americans. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: good work, good ally ship, or whatever you wanna call it. Uh.
Speaker 1: Nineteen twenty was actually the first year in which more
Speaker 1: lynchings were averted by law enforcement than carried out between
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty and ninety two, two hundred and ninety lynchings
Speaker 1: were stopped by police. The activism of groups like as
Speaker 1: Whipple helped helped reduced lynching through the nineteen twenties, and
Speaker 1: while it saw an upswing during the Great Depression, the
Speaker 1: number of lynchings dropped precipitously by the end of the
Speaker 1: nineteen thirties and for most of the last few decades,
Speaker 1: the anti lynching campaigns were seen as a major feather
Speaker 1: in the cap of u s law enforcement. An example
Speaker 1: about the police kind of modernizing and reforming and of
Speaker 1: Southern cops rising to the occasion to protect black people
Speaker 1: from violence. This is wildly inaccurate. Um Niedermeyer argues with
Speaker 1: exhaustive documentation that rather than protecting black people from murder quote,
Speaker 1: law enforcement authorities in the South were generally taking initiatives
Speaker 1: to protect black suspects from being seized by lynch mobs. Now.
Speaker 1: The way they did this was by loading suspects up
Speaker 1: into police cars, which were a new thing then and
Speaker 1: allowed for faster transport, and taking them away to distant jails.
Speaker 1: Law enforcement did sometimes use violence and even call out
Speaker 1: malicious to disperse lynch mobs, But the anger that had
Speaker 1: spawned those mobs still had to be sated, and police
Speaker 1: say did it by making damn certain that black suspects
Speaker 1: got what those mobs thought they deserved, a swift and
Speaker 1: violent death. Quote. In his study of the state of Kentucky,
Speaker 1: historian George Wright comes to the conclusion that the number
Speaker 1: of executions of blacks carried out during the first decades
Speaker 1: of the twentieth century continually rose, while the number of
Speaker 1: lynch ngs steadily declined during the same period. Likewise, the
Speaker 1: findings of the political scientists James W. Clark show a
Speaker 1: clear correlation in the nineteen twenties and thirties between the
Speaker 1: declining lynch violence and the growing number of convicted African
Speaker 1: American offenders who were executed by state authorities. The available
Speaker 1: statistical data on the number of executions carried out in
Speaker 1: the United States between nineteen thirty and nineteen seventy also
Speaker 1: suggests the dwindling number of lynchings was tied to the
Speaker 1: growing use of the death penalty. Although there is no
Speaker 1: conclusive evidence to support the theory that lynching violence was
Speaker 1: gradually replaced by the death penalty, it can be said
Speaker 1: that the legal system in the South increasingly assumed the
Speaker 1: function of maintaining social control over the black population during
Speaker 1: the early twentieth century. See that is dizzying. YEA, hope
Speaker 1: y'all caught it. It's so dizzy, it's it's like because
Speaker 1: to to try to sort that out is to go,
Speaker 1: you're you're off celter because like you said, you think,
Speaker 1: oh it's cool man, maybe they're maybe these people are evolving,
Speaker 1: and they're like, no, this is I'm They're just you
Speaker 1: just want control of Yo County and you just like, So,
Speaker 1: the point is, I can't be having these I can't
Speaker 1: be having the city think they got more power than
Speaker 1: me because I'm the law. So but they're like, but
Speaker 1: I feel you. You know what I'm saying, Like Loki,
Speaker 1: I feel you. I'm just saying, you don't get to
Speaker 1: tell me what to do. So when so, from the
Speaker 1: black perspective, do I can I make any distinction between
Speaker 1: that mob and this jail? No? Because I still end
Speaker 1: up dead, you know what I'm saying. So, and then
Speaker 1: when we say and then, like you said, all the
Speaker 1: signs we're talking about the other ones, that mass incarceration
Speaker 1: and the deputy and the law for it's just it's
Speaker 1: the same disease. This is what we're trying to say,
Speaker 1: and here is right in your history. It's same ease.
Speaker 1: This is why we don't make no distinction. You know
Speaker 1: what I'm saying. This is why we keep saying the
Speaker 1: orchards bad, orchards bad sayings. Apples, Yes, they're piss apples.
Speaker 1: You know. You keep going away individual piss apples, hoping
Speaker 1: and then trying to point at one. It ain't got pissed,
Speaker 1: And I'm going what it's the yes, Oh you know
Speaker 1: what's not? An apple filled with urine? First of all,
Speaker 1: I've never heard of the term piss apple. But that's
Speaker 1: great anyway. But I hope these products and services are
Speaker 1: not because they are not. They are not. That's our
Speaker 1: one line for advertisers, No apples filled with urine. This
Speaker 1: is Roxande Gay, host of the Roxande Gay Agenda the
Speaker 1: Bad Room, in his podcast of Your Dreams. Now, what
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Speaker 1: what's on my mind, and that could be anything. Every week,
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Speaker 1: with as well. Listen to the Luminary original podcast, The
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Speaker 1: We're back, all right, um cool, uh all right, So
Speaker 1: when you really look at it through a gimlet eye,
Speaker 1: the inevitable conclusion one comes to in all of this
Speaker 1: um is. You know, while police often enabled violence, you
Speaker 1: know of the Clan in the late eight hundreds, in
Speaker 1: the early nineteen hundreds, and with the race riots in
Speaker 1: nineteen nineteen, you know, Tulsa. While police often enabled such
Speaker 1: things on an individual level, collectively, they were more than
Speaker 1: anything else powerless to stop this violence. Um. Although you
Speaker 1: could argue that didn't tryal that hard. Um, But they
Speaker 1: weren't really set up to stop that violence either. And
Speaker 1: to both the state and the kind of people who
Speaker 1: tend to become police officers, that lack of control over
Speaker 1: the mob was worse for them than whatever violence the
Speaker 1: mob was committing. Often white sheriffs and police chiefs were
Speaker 1: absolutely fine with killing black people. Would bug them? Was
Speaker 1: the disorder? Um, because power people. In nineteen thirty three,
Speaker 1: a sociologist with the the just tremendously unfortunate name of
Speaker 1: Arthur Raper, which, oh, that's a rough one to dry
Speaker 1: out of the names. Arthur Raper published a study that
Speaker 1: suggested lynchings were most often permitted by making it clear
Speaker 1: to the mob that the alleged offender would be quickly
Speaker 1: convicted and punished. Southern politicians came to rely on the
Speaker 1: death penalty is an easy way to appease the mob
Speaker 1: and have avoid uncivilized violence. Local journalists supported the state
Speaker 1: and it's massively increased rate of executions, seeing them as
Speaker 1: a victory for law and order. Yo, when I was
Speaker 1: so nice to teach high school, I to high school
Speaker 1: for a couple of years at ninth graders. And one
Speaker 1: time we went on this field trip, uh to Lacma
Speaker 1: to the Museum of um you know, the museum in
Speaker 1: in On Libreya. And so it's four teachers to a
Speaker 1: hundred in fourteen year old, right, So I had me
Speaker 1: and another teacher had control a half of them. So
Speaker 1: I got seventy five freshmen. Right, We're walking by the
Speaker 1: park and there's a dude selling like inflatable toys, so
Speaker 1: like hammers and dolls and such like this. And at
Speaker 1: this point it's seventy five of y'all and two of us.
Speaker 1: They're gonna the kids are gonna beat each other with it.
Speaker 1: There's no you're not gonna stop these freshmen from hurting
Speaker 1: each other with these inflatable hammers. So my thought was, Okay,
Speaker 1: if they're gonna do it, they're gonna do it. You're
Speaker 1: you're freshman, and I'm not gonna stop you and Loki,
Speaker 1: it seems kind of fun. I'm not gonna lie to you.
Speaker 1: It seems kind of fun. So what I did was
Speaker 1: I broke them up into their home rooms, right and
Speaker 1: made them be feuding clans. So I made them send
Speaker 1: gladiators from their home room to the middle for the
Speaker 1: purpose of as the greatest teacher ever, for the purpose
Speaker 1: of being able to make sure that no one gets
Speaker 1: actually injured. Right. So, because the point is the same
Speaker 1: thing that this sheriff is saying, I just need to
Speaker 1: maintain order, right of course, I don't want you to
Speaker 1: beat each other, and well, I just don't want to
Speaker 1: lose control. It's really the point. The point is I
Speaker 1: don't want to lose control because your mom are gonna
Speaker 1: kill me if I lose one of y'all, right, and
Speaker 1: I'm probably gonna lose my job. So I don't want
Speaker 1: to lose control. But y'all gonna beat each other. So
Speaker 1: in my mind, I'm like, at least I can make
Speaker 1: sure that everyone's engaged, and I can then it's not
Speaker 1: everybody beating each other, but you all sent bladd ear
Speaker 1: is one of the funniest things I really got reprimanded
Speaker 1: by the vice principle. But then the principal was like,
Speaker 1: you're brilliant. Yeah, it's like that again, uhty problematic copy
Speaker 1: in England, who was like, well, they were going to
Speaker 1: throw the statue in the river and we could either
Speaker 1: pull it out of the river later and put it back,
Speaker 1: or we could beat a bunch of our citizens for
Speaker 1: throwing a statue in the river. And that seemed like
Speaker 1: the wrong call, you know, like yeah, yeah, um yeah.
