Speaker 1: Welcome to Behind the Police, a production of I Heart
Speaker 1: Radio Depressing Ship. I mean hello, I'm Robert Evans, and
Speaker 1: this is Behind the Police, the podcast that's normally Behind
Speaker 1: the Bastards, but is for this week, last week, and
Speaker 1: next week, giving the tailed history about the you know,
Speaker 1: the cops and such, the systemic manifestation of white supremacy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and bastard. Yeah. And the voice that you heard that's
Speaker 1: not mine, justin is Jason Petty, better known as the
Speaker 1: hip hop artist propaganda. Jason, how are you continuing to
Speaker 1: do pulling a ham sandwich out the damn cabinet? There
Speaker 1: we go, there we go. I don't yeah, I'm sorry, no, no,
Speaker 1: it's been hours, guys, there hasn't been enough freestyling on
Speaker 1: this podcast because I can't, No one's and shouldn't yeah,
Speaker 1: and and and I should not go right to something
Speaker 1: that would be incredible, that would be very fun you
Speaker 1: and like Glue Network asked annalists like you guys, just
Speaker 1: do a song and then just all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: Robert Evans just wraps. Oh, man, if I had any
Speaker 1: musical talent that would be that would be cool. But yeah,
Speaker 1: we all have our gifts and My gift is reading
Speaker 1: things that are really depressing for I don't know, another
Speaker 1: ninety minutes or so, um, which is a kind of music.
Speaker 1: But yeah, anyway, Uh, we don't talk nearly enough about lynching,
Speaker 1: um today and and that's starting to change because of
Speaker 1: the recent you know, lynchings. I think we're at six
Speaker 1: right now possible lynchings. Um. But lynching has a long
Speaker 1: and well, proud is the wrong word. I should have
Speaker 1: put proud in there. But it's a long history in
Speaker 1: the United States, and the history of lynching in the
Speaker 1: US is not entirely a racist what I mentioned this before,
Speaker 1: but actually the term came out of like people hanging
Speaker 1: British tax collectors by their thumbs and stuff. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so like the first lynching victims were British people, um,
Speaker 1: and kind of had it coming because they were they
Speaker 1: were being dicks colonialistics. Um. Obviously nobody thinks of British
Speaker 1: people and they think about lynching victims. Um. It's also
Speaker 1: fair like worth noting that during the period where lynching
Speaker 1: was most common in the United States, um, like the
Speaker 1: late eighteen hundreds to the mid nineteen hundreds, Um, not
Speaker 1: every person lynched was black. Although the vast majority were um.
Speaker 1: Lynching was used to enforce racial terror from whites against blacks,
Speaker 1: but it was also a really common method of what
Speaker 1: we'd call, you know, thinking back to our first episode,
Speaker 1: public spirit law enforcement, you know, communities dealing with people
Speaker 1: that they saw as problematic, some of whom were surely guilty,
Speaker 1: some of them probably who certainly weren't. I found one
Speaker 1: analysis of four thousand, four hundred and sixty seven lynching
Speaker 1: victims from eighteen eighty three to ninety one. Four thousand
Speaker 1: and twenty seven victims were men, were women, in three
Speaker 1: forty were of unknown or more accurately, nobody wrote down
Speaker 1: what the gender was. Three thousand, two hundred and sixty
Speaker 1: five of these four thousand, four hundred sixty seven victims
Speaker 1: were black, one thousand and eighty two were white, seventy
Speaker 1: one were Mexican, and thirty eight were American Indian, while
Speaker 1: ten were Chinese and one was Japanese. All of these
Speaker 1: numbers are, of course, likely somewhat low, because we'll never
Speaker 1: know the total number of people who were lynching victims UM. Now,
Speaker 1: historians who studied lynching generally divided into three separate regimes.
Speaker 1: The Wild West, where lynching was mostly white people lynching
Speaker 1: a lot of other white people in areas where there
Speaker 1: just wasn't law enforcement in a way, so like this
Speaker 1: was like how you dealt with people who were a problem. Um.
Speaker 1: And then there was the slavery regime, which was found
Speaker 1: in former slave states were lynching existed as a form
Speaker 1: of social control against black people. And then a smaller
Speaker 1: regime of lynching on the Texas Mexican border where Latinos
Speaker 1: were lynched by white Texans. So there's a kind of
Speaker 1: the three broad areas that most lynchings during the lynching
Speaker 1: period in the U S history kind of come come
Speaker 1: down to. Uh. 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 some 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 worth it? Yeah. There there was a lot of that.
Speaker 1: Um yeah yeah. Um. Now, this was often the case
Speaker 1: police kind of backing away because they didn't want the
Speaker 1: jail to get burned down and to get killed themselves.
Speaker 1: This was often the case with lynchings in Oklahoma. Oklahoma's
Speaker 1: fucking loved vigilante violence, still kind of do. But like,
Speaker 1: oh man, historians who study this are like Oklahoma, those
Speaker 1: are like the yeah. Um. And this was particularly the
Speaker 1: case in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Now, the Sooner State was in
Speaker 1: general a big lynching state. It was number eleven in
Speaker 1: the nation for lynchings, and Oklahoma was famous for having
Speaker 1: a public that loved taking justice into its own hands.
Speaker 1: We're gonna talk about the Tulsa race riot of nine
Speaker 1: in a bit and the burning a black Law Street, um,
Speaker 1: Wall Street and on Law Street. Um yeah. And and
Speaker 1: obviously this is in the consciousness of a lot more
Speaker 1: white folks recently because the TV show Watchman featured it.
Speaker 1: But the year before that all happened a mob of
Speaker 1: white Tulson's rushed the county courthouse to lynch a prisoner,
Speaker 1: a white prisoner. The local sheriff's department did nothing, and
Speaker 1: the local police were supportive. The chief called the lynching
Speaker 1: of real benefit to Tulsa and the vicinity, but the
Speaker 1: sheriff actually got fired for kind of well you're not fired,
Speaker 1: like we're called for standing down, uh to this lynching.
Speaker 1: And again, historians will often note that prior to the
Speaker 1: race riot or racist riot of nineteen Tulsa had relatively
Speaker 1: minimal history of mass violence from white people against black people. Right,
Speaker 1: We're not gonna say it was like congenial friendly relations
Speaker 1: between the races, but like the racist riot in ninety
Speaker 1: one was really it was shocking to a lot of
Speaker 1: people because yet hadn't happened before ul Yeah, and and
Speaker 1: if you think about it, like it's logical because the
Speaker 1: black community had time to develop infrastructure and flourish and
Speaker 1: stuff like that, because they're relatively just like, look, you
Speaker 1: stay over there, we stay over here, we'll figure this out.
Speaker 1: And yeah. One of the kind of actually one of
Speaker 1: the precipitating factors of that is that like in the
Speaker 1: weeks before the racist riots, some like local white preachers
Speaker 1: and stuff. Had started getting very very angry about the
Speaker 1: fact that white people were starting to hang out with
Speaker 1: black people in parts of town and like developing friendships
Speaker 1: and like using it like and that was like they
Speaker 1: were like, this has to stop. Yeah, it's like the
Speaker 1: weird part of like the ven diagram of like racism
Speaker 1: and capitalism and just normal friendship to where you're like,
Speaker 1: I don't know, this rest the run is just it's
Speaker 1: good food. So I came down here. Yeah, they're way
Speaker 1: better at my Yeah, yeah, it's 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 networks here. I don't know.
Speaker 1: It's kind of cool. It's good food, it's good company.
Speaker 1: I don't understand the problem. You know. I'm starting to
Speaker 1: think racism might not be the right call. I'm starting
Speaker 1: to think maybe we benefit from having these folks in
Speaker 1: our community. Now now, now we're time to shoot, I guess. So. Yeah. So,
Speaker 1: in the years after World War Two, large numbers of
Speaker 1: veterans of both races had come back to Tulsa and
Speaker 1: armed themselves in fear of escalating interracial tensions in Muskogee.
Speaker 1: In nineteen sixteen, an armed black crowd had stopped a lynching.