Speaker 1: This also dovetails into I won't go onto a long
Speaker 1: rant about my ideas for school reform, but why all
Speaker 1: children should be forced to carry claw hammers at all
Speaker 1: times in public schools, um and private schools for that matter,
Speaker 1: and all teachers to everybody should have a real big hammer. Um,
Speaker 1: that's very important to me for a variety of reasons. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm very pro hammer. I don't get into that. I
Speaker 1: just found I just found the first thing we disagree on.
Speaker 1: There'd be a lot less statues, all kinds of statues,
Speaker 1: but a lot less of them. It would be a
Speaker 1: great lesson on like pulleys and physics. Though, I'll tell
Speaker 1: you that. Like we was like, all right, guys, this
Speaker 1: was this, this is the freshman second Semester project has
Speaker 1: come up with the best pulley system to tear down
Speaker 1: a Confederate statute. Yeah, the person that could do it
Speaker 1: with the where the smallest little person in my room
Speaker 1: is able to pull down this whole statute. That person
Speaker 1: get to a yeah, you do you pulled? You have
Speaker 1: the little kids pulled on the statue. And then you're like,
Speaker 1: and this is why Aliens didn't build the pyramids. Yes,
Speaker 1: you've figured this out, and so did the Egyptians. Yea,
Speaker 1: so did the Egyptians. Alright, alright, alright, we gotta get
Speaker 1: back to the subject. So in nine yeah, Arthur Raper
Speaker 1: published a study again like yeah, basically that the Southern
Speaker 1: politicians came to rely on the death penalty is a
Speaker 1: way to appease the mob and avoid uncivilized violence. Now,
Speaker 1: you can't easily get a swift conviction if you have
Speaker 1: a real trial. Obviously, remember the data we have suggests
Speaker 1: that the vast majority of black people targeted by lynch
Speaker 1: mobs were innocent of any serious crime. Uh, if this
Speaker 1: ship went to court, even a crooked court, it would
Speaker 1: take time. And during that time, like like if it
Speaker 1: if you were if you were doing this the way
Speaker 1: police are supposed to hand endle cases like this. It
Speaker 1: would take a lot of time and it might be yeah,
Speaker 1: it might be off. And it's way easier if you
Speaker 1: go into court with a confession, because then you're are like, well,
Speaker 1: he confessed. Uh So, police in this time focused on
Speaker 1: securing confessions because a suspect who confesses isn't really a
Speaker 1: suspect anymore. During the early nineteen hundreds, the a CP
Speaker 1: documented cases of forced confessions in Southern States. These were
Speaker 1: a tiny fraction of the total number of cases, which
Speaker 1: numbered in the hundreds of the thousands. The CPS resources
Speaker 1: were limited, and they were picking out specific cases that
Speaker 1: they were challenging in courts. These were a percent of
Speaker 1: what was going on um In three fourths of the
Speaker 1: cases they documented, the black defendants alleged that they had
Speaker 1: been tortured into confessing by the police. The vast majority
Speaker 1: of these cases were either alleged murders or rapes. The
Speaker 1: color of the third degree goes into significant detail about
Speaker 1: a number of cases that illustrate this transition. One I
Speaker 1: want to highlight to you all is the case of
Speaker 1: the murder of Raymond Stewart in ninety war Stewart was
Speaker 1: a prominent white farmer and landowner, and he was found
Speaker 1: dead in his home in Kemper County, Mississippi. There were
Speaker 1: signs of a struggle. Almost as soon as the news
Speaker 1: got out. Two hundred people gathered in front of his
Speaker 1: home to look for the officers. Three young black men
Speaker 1: were eventually arrested. A lynch mob form to go and
Speaker 1: murder them, which prompted the local sheriff to call an
Speaker 1: e extra deputies and fortified the jail with machine guns
Speaker 1: and tear gas grenades. The National Guard was almost called
Speaker 1: in and a state of emergency was declared in order
Speaker 1: to preempt white mob violence. The sheriff's department immediately set
Speaker 1: to torturing the absolute ship out of these three kids.
Speaker 1: Confessions were quickly obtained, but when the case actually went
Speaker 1: to court, one of the young defendants began to complain
Speaker 1: that his confession had been forced out of him. Near
Speaker 1: deer Meyer writes, quote Brown, who was this one of
Speaker 1: these kids, testified that after his arrest, he had been
Speaker 1: subjected to violent treatment, above all by Deputy sheriff Cliff
Speaker 1: Dial to force him to admit the crime. He told
Speaker 1: me to come on out here that he had to heard.
Speaker 1: I told I killed Mr Raymond. I come out of
Speaker 1: the jail house and I said, I declare I didn't
Speaker 1: kill Mr Raymond. He said, come on here and pull
Speaker 1: your clothes off. I'm gonna get you. I said to
Speaker 1: the last that I didn't kill him. There was two
Speaker 1: more fellows about like that there, and they was whipping me.
Speaker 1: They had me behind a cross chairs kind of like that.
Speaker 1: I said I didn't kill him. They said to put
Speaker 1: him on again, and they hit me so hard. I
Speaker 1: had to say yes, sir. Mr Cliff Dial said give
Speaker 1: the strap to me, I will get it. He took
Speaker 1: it and he had two buckles on the end. They
Speaker 1: stripped me naked and bit me over a chair and
Speaker 1: I just had to say it. I couldn't help it.
Speaker 1: As the court transcript shows, Brown supported his testimony by
Speaker 1: pointing to the injuries from the blows to his body.
Speaker 1: Question they whipped you hard there? Answer yes, sir, I
Speaker 1: will show you there are places all the way up.
Speaker 1: Question did you bleed any? Answer? Did I bleed? I
Speaker 1: sure did. Brown testified that after Dial had forced him
Speaker 1: to confess, he threatened him with additional beatings if he
Speaker 1: were canted his statement. Furthermore, he emphatically maintained that he
Speaker 1: did not kill Raymond Stewart. If I die right now,
Speaker 1: I am going to say it. I ain't never harmed
Speaker 1: Mr Raymond in my life. If they want, they can
Speaker 1: kill me because I said that, but I ain't never
Speaker 1: harmed Mr Raymond. Afterward, Henry Sheild was called to the
Speaker 1: next to the witness stand. He was another one of
Speaker 1: the boys arrested. He testified that after his arrest, he
Speaker 1: had been whipped by Deputy Sheriff Cliff Dial in the
Speaker 1: murder In jail. Shields said that due to the relentless whipping,
Speaker 1: he eventually gave a false confession and declared that he
Speaker 1: had a hand in Stuart's murder. Mr Cliff Dial and
Speaker 1: then come back that evening and whipped me first. I
Speaker 1: tried to tell the truth, but he wouldn't let me.
Speaker 1: He said, no, you ain't told the truth, and I
Speaker 1: tried to stick to it. He whipped me so hard
Speaker 1: I had to tell him something. Ellington, who was the
Speaker 1: third boy who was forced subsequently to the stand, also
Speaker 1: testified that he was innocent and had been forced to confess.
Speaker 1: He stated that shortly after word of Stuart's murder started
Speaker 1: making the rounds. He was seized by a mob of
Speaker 1: roughly twenty people, several of whom were employees of the sheriff,
Speaker 1: including the previously mentioned Cliff Dial. He said that the
Speaker 1: men had tied him to a tree and whipped him.
Speaker 1: He went on to say that a rope which had
Speaker 1: been thrown over a tree limb, was then tied around
Speaker 1: his neck and members of the mob pulled him up
Speaker 1: in the air twice to force him to divulge information
Speaker 1: about the murder. Yeah, it's pretty bad, it's real real, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, from a practical standpoint, like hey, you know, um,
Speaker 1: you know, rocket scientists shareff you know, if you beat me,
Speaker 1: there's evidence, so I can go, Yeah, this right here,
Speaker 1: that's that's his buckle. That's where that came from, this
Speaker 1: rocket science. And then secondly, I think remember that the
Speaker 1: To Catch a Murderer, the little series on Netflix. Remember
Speaker 1: how like when they finally showed that interrogation of the
Speaker 1: little dude that clearly was autistic, you know, and when
Speaker 1: they bullied him into saying something just so they bullied
Speaker 1: him into say it. Yeah, we'll talk about um that
Speaker 1: in a bit because that there's yeah that ties into
Speaker 1: this actually rather directly. Yeah, yeah, like this so yeah,
Speaker 1: all that to say, like this isn't this is a
Speaker 1: normal practice? Yeah if yeah, if you treated your domestic
Speaker 1: partner the way that police routinely treat people in Terry Asians,
Speaker 1: they would have easy legal standing to get a restraining
Speaker 1: order against you and take your guns away if you
Speaker 1: own guns, Like it's emotional abuse. So, um, it's worth
Speaker 1: noting that. Further on in their testimony, Uh, these boys
Speaker 1: made statements to the effect that a great deal of
Speaker 1: the local white population knew they were being tortured at
Speaker 1: the jail. Now they've been specifically taken to a separate,
Speaker 1: geographically isolated jail on the other side of the state
Speaker 1: line in order to hide the fact that they were
Speaker 1: being tortured. Um. This was common behavior for police around
Speaker 1: the country. But at the same time, it was important
Speaker 1: to the police that enough white people knew these black
Speaker 1: prisoners were being tortured to stop mobs from burning down
Speaker 1: one of the jails. Under questioning. Officer Dial did eventually
Speaker 1: admit to having beaten the boys. He said that it
Speaker 1: was not too much for a negro, not as much
Speaker 1: as I would have done if it was left to
Speaker 1: me that statements. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and again it's people
Speaker 1: can handle a lot. That's exactly what I'm getting into.
Speaker 1: This is part of the very long standing trend in
Speaker 1: in not just law enforcement, but white racism, the idea
Speaker 1: that black people feel less pain than white people. It's,
Speaker 1: for one thing, documented that black men and women are
Speaker 1: prescribed lower doses of pain killers by doctors for the
Speaker 1: exact same ailments as white people are prescribed higher doses.
Speaker 1: And this is like a large Black doctors do this.
Speaker 1: This is a largely unconscious thing. It's it's so deeply
Speaker 1: woven into the fabric of our society, the idea that
Speaker 1: black people feel pain somehow less than white people. Yep, yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't even maybe that's there, Yeah yeah, might have
Speaker 1: something to do with police officers, for example, putting a
Speaker 1: knee on one of their necks for eight minutes and
Speaker 1: forty six seconds because you're soume, we're fine. Yeah now, yeah,
Speaker 1: And you can draw a direct line from the whipping
Speaker 1: of slaves in the pre war South and like justifications
Speaker 1: for why that wasn't cruel. It was the only way
Speaker 1: they would learn, you know, they don't feel pain the same.
Speaker 1: This is what you have to do. You can draw
Speaker 1: a direct line from that to officer dials abuse to
Speaker 1: the fact that, for example, today black and Hispanic people
Speaker 1: are fifty like Leier in the United States to experience
Speaker 1: non lethal use of force from police. Yeah, yep, all
Speaker 1: tied together. Yeah yeah. Dial and his fellow officers insisted
Speaker 1: that despite the force used, all three black boys made
Speaker 1: free and open confessions to the murder, and this convinced
Speaker 1: the all white jerry. Part of white convinced the white
Speaker 1: jerry is that a reverend who had been in the
Speaker 1: jail at the time testified that they had given free confessions.
Speaker 1: By the way, that reverend repeatedly referred to all of
Speaker 1: the boys as darkies. Um yeah, yeah, unbiased religious official there. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And again I'm highlighting a single case because it is
Speaker 1: important for you to know. But also this happened in
Speaker 1: every state, particularly in the South and a lot of
Speaker 1: parts of the North, on a regular basis. Most police officers,
Speaker 1: particularly in the South, had similar participated in similar things.
Speaker 1: This was the norm. This was a common occurrence. Um yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: If they didn't participate like officer Dial, they were aware
Speaker 1: of other officers doing it. That's probably more common than
Speaker 1: than doing it, just because most people aren't comfortable with
Speaker 1: with carrying out random physical violence, even most police officers. Um,
Speaker 1: but they let it happen. Yeah, broadly supported it. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The fear that's already striking in somebody, that's like, obviously
Speaker 1: the person you talk to is a sociopath, you know
Speaker 1: what I'm saying. So like the fear of being like, well,
Speaker 1: I'm not going to get in his way because he
Speaker 1: won't turn it on me. You know, this guy's crazy.
Speaker 1: Look at him. Yeah, crazy, I mean, um, And of
Speaker 1: course he's not crazy. Officer Dial, I have no doubt.
Speaker 1: Um was completely in possession of his white right mind,
Speaker 1: white mind, um, and not not any way mental real
Speaker 1: He was a He was enforcing white supremacy through violence
Speaker 1: in a way that was effective and rational. Um. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the white jury, after a day and a half
Speaker 1: of proceedings, voted to convict all three boys of murder
Speaker 1: and have them executed. And thankfully this was a case
Speaker 1: where the CP managed to get involved in time, They
Speaker 1: appealed and the lives of all three young men were saved.
Speaker 1: So as happy an ending as the story of torture
Speaker 1: can have, Um, there's a there's a trial like right
Speaker 1: before Brown versus Voard of Education that uh missed, missed
Speaker 1: all the missed all the fame because of Brown versus
Speaker 1: Vard of Education. When yeah, about the white jurors like
Speaker 1: being able to, like the law of saying like I
Speaker 1: have a right to be you know, tried in front
Speaker 1: of a jury of my peers. But it wasn't until
Speaker 1: after this case because our documents only recognized two races.
Speaker 1: So so if this is a Latino dude, and that's
Speaker 1: that's what the case was. It was a Latino dude
Speaker 1: who got in a bar fight with a Latino dude, right,
Speaker 1: but according to the eyes of the constitution, Latinos are
Speaker 1: white until this case. Right, So if you've got an
Speaker 1: all white jury, they're like, but they're still looking at
Speaker 1: a Mexican dude and he's like, dude, like, these are
Speaker 1: not my peers, Like and then they're going, what are
Speaker 1: you talking about? You guys are both white people. It's like, no,
Speaker 1: where you can't you can't play it both ways, man,
Speaker 1: Like you know what I'm saying. So, so what's interesting
Speaker 1: about this case, like you said, is like there's clear evidence,
Speaker 1: there's obvious evidence. They dude that did it said he
Speaker 1: did it, and then the jury acquitted. You know what
Speaker 1: I'm saying, Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. And the case
Speaker 1: that I just related to you was only exceptional because
Speaker 1: some version of justice was eventually done thanks to the
Speaker 1: hard work of the end of a CP. Unknowable numbers
Speaker 1: of black men and boys were tortured and executed without
Speaker 1: the end a CP ever coming to their aid. Um,
Speaker 1: just because you know, that's not a criticism of the
Speaker 1: end of a CP. The resources were limited, um, playing
Speaker 1: whack a mole man like you can't be everywhere, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And the FBI did not start to really look into
Speaker 1: the problem of torture enforced confessions by US law enforcement
Speaker 1: until nineteen forty two. And the Bureau does again get
Speaker 1: a little bit of credit for intervening to try and
Speaker 1: protect black Americans faster than any other wing of the
Speaker 1: US government, But as near to Miyer notes, their efforts
Speaker 1: were limited in scope and saw very limited success and
Speaker 1: absolutely did not stop the problem or really arrested in
Speaker 1: any major way. Some of this has to do with
Speaker 1: the history of police torture, and this is where we
Speaker 1: get into stuff that's both white and black history, um
Speaker 1: you know, in in a in a in a way
Speaker 1: um or a history of at least police abuse of
Speaker 1: both white and black people for all of the eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 1: In the first half of the twentieth century, it was
Speaker 1: not illegal for the police in the United States to
Speaker 1: torture people. Charges could be brought against the cops that
Speaker 1: they committed assaulter, battery, and breach of their regulations, but
Speaker 1: that was as hard to prove as you might suspect.
Speaker 1: Some states had laws to prohibit the use of violence
Speaker 1: to force confessions, but that was not an across the
Speaker 1: board sort of thing, near to Meyer notes quote as
Speaker 1: investigative reports from that date. From this period reveal, however,
Speaker 1: penalties were rarely imposed because district attorneys, duges, and jury
Speaker 1: members were highly reluctant to limit the power and authority
Speaker 1: of law enforcement officials. While the white press in the
Speaker 1: South generally avoided using the term torture and it's reporting
Speaker 1: on cases of police violence during interrogations, the term was
Speaker 1: purposefully used by the black press to expose and announced
Speaker 1: the violent abuse of African American suspects, often in a
Speaker 1: bid to gain public support for the fledgling civil rights struggle.
Speaker 1: A more common and prevalent term was the third degree,
Speaker 1: which was adopted as police jargon in the late nineteenth
Speaker 1: century and entered the general American vocabulary in the early
Speaker 1: twentieth century. And I'm gonna guess most people know this term, right,
Speaker 1: that's yeah, as I say, from the TV, from the choose,
Speaker 1: And what that means is I'm going to torture the
Speaker 1: ship out of Yeah. Yeah, it's bad. Um yeah, so yeah,
Speaker 1: And it is like it. It is a term that
Speaker 1: was used to justify police, to dress up police torture
Speaker 1: something else. Torture sounds like a crime, giving them the
Speaker 1: third degree is something that like hard bitten but goodhearted,
Speaker 1: dragnet type cop has to do it. He doesn't like it,
Speaker 1: but I gotta keep a city safe, you know. Um yeah.
Speaker 1: The term really took off in the nineteen thirties, right
Speaker 1: alongside a massive increase in police use of torture. In
Speaker 1: ninety one, President Herbert Hoover established the National Commission on
Speaker 1: Law Observance and Enforcement, better known as the Wickersham Commission.