Speaker 1: In May of nineteen one, prior to the Big Racist Riot,
Speaker 1: an armed group of black citizens had again stopped the
Speaker 1: lynching of a black man for an alleged rape. Now
Speaker 1: about lynchings of black men nationwide were justified because the
Speaker 1: crowd accused the black man of rape or sexual assault
Speaker 1: in some way. Now, only about two percent of incarcerated
Speaker 1: black people nationwidehead 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, and
Speaker 1: Tulsa later in reinforces this suggestion. On Monday, a young
Speaker 1: black man named Dick Rowland gotten to an elevator that
Speaker 1: also contained a young white woman. We will never know
Speaker 1: exactly what happened. The most common story here is that
Speaker 1: he likely tripped and bumped into her and she freaked
Speaker 1: out and the police were called. There's a bunch of
Speaker 1: different stories around this. Nobody knows what happened, but white
Speaker 1: black guy walks into an elevator with a white woman.
Speaker 1: White woman screams, black guy runs away. He gets tracked
Speaker 1: down and arrested by two officers, one of whom was black,
Speaker 1: and these men were sheriff's deputies. So Dick wound up
Speaker 1: in the care of the sheriff's office. And the sheriff
Speaker 1: was a guy named Williard McCullough. He'd gotten his job
Speaker 1: as a result of the lynching of that white guy
Speaker 1: a year earlier, which his predace sessor had let happened,
Speaker 1: and Willier didn't want to make the same mistake. So
Speaker 1: 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 Gustafsson, warned
Speaker 1: the sheriff to take Roland out of town. H The
Speaker 1: sheriff refused, arguing that the kid was safer in jail
Speaker 1: than in an open car, and he may have been
Speaker 1: right about that. The police chief felt that moving him
Speaker 1: out of town would disperse the crowd, and he may
Speaker 1: have been right about that. Um, we don't know exactly
Speaker 1: how it started, but you know, basically, a black crowd
Speaker 1: with a lot of guns showed up next to the
Speaker 1: white crowd who had a lot of guns. And at
Speaker 1: some point there was a struggle between an armed black
Speaker 1: guy and a white guy and the black fella's gun
Speaker 1: went off or he fired it again, we don't know.
Speaker 1: But it turned into a giant, fucking mob of of
Speaker 1: white rioters gutting down black people. Black people shooting back
Speaker 1: in self defense. And it will continue to talk about
Speaker 1: how it gets worse. This is not an episode about
Speaker 1: the burning of Black Wall Street. We will have to
Speaker 1: cover that in more detail one of these days. Like, Yeah,
Speaker 1: there are a couple of points I should make. Um,
Speaker 1: I will say this before you get to this point,
Speaker 1: like there's an interesting thing that happened there all the
Speaker 1: way to Emmett Till and to like, um, this this
Speaker 1: particular moment is like just this idea of like weaponizing
Speaker 1: the white woman, you know, and um, in a in a,
Speaker 1: in a, it's just this weird mix of just how
Speaker 1: social and supremacy and stuff like that works where it's
Speaker 1: like you can use her fear, you know that was
Speaker 1: implanted in her. You know what I'm saying, uh, as
Speaker 1: an excuse to carry out violence towards black men, right,
Speaker 1: and play the whole damsel and distress thing, you know
Speaker 1: what I'm saying, and then them being their own white
Speaker 1: women having their own versions of oppression, right and misogyny,
Speaker 1: being like, well, this is a way to get these
Speaker 1: men to do something for me, like a position of
Speaker 1: power which evolves into the Karen's you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: But it's just essentially like just you're you're It's almost
Speaker 1: like yo, your oppressor has weaponized you, and now you've
Speaker 1: become that, you know what I'm saying. So just the
Speaker 1: like the awareness of just that, the mind scramble that
Speaker 1: which is it's like I said, it's your own unique thing,
Speaker 1: just this idea like the voice of the white woman.
Speaker 1: You know, that's like there's there's history there, like Karen,
Speaker 1: don't come out of nowhere, and but Karen, don't understand
Speaker 1: that you're being leveraged, you know what I'm saying, to
Speaker 1: carry out voices of of of violence. And then now
Speaker 1: it's almost like now you're participating in that same violence,
Speaker 1: you know what I'm saying. So like I don't know,
Speaker 1: it's just such an interesting thing like how interlocking systems
Speaker 1: of oppression work, you know what I mean, and like
Speaker 1: and how it all like keeps power in the same place.
Speaker 1: Interlocking system. That's a really important term, um, because I
Speaker 1: do think there is a tendency and a lot of
Speaker 1: groups to like, Oh, no, racism is rooted in capitalism.
Speaker 1: Racism is rooted in you know, religion, Racism is rooted
Speaker 1: in class, Racism rooted this or that. Racism is rooted
Speaker 1: has a lot of roots. It's like it's like a hedgerow.
Speaker 1: That's why it's so hard to remove, Like you dynamite
Speaker 1: like hedgerows by these gigantic, sometimes centuries old, like huge
Speaker 1: fucking plant walls that existed in the exists in a
Speaker 1: bunch of places, specifically like in France during World War Two.
Speaker 1: They were used as like to stop tanks. And the
Speaker 1: only way to get rid of a fucking hedgerow, because
Speaker 1: there's so many roots and they're so deep and so tough,
Speaker 1: is to fucking dynamite it, like up right. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So again, this is not an episode about the burning
Speaker 1: up Black Wall Street and Tulsa, but there are a
Speaker 1: couple of points I should make about Tulsa. In this period, Uh,
Speaker 1: it was unusual for having a large organized black community
Speaker 1: that controlled a really sizeable section of Town, Greenwood, Um,
Speaker 1: and that you know black Wall Street is it was
Speaker 1: called had its own banks, its own theaters, of vibrant
Speaker 1: business community, good schools, and this relative prosperity was really
Speaker 1: unusual for black communities in the South, which is why
Speaker 1: it was called black Wall Street. Another thing I should
Speaker 1: note is what historian Carol Anderson wrote in her book
Speaker 1: White Rage quote the trigger for white rage inevitably is
Speaker 1: black advancement. It is not the mere presence of black
Speaker 1: people that is the problem. Rather, it is blackness with ambition,
Speaker 1: with drive, with purpose, with aspirations, and with demands for
Speaker 1: full and equal citizenship. So powerful, man, Yeah good, it's powerful.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah. Yeah. The comedian clip that would I Forget
Speaker 1: Home his name that was going around that where where
Speaker 1: he was just like, look, man, we're asking for the
Speaker 1: bare minimum. Like even the Civil rights movement that wasn't
Speaker 1: even equal rights, were just like just just civil yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, just just basic. 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 you're. It's just
Speaker 1: just just matter, you know. So like you said, like
Speaker 1: just and and and and the ambition of Black America
Speaker 1: sparked so much rage. Michael Chase Special Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and that's yeah. So two large mobs gather at the
Speaker 1: courthouse again, one white, one black. The white mob clearly
Speaker 1: wanted to just murder Roland, who was the kid who
Speaker 1: you know got in trouble. Uh, and you know they
Speaker 1: were in the mood to burn down the courthouse if
Speaker 1: the cops tried to stop them. The black mob obviously
Speaker 1: wanted to save their guy, um. And this was a
Speaker 1: tricky situation for the police, particularly since two weeks earlier,
Speaker 1: the state Attorney General had finished an investigation that described
Speaker 1: the Tulsa police as corrupt, poorly lead, and so poorly
Speaker 1: equipped that they had to borrow cars from their civilian
Speaker 1: friends to get to crime scenes. They were hitching rides
Speaker 1: to like, not a great police force. So that's so funny.
Speaker 1: The over when this all are ups into violence. The
Speaker 1: overall response of Tulsa's police to the massacre followed like
Speaker 1: kind of perfectly encapsulates the different ways US cops responded
Speaker 1: to lynching. Overall, Sheriff McCullough seems to have been probably
Speaker 1: kind of your best case scenario for a white cop
Speaker 1: in this period, he had black deputies. He seems to
Speaker 1: have listened to their advice, and he basically spent the
Speaker 1: riot barricaded in the jail defending Roland. You know, his
Speaker 1: black prisoner um so hard to I'm not gonna call
Speaker 1: him a great dude or like particularly wokeradating, but like
Speaker 1: does broadly what you'd consider to be the right thing here. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: the police chief, Gausetabson 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: any much smaller crowd of armed black people, and he
Speaker 1: called the National Guard to ask for their help to
Speaker 1: quote clear the streets of negros. So police chief not
Speaker 1: the same as the sheriff here. Um. Now. One of
Speaker 1: the first things that happened after the riot was that
Speaker 1: large numbers of ang gree 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 stone, 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 and being like, Nah, no, I'm not
Speaker 1: gonna keep what are you talking about? What are you
Speaker 1: talking about? So this crowd, which included a number of
Speaker 1: uniformed police officers, went over to a local sporting goods store.
Speaker 1: This particular store sold ammunition to the police department, so
Speaker 1: the cops in the crowd knew that it was a
Speaker 1: good place to go to get guns and ammo. They
Speaker 1: broke in and looted it so that they could go
Speaker 1: murder black people. As the looting and killing worsen, the
Speaker 1: police chief called in his entire department and began commissioning
Speaker 1: special deputies, some four hundred random white dudes who were
Speaker 1: given guns and legal authority by the police to go
Speaker 1: commit acts of horrific violence. By dawn the next day,
Speaker 1: the black community of Tulsa had pulled back to defend Greenwood,
Speaker 1: their neighborhood. A massive army of angry white dudes, described
Speaker 1: in media at the time as a force of citizens,
Speaker 1: police and members of the National Guard, numbering fiftundred, invaded
Speaker 1: Black Wall Street from two directions. They took unarmed black
Speaker 1: people 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 firebomb 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 Bostick's 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 hundred black men, women and
Speaker 1: children were murdered during the Tulsa racist riot. We will
Speaker 1: never know. They are currently in the process of excavating
Speaker 1: and what 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 count 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: run a barbershop, you at church, and a US military
Speaker 1: plane well all own country, you know what I'm saying,
Speaker 1: Like a civilion plane that the police that the police
Speaker 1: were had common deered. Yeah, okay, yes, billion playing at
Speaker 1: the police common deer. Like it's just just a like
Speaker 1: you just bombed my church. Yeah, Like just try to
Speaker 1: like get your brain around net you know. Yeah, yep, yep,
Speaker 1: um yeah, it's pretty yeah, like this is sitting bad.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah yeah. And I wonder how many listeners, uh
Speaker 1: of all races have never heard this, you know what
Speaker 1: I'm saying, Like that's the part that blow Mama's black
Speaker 1: people that don't notice. You know, it's pretty fucking wild. Um.
Speaker 1: And you know, there are two cases that I'm aware
Speaker 1: of of air power bombing, like of of people on
Speaker 1: American soil being bombed by armed airplanes prior to uh
Speaker 1: December seventh, nineteen attack on Pearl Harbor. And it is
Speaker 1: the attack on Black Wall Street and the attack on
Speaker 1: the white you well, no, actually not just white, um,
Speaker 1: largely white, but definitely mixed race union miners in Blair
Speaker 1: Mountain during the the Union uprising there. They were also
Speaker 1: bombed and had gas bombs dropped on them too. So
Speaker 1: those are the two cases before fucking Pearl Harbor that
Speaker 1: air power was used to kill Americans. Um yeah, by Americans, Yeah,
Speaker 1: by Americans, sure yeah um so uh yeah. In the
Speaker 1: months that followed the racist riot in Tulsa, Tulsa became
Speaker 1: the nexus of KKK organizing in the state. There's a
Speaker 1: debate about how much role they played in an actually
Speaker 1: the racist riot, it was probably not super huge, but
Speaker 1: the clan Tulsa becomes like the fucking headquarters of the
Speaker 1: Oklahoma Ku Klux Klan in the wake of the racist riot,
Speaker 1: and before much longer, Tulsa got a new clan backed
Speaker 1: sheriff a claimed back police chief, as did many cities
Speaker 1: in Oklahoma, clan members of the city council, and of
Speaker 1: course the clan brought with it violence not just against
Speaker 1: black people, but against Catholic and Jewish Oklahoma's The governor
Speaker 1: of Oklahoma eventually had to bring the National Guard in
Speaker 1: again to deal with the Ku Klux Klan. So yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's yeah, Tulsa. Uh. And again, like again, it goes
Speaker 1: to like the like God, the clans all over the place,
Speaker 1: like why how all of a sudden, why are we
Speaker 1: mad at Catholic and Jews? Like when when did they
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 don't go over here and get it,
Speaker 1: get it, get it cracking. Let's take over the city.
Speaker 1: And while we're at it, you know the Catholics like
Speaker 1: the Catholics, Yeah, what the hell that got to do
Speaker 1: with anything? You know? Yep? Yeah, yep. Uh. So lynching
Speaker 1: and again, I think really one of the ways to
Speaker 1: look at the racist right and told you this is
Speaker 1: a mass a mass lynching. Yeah, they lynched the entirety
Speaker 1: of Black Wall Street because they were angry. You know.
Speaker 1: The that young woman screaming was the excuse, but it
Speaker 1: was anger over black success in organization. And there's stories
Speaker 1: of like black or white people looting Greenwood after they
Speaker 1: you know, arrested all of the black people in town
Speaker 1: and as they were burning it down and coming out
Speaker 1: of black houses with like furniture and property and like
Speaker 1: angrily yelling like these inwards have nicer things than a
Speaker 1: lot of white people. Like that. That was a big
Speaker 1: part of why they did this. Uh, yep. So like
Speaker 1: we want segregation, okay, cool, we don't want you to
Speaker 1: use our money, Okay cool. Damn y'all segregated and using
Speaker 1: your own money. I guess we'll kill you. I guess
Speaker 1: I hate that, man. What do you want? I think
Speaker 1: it's pretty clear what they want. Yeah, yeah, um lynch
Speaker 1: ng's peak was probably in the eighteen nineties, but it
Speaker 1: continued to be a massive problem. I mean throughout the
Speaker 1: nineteen hundreds. Of the nineteen twenties were a pretty bad
Speaker 1: time for lynching. Most historians will tell you that lynching
Speaker 1: is best seen as a sort of non state uh
Speaker 1: auxiliary to Jim Crow, the civilian side of the enforcement
Speaker 1: of white supremacist laws. When the law fell short in
Speaker 1: the eyes of racists, it was time for a massive
Speaker 1: mob spectacle. Lynching generally was not just about murder. Victims
Speaker 1: were usually tortured to extract confessions um and the crowd
Speaker 1: generally took souvenirs and posed with the body of the
Speaker 1: murdered black person. These were often family gatherings that were
Speaker 1: 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 I 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 Niedermeyer, and
Speaker 1: he writes quote during the nineteen tens into a greater
Speaker 1: degree from nineteen twenty on, where the white elite of
Speaker 1: the South voiced growing criticism of the practice of lynching.
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 primarily in church circles and their tireless work
Speaker 1: against lynching. These women disputed the traditional rationalization of this
Speaker 1: 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.
Speaker 1: Good yeah, yeah, good work, good ally ship, or whatever
Speaker 1: you wanna call it. Uh. Nineteen twenty was actually the
Speaker 1: first year in which more lynchings were averted by law
Speaker 1: enforcement than carried out. Between nineteen thirty two and ninety two,
Speaker 1: two hundred and ninety lynchings were stopped by police. The
Speaker 1: activism of groups like as WHIPPLE helped helped your do
Speaker 1: lynching through the nineteen twenties, and while it saw an
Speaker 1: upswing during the Great Depression, The number of lynchings dropped
Speaker 1: precipitously by the end of the nineteen thirties, and for
Speaker 1: most of the last few decades, the anti lynching campaigns
Speaker 1: were seen as a major feather in the cap of
Speaker 1: U s law enforcement. An example about the police kind
Speaker 1: of modernizing and reforming, and of Southern cops rising to
Speaker 1: the occasion to protect black people from violence. This is
Speaker 1: wildly inaccurate. Um Niedermeyer argues with exhaustive documentation that rather
Speaker 1: than protecting black people from murder quote, law enforcement authorities
Speaker 1: in the South were generally taking initiatives to protect black
Speaker 1: suspects from being seized by lynch mobs. Now. The way
Speaker 1: they did this was by loading suspects up into police cars,
Speaker 1: which were a new thing then and allowed for faster transport,
Speaker 1: and taking them away to distant jails. Law enforcement did
Speaker 1: sometimes use violence and even call out malicious to disperse
Speaker 1: lynch mobs, but the anger that had spawned those mobs
Speaker 1: still had to be sated, and police sayd it by
Speaker 1: making damn certain that black suspects got what those mobs
Speaker 1: thought they deserved, a swift and violent death. Quote. In
Speaker 1: his study of the state of Kentucky. Historian George Wright
Speaker 1: comes to the conclusion that the number of executions of
Speaker 1: blacks carried out during the first decades of the twentieth
Speaker 1: century continually rose, while the number of lynchings steadily declined
Speaker 1: during the same period. Likewise, the findings of the political
Speaker 1: scientist James W. Clark show a clear correlation in the
Speaker 1: nineteen twenties and thirties between the declining lynching violence and
Speaker 1: the growing number of convicted African American offenders who were
Speaker 1: executed by state authorities. The available statistical data on the
Speaker 1: number of executions carried out in the United States between
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty and nineteen seventy also suggests the dwindling number
Speaker 1: of lynchings was tied to the growing use of the
Speaker 1: death penalty. Although there is no conclusive evidence to support
Speaker 1: the theory that lynching violence was gradually replaced by the
Speaker 1: death penalty, it can be said that the legal system
Speaker 1: in the South increasingly assumed the function of maintaining social
Speaker 1: control over the black population during the early twentieth century.