Speaker 1: It reported that the third degree was used throughout the country,
Speaker 1: most often in big cities like New York, Chicago, Detroit,
Speaker 1: and Los Angeles. In the South, torture was used to
Speaker 1: control black bodies and white mobs, but in the urban
Speaker 1: North it was just used to make cop lives easier
Speaker 1: by guaranteeing them quick convictions. People at the time were
Speaker 1: rightly angry at this, and initiatives were enacted after the
Speaker 1: Wickersham Commission to reduce the use of the third degree. Police,
Speaker 1: for their part, denied that the third degree existed and
Speaker 1: worn with any additional legal restrictions on cops, would cause
Speaker 1: crime to rise. Yeah. Yeah, they have one tool and
Speaker 1: they use it real well. You know, yeah, well, you know,
Speaker 1: you know, if you do this, then you know you're
Speaker 1: gonna do You're gonna call it's gonna be more crime.
Speaker 1: And as you hear props say that, imagining it's coming
Speaker 1: from the voice of a police officer actively pulling a
Speaker 1: man's fingernails off. Yeah so yeah. For a long time,
Speaker 1: historians thought that government scrutiny successfully reduced the use of
Speaker 1: police torture, and maybe it did reduce it, but it
Speaker 1: did not eliminate it, and modern scholarship suggests that it
Speaker 1: just caused cops to get cagier and a little bit
Speaker 1: more clever with how they tortured people. One way to
Speaker 1: do this was to transition to methods of torture that
Speaker 1: left no physical marks on the victims. In nineteen thirty,
Speaker 1: a New York Legal aid organization listed two cases of
Speaker 1: suspects who were brutalized by police during interrogations. Most of
Speaker 1: the torture victims were uneducated whites under the age of thirty.
Speaker 1: A large number of those white boys were immigrants. While
Speaker 1: black people were a minority of torture victims in the North,
Speaker 1: they were a disproportionate percentage of the victims of New
Speaker 1: York Police Department. Torture victims were black men, and black
Speaker 1: people made up only five percent of New York's population.
Speaker 1: So that's follow me. Now, that's pretty bad. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that ain't good. Dog. When you think of like, so
Speaker 1: when I think of like just just statistics of like okay, uh,
Speaker 1: some like some like three times three times more likely
Speaker 1: if you're a black miner boy to be tried as
Speaker 1: an adult, uh, and then and given the harshest, like
Speaker 1: the harshest possible sentence. It's like I used to wonder, like, okay,
Speaker 1: when like when did how did y'all pull this off?
Speaker 1: Like how like I just I couldn't. I couldn't do
Speaker 1: the math, Like okay, so like why why why try
Speaker 1: us as adults? Like I don't. I don't understand why
Speaker 1: you think and why us more than anyone else. And
Speaker 1: then you hear stories like this where you're like, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean they you know, they routinely just you know,
Speaker 1: we could take a lot of pain, and then they
Speaker 1: you know, it's well, I mean they've been torturing us
Speaker 1: for a while, you know, so like and now you know,
Speaker 1: you go, you get to a time where, you know,
Speaker 1: post civil rights, where like you said, like you can't
Speaker 1: you can't just leave physical marks, and like can I
Speaker 1: actually torture fools? We try to figure out other ways
Speaker 1: to do it, you know, we just yeah, it's got
Speaker 1: so you're continuing the problems. So it's like them getting cunning.
Speaker 1: That's what I'm trying to get to them being cunning
Speaker 1: is the tradition? Yes, Yes, And then saying also this
Speaker 1: thing that you have extensive documentation of happening never happens
Speaker 1: when you're a liar. Believe us we're the cops. Yes,
Speaker 1: And it gets it gets, it gets worse. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: quote again from niedermeyer Um. The report by the Wickersham
Speaker 1: Commission highlighted numerous cases from Southern states in which police
Speaker 1: officers and sheriffs used batons, fists, and whips to extort
Speaker 1: confessions from black suspects. The report also documented the use
Speaker 1: of the so called water cure on black suspects, a
Speaker 1: forerunner to water boarding that US soldiers used during the
Speaker 1: Philippine American War eight two. The water cure consisted of
Speaker 1: tying suspects flat on their backs and using a hose
Speaker 1: to force water into their mouths or noses until they
Speaker 1: provided the requested information and made a confession. Furthermore, the
Speaker 1: report mentioned torture methods on African Americans that included the
Speaker 1: use of electricity. One of these involved in improvised electric chair,
Speaker 1: which was used until nineteen by the sheriff's office and Helena,
Speaker 1: Arkansas to extract confessions. The report also pointed to individual
Speaker 1: cases of police torture of people of Mexican origin and
Speaker 1: white suspects. The cases collected by the Wickersham Commission indicate
Speaker 1: that the vast majority of the victims in the South
Speaker 1: were African Americans. Primarily men, but also women. Moreover, they
Speaker 1: showed that police torture of African Americans in the South
Speaker 1: was already commonplace before nineteen thirty. Diverse historical studies confirmed
Speaker 1: that this practice can be traced to the days of slavery.
Speaker 1: It never ended. They just got cunning, Yes, there it is, yes,
Speaker 1: and and I love like, I love how you're you're
Speaker 1: bringing out the idea that like, we're not we're not
Speaker 1: historical revisionists in the sense to say that this is
Speaker 1: a uniquely black experience. That's not to say that black
Speaker 1: have had Blacks have had a unique experience in this,
Speaker 1: but this is not a unique experience. This is a
Speaker 1: This is a continual abuse of power and a protection
Speaker 1: of wealth, resources and supremacy. And and nobody is safe.
Speaker 1: Nobody is safe. That's part of the that's part of the
Speaker 1: the people started to realize. A lot of liberals who
Speaker 1: would have been broadly pro police, uh, you know, have
Speaker 1: started to realize since getting tear gassed and shot with
Speaker 1: rubber bullets by the cops, it's just like safe. If
Speaker 1: you give them the right to violently oppress one group
Speaker 1: of people, they will start fucking with you. It's the whole.
Speaker 1: It's the whole. First, they came for the communist and
Speaker 1: I was not a Commis, Like, that's how it works.
Speaker 1: It's fascism, Robert. You know what isn't, hopefully fascism the
Speaker 1: products and services that support this podcast. Yeah, yep, not
Speaker 1: fascism all legally antifa um hopefully Yeah. I call the
Speaker 1: Union Hall as his mat of life and death. I
Speaker 1: think these people of planning to kill Dr King. On
Speaker 1: April four, Dr Martin Luther King was shot and killed
Speaker 1: in Memphis. A petty criminal named James Earl Ray was arrested.
Speaker 1: He pled guilty to the crime and spent the rest
Speaker 1: of his life in prison. Case closed right, James Hilvay
Speaker 1: was con for the official story, the authorities would parade
Speaker 1: all we found a gun that James L. Ray board
Speaker 1: in Birmingham that killed Dr King, Except it wasn't the
Speaker 1: gun that killed Dr King. One of the problems that
Speaker 1: came out when I got the Ray case was that
Speaker 1: some of the evidence, as far as I was concerned,
Speaker 1: did not match the circumstances. This is the MLK tapes.
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Speaker 1: So the through line, the direct line you can draw
Speaker 1: from the use of force to suppress black people during slavery,
Speaker 1: through the KKK and lynching to the third degree. That
Speaker 1: through line is critical because what ties all of this
Speaker 1: together is a desire by white people in particularly not
Speaker 1: just white people but white moneyed people, um in terms
Speaker 1: of who's organizing this to fight against the establishment of
Speaker 1: black autonomy and equality and sort of weaponizing the rage
Speaker 1: that white poor people feel over being poor and turning
Speaker 1: that in a racist direction. Anyway, there's a lot that
Speaker 1: goes into this. Historian William Brundage, cited by Niedermeyer, sees
Speaker 1: white supremacy as continually contested to rain and when black
Speaker 1: people would fight back and gain the upper hand. However,
Speaker 1: briefly in this struggle, police were the most reliable tool
Speaker 1: whiteness had to fight back. This has been obvious to
Speaker 1: serious researchers for a very long time. Swedish sociologist Gunner
Speaker 1: Myrtle wrote in a nineteen forty four study titled an
Speaker 1: American dilemma. Quote, the policeman stands not only for civic
Speaker 1: order as defined in formal laws and regulations, but also
Speaker 1: for white supremacy and the whole set of social customs
Speaker 1: associated with this concept. It is demanded that even minor
Speaker 1: transgressions of cast etiquette should be punished, and the policeman
Speaker 1: is delegated to carry out this function. Nineteen forty four,
Speaker 1: Gunner saw it. Yeah, there's don't say you weren't warned. Yeah,
Speaker 1: people tried, Yes, and yes, I love the idea that
Speaker 1: it's a Scandinavian country. Now. Yeah, the whitest dude in
Speaker 1: the world, what are y'all doing? This is a problem. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The federal government and federal law enforcement made attempts in
Speaker 1: the nineteen forties and nineteen fifties to push back against
Speaker 1: the torture and murder of black people by police. There
Speaker 1: were numerous investigations in two different sheriffs and police departments.
Speaker 1: Some of these investigations even lad to punishments. But as
Speaker 1: we saw in the Red Summer of nineteen nineteen, at
Speaker 1: the end of the day, black Americans had to rely
Speaker 1: on themselves in order to fight back. They did this
Speaker 1: in large part through the end of a c P.