Speaker 1: See that is dizzying, Yeah, caught it. It's so diggery.
Speaker 1: It's it's like because I to to try to sort
Speaker 1: that out is to go you're you're off celter because
Speaker 1: like you said, you think, oh it's cool man, maybe
Speaker 1: they're maybe these people are evolving and they're like, no,
Speaker 1: this is I'm They're just you just want to control
Speaker 1: of your county and you just like So, the point
Speaker 1: is I can't be having these I can't be having
Speaker 1: the city think they got more power than me because
Speaker 1: I'm the law. So but they're like, but I feel you.
Speaker 1: You know what I'm saying, like low key, I feel you.
Speaker 1: I'm just saying, you don't get to tell me what
Speaker 1: to do. So when so from the black perspective, do
Speaker 1: I can I make any distinction between that mob and
Speaker 1: this jail? No, because I still end up dead, you
Speaker 1: know what I'm saying. So, and then when we say
Speaker 1: and then like you said, all the signs we're talk
Speaker 1: about the other ones, that mass incarceration and the deputy
Speaker 1: and the law for just it's same ease. This is
Speaker 1: what we're trying to say. And here is right in
Speaker 1: your history it's SAME's. This is why we don't make
Speaker 1: no distinction. You know what I'm saying. This is why
Speaker 1: we keep saying the orchards bad orchards. Badis apples, Yes,
Speaker 1: they're piss apples. You keep going away individual piss apples,
Speaker 1: hoping and then trying to point out one it ain't
Speaker 1: got pissed, and I'm going what it's the Yes, Oh
Speaker 1: you know what's not an apple filled with urine. First
Speaker 1: of all, I've never heard of the term piss apple.
Speaker 1: But that's great anyway. But I hope these products and
Speaker 1: services are not because they are not. They are not.
Speaker 1: That's our one line for advertisers. No apples filled with urine.
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 avoid uncivilized violence. Local journalists supported the state and
Speaker 1: its massively increased rate of executions, seeing them as a
Speaker 1: victory for law and order. Yo, when I was so
Speaker 1: nice to teach high school that's a high school for
Speaker 1: a couple of years at ninth graders, And one time
Speaker 1: we went on this field trip, uh to Lacma to
Speaker 1: the Museum of um you know, the museum in in
Speaker 1: on Libreya. And so it's four teachers to a hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty fourteen year old, right, So I had me
Speaker 1: and an other teacher had control a half of them.
Speaker 1: So I got seventy five freshmen. Right, We're walking by
Speaker 1: the park and there's a dude selling like inflatable toys,
Speaker 1: so like hammers and dolls and such like this. And
Speaker 1: at this point it's seventy five of y'all and two
Speaker 1: of us. They're gonna the kids are gonna beat each
Speaker 1: other with it. There's no You're not gonna stop these
Speaker 1: freshmen from hurting each other with these inflatable hammers. So
Speaker 1: my thought was, Okay, if they're gonna do it, they're
Speaker 1: gonna do it. You're you're freshman, and I'm not gonna
Speaker 1: stop you. And Loki, it seems kind of fun. I'm
Speaker 1: not gonna lie to you. Seems kind of fun. So
Speaker 1: what I did was I broke them up into their
Speaker 1: home rooms, right, and made them be feuding clans. So
Speaker 1: I made them send gladiators from their home room to
Speaker 1: the middle for the purpose of as the greatest teacher ever,
Speaker 1: for the purpose of being able to make make sure
Speaker 1: that no one gets actually injured. Right. So, because the
Speaker 1: point is the same thing that this sheriff is saying,
Speaker 1: I just need to maintain order, right, of course, I
Speaker 1: don't want you to beat each other, and well, I
Speaker 1: just don't want to lose control. It's really the point.
Speaker 1: The point is I don't want to lose control because
Speaker 1: your mama gonna kill me if I lose one of y'all, right,
Speaker 1: and I'm probably gonna lose my job. So I don't
Speaker 1: want to lose control. But y'all gonna beat each other.
Speaker 1: So in my mind, I'm like, at least I can
Speaker 1: make sure that everyone's engaged, and I can then it's
Speaker 1: not everybody beating each other, but you all sent Gladdie
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. Uh detty problematic
Speaker 1: cop in England who was like, well, they were going
Speaker 1: to throw the statue in the river and we could
Speaker 1: either pull it out of the for later and put
Speaker 1: it back, or we could beat a bunch of our
Speaker 1: citizens for throwing a statue in the river. And that
Speaker 1: seemed like the wrong call, you know, like yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: um yeah. This also dovetails into. I won't go on
Speaker 1: to a long rant about my ideas for school reform,
Speaker 1: but why all children should be forced to carry claw
Speaker 1: hammers at all times in public schools, um and private
Speaker 1: schools for that matter, and all teachers to everybody should
Speaker 1: have a real big hammer. Um, that's very important to
Speaker 1: me for a variety of reasons. Yeah, I'm very pro
Speaker 1: hammer man. I don't get into that. I just found.
Speaker 1: I just found the first thing we disagree on. There'd
Speaker 1: be a lot less statues, all kinds of statues, but
Speaker 1: a lot less of them. It would be a great
Speaker 1: lesson on like pulleys and physics. Though, I'll tell you that.
Speaker 1: Like we was like, all right, guys, this was this,
Speaker 1: this is the freshman second semester project has come up
Speaker 1: with the best pulley system to tear down a Confederate statue. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the person I could do it with the where the
Speaker 1: smallest little person in my row is able to pull
Speaker 1: down this whole statute. That person get to a yeah,
Speaker 1: you do you pulled? You have the little kids pulled
Speaker 1: on the statue. And then you're like, and this is
Speaker 1: why Aliens didn't build the pyramids. Yes, you've figured this out,
Speaker 1: and so did the Egyptians. Yea, so did the Egyptians. Alright, alright, alright,
Speaker 1: we gotta get back to the subject. So in nine three, yeah,
Speaker 1: Arthur Raper published a study again like yeah, basically that
Speaker 1: the southern politicians came to rely on the death penalty's
Speaker 1: a 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 it, like if
Speaker 1: it if you were if you were doing this the
Speaker 1: way police are supposed to handle cases like this, it
Speaker 1: would take a lot of time and then it might
Speaker 1: be yeah, it might be off. And it's way easier
Speaker 1: if you go into court with a confession, because then
Speaker 1: you're like, well he confessed. Uh So police in this
Speaker 1: time focused on securing confessions because a suspect who confesses
Speaker 1: isn't really a suspect anymore. During the early nineteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: the a CP documented fifty one cases of forced confessions
Speaker 1: in Southern States. These were a tiny fraction of the
Speaker 1: total number of cases, which numbered in the hundreds of
Speaker 1: the thousands. The d a CPS resources were limited, and
Speaker 1: they were picking out specific cases that they were challenging
Speaker 1: in courts. These were a percent of what was going
Speaker 1: on um In three fourths of the cases they documented,
Speaker 1: the black defendants alleged that they had been tortured into
Speaker 1: confessing by the police. The vast majority of these cases
Speaker 1: were either alleged murders or rapes. The color of the
Speaker 1: third degree goes into significant detail about a number of
Speaker 1: cases that illustrate this transition. One I want to highlight
Speaker 1: to you all is the case of the murder of
Speaker 1: Raymond Stewart in nineteen thirty four. Stewart was a prominent
Speaker 1: white farmer and landowner, and he was found dead in
Speaker 1: his home in Kimber County, Mississippi. There were signs of
Speaker 1: a struggle. Almost as soon as the news got out,
Speaker 1: two hundred people gathered in front of his home to
Speaker 1: look for the officers. Three young black men were eventually arrested.
Speaker 1: A lynch mob form to go and murder them, which
Speaker 1: prompted the local sheriff to call an e extra deputies
Speaker 1: and fortified the jail with machine guns and tear gas grenades.
Speaker 1: The National Guard was almost called in and a state
Speaker 1: of emergency was declared in order to preempt white mob violence.
Speaker 1: The Sheriff's department immediately set to torturing the absolute ship
Speaker 1: out of these three kids. Confessions were quickly obtained, but
Speaker 1: when the case actually went to court, one of the
Speaker 1: young defendants began to complain that his confession had been
Speaker 1: forced out of him. Near to Meyer writes, quote Brown,
Speaker 1: who was this one of these kids, testified that after
Speaker 1: his arrest, he had been subjected to violent treatment, above
Speaker 1: all by Deputy Sheriff Cliff Dial to force him to
Speaker 1: admit the crime. He told me to come on out
Speaker 1: here that he had to heard. I told I killed
Speaker 1: Mr Raymond. I come out of the jail house and
Speaker 1: I said, I declare I didn't kill Mr Raymond. He said,
Speaker 1: come on in here and pull your clothes off. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna get you. I said to the last that I
Speaker 1: didn't kill him. There was two more fellows about like
Speaker 1: that there, and they was whipping me. They had me
Speaker 1: behind a cross chairs kind of like that. I said,
Speaker 1: I didn't kill him. They said to put him on again,
Speaker 1: and they hit me so hard. I had to say yes, sir.
Speaker 1: Mr Cliff Dial said give the strap to me, I
Speaker 1: will get it. He took it and he had two
Speaker 1: buckles on the end. They stripped me naked and bit
Speaker 1: me over a chair, and I just had to say it.
Speaker 1: I couldn't help it. As the court transcript shows, Brown
Speaker 1: supported his testimony by pointing to the injuries from the
Speaker 1: blows to his body. Question they whipped you hard there?
Speaker 1: Answer yes, sir, I will show you. There are places
Speaker 1: all the way up. Question did you bleed any? Answer?
Speaker 1: Did I bleed? I sure did. Brown testified that after
Speaker 1: Dial had forced him to confess, he threatened him with
Speaker 1: additional beatings if he were canted his statement. Furthermore, he
Speaker 1: emphatically maintained that he did not kill Raymond Stewart. If
Speaker 1: I die right now, I am going to say it.
Speaker 1: I ain't never harmed Mr Raymond in my life. If
Speaker 1: they want, they can kill me because I said that,
Speaker 1: But I ain't never harmed Mr Raymond. Afterward, Henry Shields
Speaker 1: was called to the next to the witness stand. He
Speaker 1: was another one of the boys arrested. He testified that
Speaker 1: after his arrest, he had been whipped by Deputy Sheriff
Speaker 1: Cliff Dial in the murder. In jail, Shields said that
Speaker 1: due to the relentless whipping, he eventually gave a false
Speaker 1: confession and declared that he had a hand in Stuart's murder. Mr.
Speaker 1: Cliff Dial and then come back that evening and whipped
Speaker 1: me first. I tried to tell the truth, but he
Speaker 1: wouldn't let me. He said, no, you ain't told the truth,
Speaker 1: and I tried to stick to it. He whipped me
Speaker 1: so hard I had to tell him something. Ellington, who
Speaker 1: was the third boy who was forced subsequently to the stand,
Speaker 1: also testified that he was innocent and had been forced
Speaker 1: to confess. He stated that shortly after word of Stuart's
Speaker 1: murder started making the rounds, he was seized by a
Speaker 1: mob of roughly twenty people, several of whom were employees
Speaker 1: of the sheriff, including the previously mentioned Cliff Dial. He
Speaker 1: said that the men had tied him to a tree
Speaker 1: and whipped him. He went on to say that a
Speaker 1: rope which had been thrown over a tree limb, was
Speaker 1: then tied around his neck and members of the mob
Speaker 1: pulled him up in the air twice to force him
Speaker 1: to divulge information about the murder. Yeah, it's pretty bad.
Speaker 1: It's real real. Yeah, you know, from a practical standpoint,
Speaker 1: like hey, you know, um, you know, rocket scientists shareff
Speaker 1: you know, if you beat me, there's evidence, so I
Speaker 1: can go Yeah, this right here, that's that's his buckle.
Speaker 1: That's where that came from. Rocket science. And then secondly,
Speaker 1: I think remember that the To Catch a Murderer, the
Speaker 1: little series on Netflix. Remember how like when they finally
Speaker 1: showed that interrogation of the little dude that clearly was autistic,
Speaker 1: you know, and when they bullied him into saying something
Speaker 1: just so they bullied him in to say it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: We'll talk about um that in a bit, because that
Speaker 1: there's yeah that ties into this actually rather directly. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah like this so yeah, all that to say, like
Speaker 1: this isn't this is a normal practice. Yeah if yeah,
Speaker 1: if you treated your domestic partner the way that police
Speaker 1: routinely treat people in interrogations, they would have easy legal
Speaker 1: standing to get a restraining order against you and take
Speaker 1: your guns away if you own guns. Yeah, Like yes,
Speaker 1: it's emotional abuse. So um, it's worth noting that further
Speaker 1: on in their testimony, uh, these boys made statements to
Speaker 1: the effect that a great deal of the local white
Speaker 1: population knew they were being tortured at the jail. Now
Speaker 1: they've been specifically taken to a separate, geographically isolated jail
Speaker 1: on the other side of the state line in order
Speaker 1: to hide the fact that they were being tortured. Um.
Speaker 1: This was common behavior for police around the country, But
Speaker 1: at the same time, it was important to the police
Speaker 1: that enough white people knew these black prisoners were being
Speaker 1: tortured to stop mobs from burning down one of the
Speaker 1: jails under questioning. Officer Dial did eventually admit to having
Speaker 1: beaten the boys. He said that it was not too
Speaker 1: much for a negro, not as much as I would
Speaker 1: have done if it was left to me. That statements, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: And again it's people can handle a lot. That's exactly
Speaker 1: what I'm getting into. This is part of a very
Speaker 1: long standing trend in in not just law enforcement, but
Speaker 1: white racism, the idea that black will feel les pain
Speaker 1: than white people. It's, for one thing, documented that black
Speaker 1: men and women are prescribed lower doses of pain killers
Speaker 1: by doctors for the exact same ailments as white people
Speaker 1: are prescribed higher doses. And this is like a large
Speaker 1: Black doctors do this. This is a largely unconscious thing.
Speaker 1: It's it's so deeply woven into the fabric of our society,
Speaker 1: the idea that black people feel pain somehow less than
Speaker 1: white people. Yep, yeah, I don't even maybe that's there. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I might have something to do with police officers, for example,
Speaker 1: putting a knee on one of their necks for eight
Speaker 1: minutes and 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 an Hispanic people
Speaker 1: are fifty likelier in the United States to experience non
Speaker 1: lethal use of force from police. Yeah, yep, all tied together,
Speaker 1: yeah yeah. Diale and his fellow officers insisted that despite
Speaker 1: the force used, all three black boys made free and
Speaker 1: open confessions to the murder, and this convinced the all
Speaker 1: white jerry. Part of white convinced the white Jerry is
Speaker 1: that a reverend who had been in the jail at
Speaker 1: the time testified that they had given free confessions. By
Speaker 1: the way, that reverend repeatedly referred to all of the
Speaker 1: 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,
Speaker 1: uh uh. If they didn't participate, like officer dial, they
Speaker 1: were aware of other officers doing it. That's probably more
Speaker 1: common than than doing it, just because most people aren't
Speaker 1: comfortable with with carrying out random physical violence, even most
Speaker 1: police officers. Um, but they let it happen. Yeah, broadly
Speaker 1: supported it. Yeah. Yeah. The fear that's already striking in somebody,
Speaker 1: that's like obviously the person you talk to, the sociopath,
Speaker 1: you know what I'm saying, So like the fear of
Speaker 1: being like, well, I'm not going to get in his
Speaker 1: way because he won't turn it on me. You know,
Speaker 1: this guy's crazy. Look at him. Yeah, this is crazy,
Speaker 1: I mean, um, And of course he's not crazy, Officer Dial,
Speaker 1: I have no doubt. Um was completely in possession of
Speaker 1: his white right mind, white mind, um, and not not
Speaker 1: any way mental real. He was a He was enforcing
Speaker 1: white supremacy through violence in a way that was effective
Speaker 1: and rational. Um. Yeah, So the white jury, after a
Speaker 1: day and a half of proceedings, voted to convict all
Speaker 1: three boys of murder and have them executed. And thankfully
Speaker 1: this was a case where the double a CP managed
Speaker 1: to get involved in time. They appealed and the lives
Speaker 1: of all three young men were saved. So as happy
Speaker 1: and ending as a story of torture can happen. Um,
Speaker 1: there's a there's a trial like right before Brown versus
Speaker 1: Board of Education that uh missed, missed all the missed
Speaker 1: all the fame because of Brown versus Board of Education.