Speaker 1: These cases helped to drum up both public awareness of
Speaker 1: the problem in public support for changes to the system.
Speaker 1: You can draw the elect line between the end a
Speaker 1: CP spending decades fighting these cases and why the murder
Speaker 1: of Emmett Till caused a massive nationwide reaction, even among
Speaker 1: a lot of white people. It's because they had laid
Speaker 1: the groundwork. And you can make a similar case for
Speaker 1: not just the end of l a CP at this point,
Speaker 1: but like why specifically the murder of George Floyd finally
Speaker 1: caused for more seeing Now, Yes, because you gotta you
Speaker 1: gotta go back from like from Rodney King all the
Speaker 1: way to Mike Brown. This. Yeah, it's like it's a
Speaker 1: continual like, oh my god, enough enough. Yeah, you gotta
Speaker 1: really prepare the white majority to give a shit about
Speaker 1: the murder of a black person. Is that I guess
Speaker 1: negatively looking at this for years years? Get a white
Speaker 1: care Yeah? So um yeah. And again, the CP eventually
Speaker 1: was successful through a number of cases in in getting
Speaker 1: a series of Supreme Court decisions that significantly regulated and
Speaker 1: reduced the admissibility the a forced confessions. Um. And that's
Speaker 1: that had that helped. But again regulation of the police
Speaker 1: in this regard, while it was a good thing, it
Speaker 1: did not cure the problem of confessions obtained under the
Speaker 1: third degree. It again just inspired the police to get subtler. Yes.
Speaker 1: In nineteen eighty nine, Gary Dotson became the first wrongfully
Speaker 1: convicted person to be proven innocent by DNA testing, and
Speaker 1: Gary was white. If you're curious. In the decades since,
Speaker 1: more than two people have been exonerated by DNA testing.
Speaker 1: In fifteen to twenty percent of these cases, police induced
Speaker 1: false confessions were involved. Overall, twelve percent of overturned wrongful
Speaker 1: convictions in the last thirty years have involved a false confession,
Speaker 1: which we don't call a forced confession anymore but probably
Speaker 1: ought to. Yes, yeah, yeah, because no one falsely confesses. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they are forced to. Nobody's like, ah, you know, it's
Speaker 1: like you have a fender bender in traffic, Like I
Speaker 1: confess to rape. I'm so sorry that was my Like totally,
Speaker 1: He's like, wait, you know what my bad did I say?
Speaker 1: Did I say I killed that guy? No? No, I
Speaker 1: mean I didn't kill that guy. My bad. You know,
Speaker 1: I thought was that Tuesday? I thought you saw my Tuesday. Yeah. No, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: I didn't say I admit to murder. I said I
Speaker 1: liked Fox Molder. I've been watching rewatching the X Files recently.
Speaker 1: It's my bad. It's you know what I'm saying like,
Speaker 1: It's just I fumbled my words. Yeah. The most shocking
Speaker 1: example of this might be the case of the Central
Speaker 1: Park five, also in nineteen eighty nine. In this case,
Speaker 1: a white female jugger was beaten and raped. Five black
Speaker 1: and Hispanic children, all between fourteen and sixteen years old,
Speaker 1: were taken into custody. All five confessed, and then all
Speaker 1: five recanted their confessions, claiming they had only confessed after
Speaker 1: hours of terrifying and stressful police interrogation. They claimed that
Speaker 1: they had only admitted to committing the crime because officers
Speaker 1: had heavily insinuated they would get to go home if
Speaker 1: they did. All five were convicted and sent to prison.
Speaker 1: Donald Trump, then a prominent con man, repeatedly urged that
Speaker 1: the boys should be executed. In two thousand two, the
Speaker 1: real rapist confessed, and DNA evidence confirmed his guilt and
Speaker 1: the innocence of all five boys. They were released. The
Speaker 1: case of the Central Park five sounds remarkably similar to
Speaker 1: the case of those three boys in Mississippi, doesn't it? Yes,
Speaker 1: and it should seem very familiar with you because just
Speaker 1: because a certain uh, certain elected official was invested in
Speaker 1: making sure that they stayed in prison, Yes, yes, uh
Speaker 1: and yeah the case of the Central Park five. Yeah,
Speaker 1: in this case, the boys, you know, in the case
Speaker 1: that we read earlier, um, in Mississippi, those boys were
Speaker 1: straight up physically tortured. What the Central Park five endured
Speaker 1: is much subtler, but some people might call it torture.
Speaker 1: And this brings me to discussion of the read technique.
Speaker 1: The read technique is an interrogation tactic invented in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty two by a former cop and a polygraph expert.
Speaker 1: You may recognize the nineteen sixty two is just right
Speaker 1: out the same time the Supreme Court said, y'all got
Speaker 1: to stop forcing people to confess the crimes they didn't
Speaker 1: commit via torture. John Reid, the techniques creator, had a
Speaker 1: reputation for being the kind of guy who used psychology
Speaker 1: to get confessions rather than violence. The origin of his
Speaker 1: technique came from a nineteen fifty case when a guy
Speaker 1: named Darryl Parker came home to find his wife raped
Speaker 1: and murdered. Parker was interrogated, and, according to the New
Speaker 1: Yorker quote, Reid hooked Parker up to the polygraph and
Speaker 1: started asking questions. Parker couldn't see the movement of the needles,
Speaker 1: but each time he answered a question about the murder,
Speaker 1: Reid told him that he was lying. As the hours
Speaker 1: wore on, Reid began to introduce a story contrary to appearances.
Speaker 1: He said the Parker's marriage wasn't a happy one. Nancy
Speaker 1: refused to give Parker the sex that he required, and
Speaker 1: she flirted with other men. One day, in a rage,
Speaker 1: Parker took what was rightfully his. After nine hours of interrogation,
Speaker 1: Parker broke down and confessed. He recanted the next day,
Speaker 1: but a jury found him guilty of murder and sentenced
Speaker 1: Himp to life in prison. Now Read was like, Ah,
Speaker 1: this is the way we should always do interrogations. Uh. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And he refined his strategy into a technique which generally
Speaker 1: boils down to elaborately accusing the suspect of committing a
Speaker 1: detailed crime. After hours and hours of interrogation, Read opened
Speaker 1: a consulting company which by two thirteen trained more interrogators
Speaker 1: than any other company in the world, working for everything
Speaker 1: from local police to the FBI, the CIA, in the
Speaker 1: Secret Service. The company brags that the people that trains
Speaker 1: get their suspects to confess eight percent of the time. Bro,
Speaker 1: just think think about what we're telling you right now.
Speaker 1: You have to be a absolute like Navy seal level
Speaker 1: mental agility and fortitude to defend yourself when you're innocent. Yea,
Speaker 1: like when I actually didn't do the thing. I have
Speaker 1: to be this skilled, you said, which is why you
Speaker 1: wait for your lawyer, which is why you have a
Speaker 1: right to remain silent. Use it. Just shut the fuck up. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the Read technique was used on the Central Park five
Speaker 1: and numerous other people who have confessed to crimes they
Speaker 1: did not commit. Now, the Read company and its president
Speaker 1: will say that that is not accurate, that they were
Speaker 1: not using the Read technique, and it's largely because they
Speaker 1: didn't do it right. That's what they'll claim is that, like,
Speaker 1: false confessions are only the result of abuse or misuse
Speaker 1: of the technique because the technique has safeguards in it
Speaker 1: to make sure that no false confessions are obtained by it.
Speaker 1: So when people who are trained in the read technique
Speaker 1: get confessions from innocent people. It's not because of the
Speaker 1: read technique. It's because they were wrongly using the read
Speaker 1: technique that makes it cool? Can you the pretzel you
Speaker 1: just put your body in? Wow? Okay? Yeah, it wouldn't
Speaker 1: be great to be able to just like to be
Speaker 1: able to just with a straight face and no like
Speaker 1: soul conviction. Your soul is so dead inside that you
Speaker 1: could make that sentence and be okay with it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: It's like if I have a school that trains people
Speaker 1: to fire over the heads of crowds with assault rifles,
Speaker 1: and then some people fire into the crowds with assault rifles.
Speaker 1: Clearly none of that's like, I have nothing to do
Speaker 1: with that. Said the heads I fled fire told you
Speaker 1: shoot over the head. Yeah, there's a safeguard to make
Speaker 1: sure no one gets hit. Oh yeah. So the read
Speaker 1: technique has started to fall out of favor in the
Speaker 1: last really in the last few years, and seventeen was
Speaker 1: when like one big agency stopped sending interrogators and to
Speaker 1: be trained in it. And it this seems to have
Speaker 1: like you know you mentioned earlier. I think it was
Speaker 1: to catch a predator, right, Um, that that the like
Speaker 1: the fact that a lot of interrogations are videotaped and
Speaker 1: that some of those came out in documentaries and people
Speaker 1: got to see, oh my god, is this what cops
Speaker 1: are doing? Yeah, this isn't okay. So it is still
Speaker 1: very common, still widely in use. But the tide might
Speaker 1: seems to be turning on the read technique. We'll see. Um,
Speaker 1: it is not legal for police to beat the ship
Speaker 1: out of suspects to force a confession, not anymore. And
Speaker 1: I guess you could see even the read technique as
Speaker 1: an improvement over literal physical torture. Um. But it is
Speaker 1: legal for police to lie about evidence, to withhold food
Speaker 1: and water from suspects for what I would consider to
Speaker 1: be long periods of time, and to subject them to
Speaker 1: verbal abuse and psychologically torture them until they see confessing
Speaker 1: is the only way out. I can't say if the
Speaker 1: read technique is responsible from most false confessions in the
Speaker 1: modern United States, but I can't tell you the police
Speaker 1: department that is responsible for more false confessions than any other.