Speaker 1: When yeah, about the white jurors like being able to
Speaker 1: like the law of saying like I have a right
Speaker 1: to be you know, tried in front of a jury
Speaker 1: of my peers, but it wasn't until after this case,
Speaker 1: because our documents only recognized two races. So so if
Speaker 1: this is a Latino dude, and that's that's what the
Speaker 1: case was. It was a Latino dude who got in
Speaker 1: a bar fight with a Latino dude, right, But according
Speaker 1: to the eyes of the constitution, Latinos are white until
Speaker 1: this case. Right, So if you've got an all white jury,
Speaker 1: they're like, but they're still looking at a Mexican dude
Speaker 1: and he's like, dude, like, these are not my peers, Like,
Speaker 1: and then they're going, what are you talking about? You
Speaker 1: guys are both white people. It's like, but no, where
Speaker 1: you can't you can't play it both ways, man, Like
Speaker 1: you know what I'm saying. So, so what's interesting about
Speaker 1: this case, like you said, is like, there's clear evidence,
Speaker 1: there's obvious evidence. They the dude that did it said
Speaker 1: he did it, and then the jury acquitted. You know
Speaker 1: what I'm saying, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. Um. And
Speaker 1: the case that I just related to you was only
Speaker 1: exceptional because some version of justice was eventually done. Thanks
Speaker 1: to the hard work of the end of a cp
Speaker 1: unknowable numbers of black men and boys were tortured and
Speaker 1: executed without the end of a CP, ever, coming to
Speaker 1: their aid um just because you know, that's not a
Speaker 1: criticism of the end of a CP. The resources were limited, um,
Speaker 1: playing whack a mole man like you can't be everywhere,
Speaker 1: you know. Yeah, And the FBI did not start to
Speaker 1: really look into the problem of torture enforced confessions by
Speaker 1: US law enforcement until ninety two. And the Bureau does
Speaker 1: again get a little bit of credit for intervening to
Speaker 1: try and protect black Americans faster than any other wing
Speaker 1: of the US government, But as near to Miyer notes,
Speaker 1: their efforts were limited in scope and saw very limited
Speaker 1: success and absolutely did not stop the problem or really
Speaker 1: arrested in any major way. Some of this has to
Speaker 1: do with the history of police torture, and this is
Speaker 1: where we 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
Speaker 1: hundreds in the first half of the twentieth century, it
Speaker 1: was not illegal for the police in the United States
Speaker 1: to torture people. Charges could be brought against the cops
Speaker 1: that they committed assaulter battery and breach of their regulations,
Speaker 1: but 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 Miyer notes quote as
Speaker 1: investigative reports from that date. From this period reveal, however,
Speaker 1: penalties were rarely imposed because district attorneys, judges, 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 its reporting
Speaker 1: on cases of police violence during interrogations, the term was
Speaker 1: purposefully used by the Black press to expose and announce
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 choree,
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 a hard bitten but
Speaker 1: goodhearted dragnet type cop has to do it. He doesn't
Speaker 1: like it, but I gotta keep a city safe, you know.
Speaker 1: Um yeah. The term really took off in the nineteen thirties,
Speaker 1: right alongside a massive increase in police use of torture.
Speaker 1: In ninety one, President Herbert Hoover established the National Commission
Speaker 1: on 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're gonna you're
Speaker 1: gonna call it's gonna be more crime. And as you
Speaker 1: hear props say that, imagining it's coming from the voice
Speaker 1: of a police officer actively pulling a man's fingernails off, yes, yes,
Speaker 1: so yeah. For a long time, historians thought that government
Speaker 1: scrutiny successfully reduced the use of police torture. And maybe
Speaker 1: it did reduce it, but it did not eliminate it,
Speaker 1: and modern scholarship suggests that it just caused cops to
Speaker 1: get kgier and a little bit more clever with how
Speaker 1: they tortured people. One way to do this was to
Speaker 1: transition to methods of torture that left no physical marks
Speaker 1: on the victims. In nineteen thirty, a New York Legal
Speaker 1: aid organization listed two cases of suspects who were brutalized
Speaker 1: by police during interrogations. Most of the torture victims were
Speaker 1: uneducated whites. Under the age of thirty. A large number
Speaker 1: of those white boys were immigrants. While black people were
Speaker 1: a minority of torture victims in the North, they were
Speaker 1: a disproportionate percentage of the victims. Thirty six percent of
Speaker 1: New York Police Department torture victims were black men, and
Speaker 1: black 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 to 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 have 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 problem. 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, uh,
Speaker 1: and it gets it gets, it gets worse. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: quote again Fromniedermeyer Um. The report by the Wickership commit
Speaker 1: Should 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 eighteen 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 twenty nine by the Sheriff's
Speaker 1: office and Helena, Arkansas to extract confessions. The report also
Speaker 1: pointed to individual cases of police torture of people of
Speaker 1: Mexican origin and white suspects. The cases collected by the
Speaker 1: Wickersham Commission indicate that the vast majority of the victims
Speaker 1: in the South were African Americans, primarily men, but also women. Moreover,
Speaker 1: they showed that police torture of African Americans in the
Speaker 1: South was already commonplace before nineteen thirty. Diverse historical studies
Speaker 1: could afirmed that this practice could be traced to the
Speaker 1: days of slavery. It never ended. They just got cunning.
Speaker 1: Yes there it is, yes, and and I love like
Speaker 1: I love how you're you're bringing out the idea that like,
Speaker 1: we're not we're not historical or visionists in the sense
Speaker 1: to say that this is a uniquely black experience. That's
Speaker 1: not to say that black have had Blacks have had
Speaker 1: a unique experience in this. This is not a unique experience.
Speaker 1: This is a This is a continual abuse of power
Speaker 1: and a protection of wealth, resources and supremacy. And and
Speaker 1: nobody is safe. Nobody is safe. That's part of the
Speaker 1: that's part of the people started to realize a lot
Speaker 1: of liberals who would have been broadly pro police, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, have started to realize since getting tear gassed
Speaker 1: and shot with rubber bullets by the cops, like safe,
Speaker 1: if you give them the right to violently oppress one
Speaker 1: group of people, they will start fucking with you. Yes,
Speaker 1: it's the whole, it's the whole. First, they came for
Speaker 1: the communist and I was not a communist. Like that's
Speaker 1: how it works. It's fascism, Robert. You know what isn't
Speaker 1: hopefully fascism the products and services that support this podcast, Yeah, yep,
Speaker 1: not fascism all legally antifa, Um, hopefully Yeah, we're back. Okay,
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 reign 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 and tried. Yes, and yes, I love the idea
Speaker 1: that it's a Scandinavian country. Now. Yeah, the whitest dude
Speaker 1: in 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 double a CP. These cases
Speaker 1: helped to drum up both public awareness of the problem
Speaker 1: and public support for changes to the system. You could
Speaker 1: draw an elect line between the double a CP spending
Speaker 1: decades fighting these cases. And why the murder of Emmett
Speaker 1: Till caused a massive nationwide reaction, even among a lot
Speaker 1: of white people. It's because they had laid the groundwork.
Speaker 1: And you can make a similar case for not just
Speaker 1: the end of a c P at this point, but
Speaker 1: like why specifically the murder of George Floyd finally caused
Speaker 1: for more seeing now, Yes, because you gotta you gotta
Speaker 1: go back from like from Rodney King all the way
Speaker 1: to Mike Brown. This. Yeah, there's like it's a continual like,
Speaker 1: oh my god, enough enough. Yeah, you gotta really prepare
Speaker 1: the white majority to give a shit about the murder
Speaker 1: of a black person. Is that I guess negatively looking
Speaker 1: at this yere yeah so um yeah. And again, the
Speaker 1: up eventually was successful through a number of cases, in
Speaker 1: in getting a series of Supreme Court decisions that significantly
Speaker 1: regulated and reduced the admissibility of forced confessions. Um. And
Speaker 1: that's that had that helped. But again regulation of the
Speaker 1: police in this regard, while it was a good thing,
Speaker 1: it did not cure the problem of confessions obtained under
Speaker 1: the third degree. It again just inspired the police to
Speaker 1: get subtler yes. In nineteen eighty nine, Gary Dotson became
Speaker 1: the first wrongfully convicted person to be proven innocent by
Speaker 1: DNA testing, and Gary was white. If you're curious. In
Speaker 1: the decades since, more than two people have been exonerated
Speaker 1: by DNA testing. In fifty 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
Speaker 1: totally he just like, wait, you know what my bad?