Speaker 1: You want to guess, No, Chicago, Who's gonna be one
Speaker 1: of the two, right, yeah? Yeah, yeah, Now, more than
Speaker 1: thirty of all exonerations that involve false confessions were people
Speaker 1: who confessed in Illinois state, and most of those were
Speaker 1: people who confess to the Chicago p D. And the
Speaker 1: question to why is this happening has a lot to
Speaker 1: do with a dude named John Burge. Yeah. So yeah,
Speaker 1: like a little a little side note especially about what
Speaker 1: what you're talking about, like how some of these confessions happen,
Speaker 1: and how slick they are, because like say, for example,
Speaker 1: you hear on the news that somebody died on Fourth Street, right,
Speaker 1: So then when you get picked up and then cops go, ey,
Speaker 1: did you hear about the shooting on Fourth Street? And
Speaker 1: you're like yeah, and then he goes, yeah, that the
Speaker 1: that the lady was coming out of the house, and
Speaker 1: you're like, yeah, I heard that. First of all, the
Speaker 1: story wasn't that there was a shooting. The story was
Speaker 1: somebody died. So when he said did you hear about
Speaker 1: the shooting, what he's doing is making sure you just
Speaker 1: confessed to information. They said he had information about the crime.
Speaker 1: And because you it's like, I didn't say shooting. You
Speaker 1: said shooting? Well no, no no, no, no, no no, I just
Speaker 1: asked if you heard about You said you heard about it.
Speaker 1: I didn't tell you. The story isn't that there's a shooting.
Speaker 1: So like how slick that type of like practice is.
Speaker 1: And you listen, I'm telling you this stuff out of experience,
Speaker 1: you know what I'm saying, Like somebody saying, hey, you here,
Speaker 1: the liquor store got robbed out. Hey you heard about
Speaker 1: that liquor store robbed Like I had to learn to
Speaker 1: be like, nah, I ain't heard ship. I don't heard nothing.
Speaker 1: I don't I mean, I don't know. You know what
Speaker 1: I'm saying. What do you mean? You don't know? You're
Speaker 1: not You're square, You're not part of You're not part
Speaker 1: of the streets. You know. I've seen you with your
Speaker 1: friends and I'm like, uh, sorry, I don't live here,
Speaker 1: you know, just like you have to like be Yeah, anyway,
Speaker 1: all that to say this stuff is like as like
Speaker 1: heinous as we're telling you. It's so subtle and it's
Speaker 1: so slick, you know what I'm saying, Like everybody swears, well, well,
Speaker 1: if I was in the situation, I'm like, na, you
Speaker 1: you would do exactly what everyone else does in the situation. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: which is why you don't talk and you wait for
Speaker 1: your fucking lawyer. Yes, Yeah, John, John motherfucking birds, John
Speaker 1: Bird is proof that the old tes tactics of the
Speaker 1: third degree still aren't as much a part of the
Speaker 1: past as some folks might like to believe. John Burge
Speaker 1: was a decorated Vietnam veteran who served as a military
Speaker 1: police officer, working for a time as a Provost marshal
Speaker 1: investigator during that conflict. After the war, he returned to
Speaker 1: Chicago and became a cop in nineteen seventy two. He
Speaker 1: was promoted to detective one year later. In nineteen seventy three,
Speaker 1: he tortured his first victim. According to the Marshall Project quote,
Speaker 1: his officers had arrested a man named Anthony Holmes on
Speaker 1: suspicion of murder and wanted to him to identify an accomplice.
Speaker 1: When Holmes refused, the officers left him handcuffed in an
Speaker 1: area to investigation room and went to find Burge. A
Speaker 1: few minutes later, Burge strolled into the interrogation room with
Speaker 1: a mysterious box in a brown paper bag. The box
Speaker 1: had a hand crank on one end and two wires
Speaker 1: with alligator clamps coming out the other end. According to
Speaker 1: trial testimony, decades later, Burge then picked up the alligator
Speaker 1: clamps and barked, inward, you're going to tell me what
Speaker 1: I want to know. He fastened the alligator clamps and
Speaker 1: pulled a plastic bag down over Holmes's head, warning him
Speaker 1: not to bite through it when the pain hit. Then
Speaker 1: he started turning the crank. He was electrocuting him. She's
Speaker 1: over the next few yeah, uh yeah yeah. Over the
Speaker 1: next few years, Burge continued to be his department's go
Speaker 1: to torture man. Department rumors stated that he had learned
Speaker 1: the techniques he employed during his time in Vietnam on
Speaker 1: the bodies of North Vietnamese po ws. We call this
Speaker 1: fucos boomerang, the tactics used in colonial wars overseas. Coming
Speaker 1: back to the United States, Burge denies that he tortured
Speaker 1: anyone in Vietnam. He also denied torturing people here, so
Speaker 1: maybe you don't take that super seriously. Um. Yeah. He
Speaker 1: quickly perfected what he called his inward box, which is
Speaker 1: what he named the box he used to electrocute black people,
Speaker 1: often electrocuting their testicles. I've talked to one of Burge's victims,
Speaker 1: and that's what Birge did him as he electrocuted his
Speaker 1: testicles with his inward box. Um. Yeah, there's there's a
Speaker 1: there's which is a whole other story I want to
Speaker 1: get to. But there's this weird fascination with torturing of
Speaker 1: black genit with it's very common in lynching, very common
Speaker 1: in lynching, that they would be severed and even taken
Speaker 1: as like souvenirs. Yeah, and it's one of those like
Speaker 1: my eternal question putting through how much detail do I
Speaker 1: go into? We could have done six episodes on lynching,
Speaker 1: and it deserves six episodes, but not trying to give
Speaker 1: a broader I appreciated like that not being mentioned. Yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's the thing because of his high case clearance rate,
Speaker 1: because he gave boy John's real good at getting criminals
Speaker 1: to confess. He's solving all these murders. Because of his
Speaker 1: high case clearance rate, John was promoted to sergeant and
Speaker 1: then to lieutenant and eventually to commander. John burgess behavior
Speaker 1: was not hidden from other men in the Chicago Police.
Speaker 1: He kept his inward box out on open display at
Speaker 1: a table in the police station. He trained dozens of
Speaker 1: other Chicago officers in his techniques, which expanded over the
Speaker 1: years to include electric cattle prods, simulate and simulated executions.
Speaker 1: Burgess officers often beat subjects with telephone books, flashlights, batons,
Speaker 1: and bats. They burned men with hot radiators cigarettes. They
Speaker 1: put plastic bags over the heads of others and suffocated them.
Speaker 1: This went on for a very, very long time. The
Speaker 1: end began in nineteen eighty two, when two police officers
Speaker 1: were murdered and Burge and his team tortured the ship
Speaker 1: out of a pair of black brothers until they confessed.
Speaker 1: The injuries one of them suffered were significant enough that
Speaker 1: a medical official reported on them, and that was the
Speaker 1: first crack in the Burge system. Allegations of torture by
Speaker 1: Burge and his men, though, didn't break through the blue
Speaker 1: wall of silence until a nineteen eighty nine civil lawsuit
Speaker 1: by the People's Law Office. One of the attorneys behind
Speaker 1: this case, who later represented many Burge victims, was Flint Taylor.
Speaker 1: He described the existence of Burgess Unit as an unremitting
Speaker 1: official cover up that has implicated a series of police superintendents,
Speaker 1: numerous prosecutors, more than thirty police detectives and supervisors, and
Speaker 1: most notably Richard M. Daley, the city's former longtime mayor,
Speaker 1: and a previous state's attorney. The whole story came out
Speaker 1: in bits and pieces through a mix of victims coming
Speaker 1: forward in anonymous sources within the department. One of these
Speaker 1: anonymous sources was a cop who left again anonymous voice
Speaker 1: messages for Flint Taylor. Taylor and his fellows nicknamed this
Speaker 1: guy Deep Badge. So part of the lesson here is
Speaker 1: that after seventeen years of torture that was enthusiastically supported
Speaker 1: at every level of the Chicago p D, a couple
Speaker 1: of good cops did finally work up the courage to
Speaker 1: leave anonymous voicemails after a lawyer had figured out the
Speaker 1: basics of the case and publicized them. That's what good
Speaker 1: cops get you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's like three of them,
Speaker 1: and then and it takes me seventeen years to do anything.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. Burge was eventually accused of
Speaker 1: torturing more than a hundred people, virtually all of whom
Speaker 1: were black, between nineteen seventy two and nineteen ninety one.
Speaker 1: That means recent. Yeah, at this point, we know that
Speaker 1: there's probably over two hundred victims. We will never know
Speaker 1: the true number of Birge victims. It's been a lot
Speaker 1: of these guys were executed, a lot of them died
Speaker 1: in prison. In the Chicago Police Board voted to fire
Speaker 1: John Burge. This into did plans the local Fraternal Order
Speaker 1: of Police had made that same year to honor Burge
Speaker 1: and four o their officers with a parade float. All
Speaker 1: of the other four officers were also accused of torturing people.
Speaker 1: By the time he was fired, Burge had risen to
Speaker 1: the rank of commander. He was not charged criminally until
Speaker 1: two thousand eight and not sent to prison until two
Speaker 1: thousand eleven. He got out of prison in two thousand fourteen.
Speaker 1: Chicago has paid out millions of dollars in reparations to victims,
Speaker 1: but an unknown number of Burge's victims still remain in prison.
Speaker 1: Multiple people were released from death row as a result
Speaker 1: of all of this coming to light, but we will
Speaker 1: again never know how many innocent men were executed. Burge
Speaker 1: died in two thousand eighteen, four years after he was
Speaker 1: released from prison. Chicago's police union issued a statement on
Speaker 1: their Facebook page offering condolences to the Burge family and
Speaker 1: insisting it does not believe the full story about the
Speaker 1: Burge cases has ever been told. Dean Angelo, former head
Speaker 1: of the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police, told reporters, I
Speaker 1: don't know that John Burge got a fair shake based
Speaker 1: on all the years and years of service that he
Speaker 1: gave the city. He insisted, Burge put a lot of
Speaker 1: bad guys in prison two thousand eighteen. The cops who
Speaker 1: believe this are still on the force. Just guys there,
Speaker 1: most of the force. Ah, yeah, guys. Yeah, you're asking
Speaker 1: you're asking us to respect you, and it's like I
Speaker 1: would love to I would love to respect just do
Speaker 1: respectable things. Yeah. Yeah. You know who I respect. My
Speaker 1: my neighbor across the street who has never tortured several
Speaker 1: hundred people that I respect him. Yeah, he's He's earned
Speaker 1: my respect by virtue of being a human being who
Speaker 1: doesn't commit random acts of violence. Yeah. It's not hard
Speaker 1: to earn respect. You just have to not Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: So I'm sure that Burge did go to his grave
Speaker 1: believing that, like what he did had been worth it,
Speaker 1: because he again put a lot of bad guys in prison.
Speaker 1: I talked to one of Burgess victims, and this guy
Speaker 1: had an extensive violent criminal record when he wound up
Speaker 1: in Burgess hands. He had done bad things, and John
Speaker 1: probably figured, we've got a crime. This guy's a scumbag fucket,
Speaker 1: he's got to be guilty. And oddly enough, that thinking,
Speaker 1: the thinking that John Burge probably used to justify his crimes,
Speaker 1: the thinking that the Chicago Police Department and the Fraternal
Speaker 1: Order of Police in Chicago certainly uses to justify Burgess
Speaker 1: crimes even today, that thinking these guys were guilty, that
Speaker 1: thinking puts them all right in line with the law
Speaker 1: abiding interrogators who used the read technique. Richard Leo, a
Speaker 1: law professor from the University of San Francisco, spent nine
Speaker 1: months sitting in an almost two interrogations in Oakland during
Speaker 1: the mid nineteen nineties. He learned that most officers who
Speaker 1: again these guys were all trained in the read technique.
Speaker 1: He learned that most officers were skipping a critical aspect
Speaker 1: of the proper read technique. That aspect is having an
Speaker 1: initial interview with the suspect. You're supposed to like interview them,
Speaker 1: have like a normal conversation with them, and kind of
Speaker 1: decide if you think they're guilty before you move on
Speaker 1: to the interrogation. I'm going to quote from the New
Speaker 1: Yorker again. The read interrogation technique is predicated upon an
Speaker 1: accurate determination during behavioral analysis of whether the suspect is lying. Here, too,
Speaker 1: social scientists find reason for concern. Three decades of research
Speaker 1: have shown that nonverbal signals so prized by the red
Speaker 1: trainers bear no relation to deception. In fact, people have
Speaker 1: little more than coin flipping odds of guessing if someone
Speaker 1: is telling the truth, and numerous surveys have shown that
Speaker 1: police do know better. Aldert Rig, a professor of psychology
Speaker 1: at the University of Portsmouth and England, found that law
Speaker 1: enforcement experience does not necessarily improve the ability to detect lies.
Speaker 1: Among police officers, those who said they paid close attention
Speaker 1: to nonverbal cues did the worst. Similarly, an experiment by
Speaker 1: Cason shows that both students and police officers were better
Speaker 1: at telling true confessions from false ones when they listened
Speaker 1: to an audio recording of an interview rather than watch
Speaker 1: it on video. In the experiment, the police officers who
Speaker 1: performed less well than the students but expressed greater confidence
Speaker 1: in their ability to tell who was lying. Cops will
Speaker 1: always tell you they know how to spot a liar
Speaker 1: they are lying. Yeah, you can't really, there's no way
Speaker 1: to know. Yeah, there's no way to know, you know.
Speaker 1: And I feel like in all my police interactions, UM,
Speaker 1: and I'm saying this as someone with like I don't
Speaker 1: I don't think I have a criminal record. Maybe you
Speaker 1: know what I'm saying. But in all of the interactions
Speaker 1: I've had, whether it was o overtly racist or very aggressive,
Speaker 1: or the guy was being a nice guy, or you
Speaker 1: just meet like like you guys playing a nice cary,
Speaker 1: or you just meet like a he's just like he's
Speaker 1: like really a good dude. It really doesn't care. He's
Speaker 1: just he's just doing his job. You know. I feel
Speaker 1: like I've had all of those you know what I'm saying. Um,
Speaker 1: But in the ones, invariably, you know you're being sized up,
Speaker 1: you know, and it's like so even then like this,
Speaker 1: it's just and sometimes I'm like, why are we playing
Speaker 1: this game right now? Like this is your your horrible actors?
Speaker 1: I know what you're doing, you know what I'm saying. Like,
Speaker 1: and then when you when I hear you say like
Speaker 1: they were supposed to train train to do an initial interview,
Speaker 1: and I noticed dudes trying to build rapport with me,
Speaker 1: you know what I'm saying. Um, And I'm like, I
Speaker 1: know this is okay, I know, I know what you're doing. Like,
Speaker 1: I know what you're doing. Okay. What time of day
Speaker 1: was it? All? Right? Word? How tall was the guy? Okay? Cool?
Speaker 1: Uh So I'm just like, just get to it, man,
Speaker 1: just get to it. Let me tell you. You want
Speaker 1: to know where I was. You want to know where
Speaker 1: I live? Okay, Here's where I live. Here's what I
Speaker 1: was doing at this time. Tell me what time it was?
Speaker 1: I fit what description? Can we just get to that
Speaker 1: rather than artists rigamar Yeah, I'm ranting. Yeah. So I
Speaker 1: talked earlier about how police torture to force confessions didn't stop.
Speaker 1: It just got settler under pressure, and the same is
Speaker 1: true with the impact of racism and law enforcement. After
Speaker 1: Jim Crow ended, the most obvious justification for bigoted policing
Speaker 1: was gone, but the bigotry remained, as it a system
Speaker 1: that was built almost completely during a period of time
Speaker 1: where either slavery, black codes or Jim Crow laws were
Speaker 1: the rule. In Minneapolis, where black people make up nineteen
Speaker 1: percent of the population, they are subjected to fifty eight
Speaker 1: percent of use of force cases by the city's police.
Speaker 1: A May two thousand twenty, studies showed that out of
Speaker 1: ninety five million traffic stops nationwide between two thousand and
Speaker 1: eleven and two thousand and eighteen, black people were vastly
Speaker 1: more likely to be pulled over than white people, except
Speaker 1: at night, when the gap shrinks considerably Black people because again,
Speaker 1: the cops can't tell what race you are is easily black, yeah,
Speaker 1: so they're not They're not able to judge this is
Speaker 1: a guilty person before the interaction. Black yeah. Black people
Speaker 1: are also more likely to be searched during a stop,
Speaker 1: even though white people are more likely to actually have
Speaker 1: contraband on them. I could go on and on, but
Speaker 1: the basic point is the same. All of these cops,
Speaker 1: from Officer Dial to John Birge to current police officers
Speaker 1: who are today two and a half times likely to
Speaker 1: shoot a black man than a white one, all of
Speaker 1: these cops are making, at a certain level, the same decision.
Speaker 1: They are judging black people as guilty before they know
Speaker 1: anything more than their skin color. And this is persistent
Speaker 1: through every single level of law enforcement in our country.
Speaker 1: Over the decades, activists and good lawyers and Supreme Court justices,
Speaker 1: and even a few decent cops here and there have
Speaker 1: worked to make forced confessions and admissible in court. They
Speaker 1: have worked to report and charge police for torture. They
Speaker 1: have worked to tear down the Jim Crow laws that
Speaker 1: provided legal justification for a lot of police aggression. And
Speaker 1: yet the aggression is still there. We have learned to
Speaker 1: channel it and probably to make it less fatal. We've
Speaker 1: gotten better at punishing the most blatant expressions of it,
Speaker 1: but we have not stopped it. And American police today
Speaker 1: are still doing the same thing they have been doing
Speaker 1: since the eighteen hundreds. They are enforcing white supremacy through violence. Period. Yep, period.