Speaker 1: Did I say? Did I say I killed that guy? No? No,
Speaker 1: I mean I didn't kill that guy. My bad. You
Speaker 1: know I thought 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: I fumbled my words. Yeah. The most shocking example of
Speaker 1: this might be the case of the Central Park five,
Speaker 1: also in nineteen nine. In this case, a white female
Speaker 1: jogger was beaten and raped. Five black and Hispanic children,
Speaker 1: all between fourteen and sixteen years old, were taken into custody.
Speaker 1: All five confessed, and then all five recanted their confessions,
Speaker 1: claiming they had only confessed after hours of terrifying and
Speaker 1: stressful police interrogation. They claimed that they had only admitted
Speaker 1: to committing the crime because officers had heavily insinuated they
Speaker 1: would get to go home if they did. All five
Speaker 1: were convicted and sent to prison. Donald Trump, then a
Speaker 1: prominent con man, repeatedly urged that the boy should be executed.
Speaker 1: In two thousand two, the real rapist confessed and DNA
Speaker 1: evidence confirmed his guilt in the innocence of all five boys.
Speaker 1: They were released. The case of the Central Park five
Speaker 1: sounds remarkably similar to the case of those three boys
Speaker 1: in Mississippi, doesn't it. Yes, and it should seem very
Speaker 1: familiar with you, because just because a certain uh uh,
Speaker 1: certain elected official was invested in making sure that they
Speaker 1: stayed in prison. Yes, yes, uh and yeah. The case
Speaker 1: of the Central Park five. Yeah, in this case, the
Speaker 1: boys you know, in the case that we read earlier,
Speaker 1: um in Mississippi, those boys were straight up physically tortured.
Speaker 1: What the Central Park five endured is much subtler, but
Speaker 1: some people might call it torture. And this brings me
Speaker 1: to discussion of the read technique. The read technique is
Speaker 1: an interrogation tactic invented in nineteen sixty two by a
Speaker 1: former cop and a polygraph expert. You may recognize the
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty two is just right around the same time
Speaker 1: the Supreme Court said, y'all got to stop forcing people
Speaker 1: to confess the crimes they didn't commit via torture. John Reid,
Speaker 1: the techniques creator, had a reputation for being the kind
Speaker 1: of guy who used psychology to get confessions rather than violence.
Speaker 1: The origin of his technique came from a nineteen fifty
Speaker 1: five case when a guy named Darryl Parker came home
Speaker 1: to find his wife raped and murdered. Parker was interrogated, and,
Speaker 1: according to the New Yorker quote, Reid hooked Parker up
Speaker 1: to the polygraph and started asking questions. Parker couldn't see
Speaker 1: the movement of the needles, but each time he answered
Speaker 1: a question about the murder, Reid told him that he
Speaker 1: was lying. As the hours wore on, Reid began to
Speaker 1: introduce a story contrary to appearances. He said the Parker's
Speaker 1: marriage wasn't a happy one. Nancy refused to give Parker
Speaker 1: the sex that he required, and she flirted with other men.
Speaker 1: One day, in a rage, Parker took what was rightfully his.
Speaker 1: After nine hours of interrogation, Parker broke down and confessed.
Speaker 1: He recanted the next day, but a jury found him
Speaker 1: guilty of murder and sentenced him to life in prison.
Speaker 1: Now Read was like, Oh, this is the way we
Speaker 1: should always do interrogations. Uh, and he refined his strategy
Speaker 1: into a technique which generally boils down to elaborately accusing
Speaker 1: the suspect of committing a detailed crime. After hours and
Speaker 1: hours of interrogation. Read opened a consulting company which, by
Speaker 1: two thousand thirteen trained more interrogators than any other company
Speaker 1: in the world, working for everything from local police to
Speaker 1: the FBI, the CIA, in the Secret Service. The company
Speaker 1: any brags that the people that trains get their suspects
Speaker 1: to confess of the time, bro just think, think about
Speaker 1: what we're telling you right now, you have to be
Speaker 1: a absolute like Navy seal level mental agility and fortitude
Speaker 1: to defend yourself when you're innocent, like when I actually
Speaker 1: didn't do the thing. I have to be this skilled,
Speaker 1: you said, which is why you wait for your lawyer,
Speaker 1: which is why you have a right to remain silent.
Speaker 1: Shut the fuck. Uh. Yeah, the Read technique was used
Speaker 1: on the Central Park five and numerous other people who
Speaker 1: have confessed to crimes they did not commit. Now, the
Speaker 1: Read company h and its president will say that that
Speaker 1: is not accurate, that they were not using the Read technique,
Speaker 1: and it's largely because they didn't do it right. That's
Speaker 1: what they'll claim is that, like false confessions are only
Speaker 1: there is of abuse or misuse of the technique because
Speaker 1: the technique has safeguards in it to make sure that
Speaker 1: no false confessions are obtained by it. So when people
Speaker 1: who are trained in the Read technique get confessions from
Speaker 1: innocent people, it's not because of the Read technique, it's
Speaker 1: because they were wrongly using the Read technique. That makes
Speaker 1: it cool? Can you the pretzel you just put your
Speaker 1: body in? Wow? Okay, Yeah, it wouldn't be great to
Speaker 1: be able to just like to be able to just
Speaker 1: with a straight face and no like soul conviction. Your
Speaker 1: soul is so dead inside that you could make that
Speaker 1: sentence and be okay with it. Yeah. It's like if
Speaker 1: I have a school that trains people to fire over
Speaker 1: the heads of crowds with assault rifles, and then some
Speaker 1: people fire into the crowds with assault rifles. Clearly none
Speaker 1: of that's my Like, I have nothing to do with that.
Speaker 1: The heads I've fled fire told you shoot over the head. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a safeguard to make sure no one gets hit. Uh. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the read technique has started to fall out of
Speaker 1: favor in the last really in the last few years,
Speaker 1: and seventeen was when like one big agency stopped sending
Speaker 1: interrogators and to be trained in it. And it this
Speaker 1: seems to have like you know you mentioned earlier. I
Speaker 1: think it was to catch a predator, right, Um that
Speaker 1: that the like the fact that a lot of interrogations
Speaker 1: are videotaped and that some of those came out in
Speaker 1: documentaries and people got to see, oh my god, is
Speaker 1: this what cops are doing? Yeah, this isn't okay. So
Speaker 1: it is still very common, still widely in use. But
Speaker 1: the tide might seems to be turning on the read technique.
Speaker 1: We'll see. Um, it is not legal for police to
Speaker 1: beat the ship out of suspects to force a confession,
Speaker 1: not anymore, and I guess you could see even the
Speaker 1: read technique as an improvement over literal physical torture. Um.
Speaker 1: But it is legal for police to lie about evidence,
Speaker 1: to withhold food and water from suspects for what I
Speaker 1: would consider to be long periods of time, and to
Speaker 1: subject them to verbal abuse and psychologically torture them until
Speaker 1: they see confessing is the only way out. I can't
Speaker 1: say if the read technique is responsible from most false
Speaker 1: confessions in the modern United States, but I can't tell
Speaker 1: you the police department that is responsible for more false
Speaker 1: confessions than any other. You want to guess, No, Chicago,
Speaker 1: it was gonna be one of the two, right, Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: More than thirty of all exonerations that involve false confessions
Speaker 1: were people who confessed in Illinois state, and most of
Speaker 1: those were people who confess to the Chicago p D.