Speaker 1: I'll say this in like period. I say this like
Speaker 1: on a personal note. So, my little brother, you know,
Speaker 1: not by blood, but we just grew up together and
Speaker 1: I lived in our house whatever it is. You know,
Speaker 1: our families work. My little brothers is a California Highway patrolman.
Speaker 1: So confession, I got law enforcement in my family. My
Speaker 1: brother has worked there for ten fifteen years. He's never
Speaker 1: pulled a gun ever in his life, right, never has
Speaker 1: he ever pulled a weapon out. He is one of
Speaker 1: those ones like you said that it's like reporting dudes,
Speaker 1: that's like building community layers ons. He does it after school.
Speaker 1: He lives, he's in the valley, does after school programs,
Speaker 1: runs a basketball league like the people know him so
Speaker 1: like so, so there's that. My father, you know, we
Speaker 1: talked about my father. My father was a Black Panther.
Speaker 1: After he left the Black Panther Party because they killed it, right,
Speaker 1: he moved being the FBI. My father was l a
Speaker 1: county probation officer. He worked with like underage defenders, retired
Speaker 1: from their right so worked in a special handling unit.
Speaker 1: He wanted to deal with the violent ist of young
Speaker 1: offenders thirty years thirty years, never at once recommended jail time,
Speaker 1: never right because of what he's talking about, the systems
Speaker 1: designed to destroy these young black and brown men. So
Speaker 1: his answer was let me have them. I remember as
Speaker 1: a child, like going to King signeras and and and
Speaker 1: g D g D like graduations and stuff like that,
Speaker 1: all these like random kids that I didn't know. Turns
Speaker 1: out there were kids on his caseload because he was
Speaker 1: shielding them from the system. He told me stories of
Speaker 1: like looking at the judge, telling the judge full well,
Speaker 1: do not send this kid to prison. Do not send
Speaker 1: him to prison. The cops doing the same thing. The
Speaker 1: cops arrested this guy, showing them, showing them the transcript
Speaker 1: and being like, this is a false confession. This kid
Speaker 1: is innocent. He shouldn't be on my case. Ode and
Speaker 1: then watching that foill go to prison. You know what
Speaker 1: I'm saying. So when you, when you, when you even
Speaker 1: into us, bring all those things up to say, this
Speaker 1: is that even if you find good men and good women,
Speaker 1: the system is flawed. And this is what we're trying
Speaker 1: to get to. The structure is wrong. Yes, the the
Speaker 1: the statement all cops are bastards, I think has been traditional,
Speaker 1: like historically kind of unproductive in terms of actually getting
Speaker 1: people to to um confront the real issues of of
Speaker 1: of law enforcement. But what people mean by it is
Speaker 1: actually very accurate, which is that it is it is
Speaker 1: impossible to be like even if you are a good person,
Speaker 1: a nice person who is a police officer and is
Speaker 1: legitimately aware of the problems and policing and trying to
Speaker 1: do your best, you are also partaking and helping to
Speaker 1: con and helping to maintain and and further a system
Speaker 1: that is undamentally abusive and enforces for supremacy and a
Speaker 1: period we are not what what we're not saying is
Speaker 1: that all cops should never have a job in that
Speaker 1: that that like, there's there's homicide detectives who are good
Speaker 1: solving murders. When we get rid of the police and
Speaker 1: replace them with something, I want those people to still
Speaker 1: be solving murders because it's good. Yeah, Um, you know
Speaker 1: there are. If you know a a police officer who
Speaker 1: is a great person and is is an asset to
Speaker 1: the community, that person should probably still be doing a
Speaker 1: broadly similar a lot of the same things they're doing.
Speaker 1: But there shouldn't be you know, I talked to cops
Speaker 1: a lot. I've talked to a lot of cops will
Speaker 1: talk about like being forced to arrest people for simple
Speaker 1: possession of drugs, even though they personally agree with ending
Speaker 1: the drug war, and like that's the problem that you're
Speaker 1: forced to do it, and that's the we don't We
Speaker 1: We decided as a as a species that just following
Speaker 1: orders is not a justification for violating people's civil rights.
Speaker 1: Think about when we decided that and why, yes, and
Speaker 1: where it led and where it started. Yeah, yes, you
Speaker 1: are hearing the cries of both my father and my brother,
Speaker 1: who both were like, I don't know if I could
Speaker 1: do this much longer. Even in me trying right, I'm
Speaker 1: trying to do the right thing. I'm trying to be
Speaker 1: an advocate for these young people, like I'm doing my best,
Speaker 1: like at least they got somebody on their side, you
Speaker 1: know what I'm saying, And you're but you're still like,
Speaker 1: I'm still I'm still throwing you to the wolves. I'm
Speaker 1: just giving you, you know, a protective jacket. But the
Speaker 1: point is I'm still throwing you to the wolves because
Speaker 1: the it's the the whole like it's what you're trying
Speaker 1: to say, It's like the whole thing needs a grenade.
Speaker 1: Because again, like you said, I want to be able
Speaker 1: to call somebody if my house is being broken into.
Speaker 1: Of course I want to be able to call somebody,
Speaker 1: But most likely who's breaking into my house is a
Speaker 1: meth head just trying to steal the PS four because
Speaker 1: he wants to hit. Don't kill the guy, like just
Speaker 1: I just want him out my house, and you know what,
Speaker 1: I could probably you know what, I probably won't call
Speaker 1: him because I could get him by my house because
Speaker 1: he's hot. You know what I'm saying. Yeah, yeah, it's
Speaker 1: it's this I mean and again when you actually we'll
Speaker 1: talk about this some next week. But when you look at,
Speaker 1: for example, homelessness, you find out that it costs the
Speaker 1: state less money to give homeless people homes then it
Speaker 1: costs to police and incarceraate them. It costs less money
Speaker 1: to give drug addicts drugs than to police them and
Speaker 1: to deal with the results of them stealing ship for drugs.
Speaker 1: They found that on like Denmark where they give heroin
Speaker 1: addicts heroin and it saves them huge amounts of money
Speaker 1: Toronto to Yeah, like safe injection zones. You don't have
Speaker 1: to police this ship. And in fact, most things shouldn't
Speaker 1: be policed. Maybe only violence should be policed exactly. If
Speaker 1: you're like, I try to like as as simple as
Speaker 1: we can make it. If my daughter comes in and
Speaker 1: she don't do her chores because she's got a cold,
Speaker 1: and I ground her rather then say here's some tail
Speaker 1: and all, like you would be like, that's ridiculous. You've
Speaker 1: for a ground her because she got a cold. That's stupid. Okay,
Speaker 1: that's putting an addict in prison, you know, what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: It's like, this is did do you? What do you? What?
Speaker 1: Are you grounding? That doesn't make sense? We're ranting. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're ranting. And um it's it's time for some plug
Speaker 1: doubles to get plugged. Yes word uh all my instagrams
Speaker 1: and socials are prop hit pop. Go to prop hit
Speaker 1: pop dot com for poetry, rap, for some podcasts, for
Speaker 1: some sustainable merch, some cups, some coffee. If you want to,
Speaker 1: you want to support non corporate coffee on a coffee head,
Speaker 1: hit me up. Let's talk about like Jeff tweetye and
Speaker 1: cigarettos because I am the most unicorny black dude you'd
Speaker 1: ever meet that I can talk to you about cigarettes
Speaker 1: and I am. I'm gonna keep reading and writing about
Speaker 1: police for another week or so. Um and um, I
Speaker 1: don't know. We'll talk about Bill Cooper or something at
Speaker 1: some point. Yeah, we'll talk We have all for some
Speaker 1: like for something light, like a like a dictator. Yeah yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: we'll talk about somebody somebody fun you know, well, somebody
Speaker 1: not connected to my own safety. And yeah, well we'll
Speaker 1: do We'll talk about chairman now or somebody somebody here. Yeah,
Speaker 1: everybody loves a good chairman mouse story, Oh my dad,
Speaker 1: or maybe Tito Tito. Yeah, yeah, Tito was cool as hell.
Speaker 1: I mean he was a monster, but he was a
Speaker 1: cool monster. Still talking about bastards, but the point is yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: Well we'll do something more lighthearted. But um you can
Speaker 1: find us online it behind the Bastards dot com, where
Speaker 1: there will be sources for this episode, including the really
Speaker 1: important book The Color of the Third Degree, um, and
Speaker 1: all the other really important book The End of Policing,
Speaker 1: both of which are important, if not easy reading, well, actually,
Speaker 1: end u Policing is very easy reading The Color of
Speaker 1: the Third Degree is some rough ship. Um. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: you can find me on Twitter at I right, okay,
Speaker 1: and go be a good person and disband um the
Speaker 1: American system of policing. Um, I'll do do both of
Speaker 1: those things ideally today, Amen, shall we collect offering? Behind
Speaker 1: the Police is a production of I Heart Radio. For
Speaker 1: more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart
Speaker 1: Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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