Speaker 1: And the question to why is this happening has a
Speaker 1: lot to do with a dude named John Burge. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: so yeah, like a little a little side note especially
Speaker 1: about what what you're talking about, like how some of
Speaker 1: these confessions happen, and how slick they are because like say,
Speaker 1: for example, you hear on the news that somebody died
Speaker 1: on Fourth Street, right, So then when you get picked
Speaker 1: up and then cops go, hey, did you hear about
Speaker 1: the shooting on Fourth Street? And you're like yeah, and
Speaker 1: then he goes, yeah, that the that the lady was
Speaker 1: coming out of the house, and you're like, yeah, I
Speaker 1: heard that. First of all, the story wasn't that there
Speaker 1: was a shooting. The story was somebody died. So when
Speaker 1: he said did you hear about the shooting, what he's
Speaker 1: doing is making sure you just confessed to information. They
Speaker 1: said he had information about the crime. And because you
Speaker 1: it's like, I didn't say shooting. You said shooting. Well no,
Speaker 1: no, no no, no no, I just asked if you heard
Speaker 1: about You said you heard about it. I didn't tell you.
Speaker 1: The story isn't that there's a shooting. So like how
Speaker 1: slick that type of like practice is. And you listen,
Speaker 1: I'm telling you this stuff out of experience, you know
Speaker 1: what I'm saying, Like somebody saying, hey, you hear the
Speaker 1: liquor store got robbed out. Hey you heard about that
Speaker 1: liquor store robbed Like I had to learn to be like, nah,
Speaker 1: I ain't heard ship, I don't heard nothing. I mean,
Speaker 1: I don't know, you know what I'm saying. What mean
Speaker 1: you don't know? You're not your square, You're not part
Speaker 1: of You're not part of the streets. You know. I've
Speaker 1: seen you with your friends and I'm like, uh, sorry,
Speaker 1: I don't live here, you know, just like you have
Speaker 1: to like be Yeah. Anyway, all that to say, this
Speaker 1: stuff is like as like heinous as we're telling you.
Speaker 1: It's so subtle and it's so slick, you know what
Speaker 1: I'm saying, Like everybody swears, Well, well, if I was
Speaker 1: in the situation, I'm like, na, you, you would do
Speaker 1: 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: Burge is proof that the old tactics of the third
Speaker 1: degree still aren't as much a part of the past
Speaker 1: as some folks might like to believe. John Burge was
Speaker 1: a decorated Vietnam veteran who served as a military police officer,
Speaker 1: working for a time as a provost marshal investigator during
Speaker 1: that conflict. After the war, he returned to Chicago and
Speaker 1: became a cop. In nineteen seventy two. He was promoted
Speaker 1: to detective one year later. In nineteen seventy three, he
Speaker 1: tortured his victim. According to the Marshall Project quote, his
Speaker 1: officers had arrested a man named Anthony Holmes on suspicion
Speaker 1: 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, Bird 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. You call we
Speaker 1: call this fucos boomerang, the tactics used in colonial wars overseas.
Speaker 1: Coming back to the United States, Birge denies that he
Speaker 1: tortured anyone in Vietnam. He also denied torturing people here,
Speaker 1: so maybe you don't take that super seriously. Um yeah.
Speaker 1: He quickly perfected what he called his inward box, which
Speaker 1: is what he named the box he used to electrocute
Speaker 1: black people, often electrocuting their testicles. I've talked to one
Speaker 1: of Burge's victims, and that's what Birch did to him
Speaker 1: as he electrocuted his testicles with his inward box. Um yeah,
Speaker 1: there's there's a there's which is a whole other story
Speaker 1: I want to get to. But there's this weird fascination
Speaker 1: with torturing of black genitalia with It's very common in lynching,
Speaker 1: very common in lynching, that they would be severed and
Speaker 1: even taken as like souvenirs. Yeah, and it's one of
Speaker 1: those like my eternal question putting through how much detail
Speaker 1: do I go into? We could have done six episodes
Speaker 1: on lynching, and it deserves six episodes, but not trying
Speaker 1: to give a broader No, I appreciate it like that
Speaker 1: not being mentioned. Yeah, yeah, it's a thing because of
Speaker 1: his high case clearance rate, because he gave boy John's
Speaker 1: real good at getting criminals to confess. He's solving all
Speaker 1: these murders. Because of his high case clearance rate, John
Speaker 1: was promoted to sergent and then to lieutenant and eventually
Speaker 1: to commander. John Burge's behavior was not hidden from other
Speaker 1: men in the Chicago Police. He kept his inward box
Speaker 1: out on open display at a table in the police station.
Speaker 1: He trained dozens of other Chicago officers in his techniques,
Speaker 1: which expanded over the years to include electric cattle prods,
Speaker 1: simulate and simulated executions. Burgess officers often beat subjects with
Speaker 1: telephone books, flashlights, batons, and bats. They burned men with
Speaker 1: hot radiators and cigarettes. They put plastic bags over the
Speaker 1: heads of others and suffocated them. This went on for
Speaker 1: a very very long time. The end began in nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty two, when two police officers were murdered and Burge
Speaker 1: and his team tortured the ship out of a pair
Speaker 1: of black brothers until they confessed. The injuries one of
Speaker 1: them suffered were significant enough that a medical official reported
Speaker 1: on them, and that was the first crack in the
Speaker 1: Burge system. Allegations of torture by Burge and his men, though,
Speaker 1: didn't break through the blue wall of silence until a
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty nine civil lawsuit by the People's Law Office.
Speaker 1: One of the attorneys behind this case, who later represented
Speaker 1: many Burge victims, was Flint Taylor. He described the existence
Speaker 1: of Burge's unit as an unremitting official cover up that
Speaker 1: has implicated a series of police superintendents, numerous prosecutors, more
Speaker 1: than thirty police detectives and supervisors, and most notably Richard M. Daley,
Speaker 1: the city's former longtime mayor and a previous state's attorney.
Speaker 1: The whole story came out in bits and pieces through
Speaker 1: a mix of victims coming forward in anonymous sources within
Speaker 1: the department. One of these anonymous sources was a cop
Speaker 1: who left again anonymous voice messages for Flint Taylor. Taylor
Speaker 1: and his fellows nicknamed this guy Deep Badge. So part
Speaker 1: of the lesson here is that after seventeen years of
Speaker 1: torture that was enthusiastically supported at every level of the
Speaker 1: Chicago p D, a couple of good cops did finally
Speaker 1: work up the courage to leave anonymous voice mails after
Speaker 1: a law year had figured out the basics of the
Speaker 1: case and publicized them. That's what good cops get you. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's like three of them and then and it takes
Speaker 1: me seventeen years to do anything. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.
Speaker 1: Burge was eventually accused of torturing more than a hundred people,
Speaker 1: virtually all of whom were black, between nineteen seventy two
Speaker 1: and nineteen ninety one. That means recent. Yeah, at this point,
Speaker 1: we know that there's probably over two hundred victims. We
Speaker 1: will never know the true number of Birge victims because
Speaker 1: been a lot of these guys were executed, a lot
Speaker 1: of them died in prison. In the Chicago Police Board
Speaker 1: voted to fire John Burge. This interrupted plans the local
Speaker 1: Fraternal Order of Police had made that same year to
Speaker 1: honor Burge and four of their officers with a parade float.
Speaker 1: All of the other four officers were also accused of
Speaker 1: torturing people, but the time he was fired, Burge had
Speaker 1: risen to the rank of commander. He was not charged
Speaker 1: criminally until two thousand eight and not sent to prison
Speaker 1: until two thousand eleven. He got out of prison in
Speaker 1: two thousand fourteen. Chicago has paid out millions of dollars
Speaker 1: in reparations to victims, but an unknown number of Burge's
Speaker 1: victims still remain in prison. Multiple people were released from
Speaker 1: death row as a result of all of this coming
Speaker 1: to light, but we will again never know how many
Speaker 1: innocent men were executed. Burge died in two thousand eighteen,
Speaker 1: four years after he was released from prison. Chicago's police
Speaker 1: union issued a statement on their Facebook page offering condolences
Speaker 1: to the Burge family and insisting it does not believe
Speaker 1: the full story about the Burge cases has ever been told.
Speaker 1: Dean Angelo, former head of the Chicago Reternal Order of Police,
Speaker 1: told reporters, I don't know that John Burge got a
Speaker 1: fair shake based on all the years and years of
Speaker 1: service that he gave the city. He insisted that Burge
Speaker 1: put a lot of bad guys in prison two thousand eighteen.
Speaker 1: The cops who believe this are still on the force.
Speaker 1: Just guys there, most of the force. Ah, yeah, guys. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're asking you're asking us to respect you, and it's
Speaker 1: like I would love to I would love to respect. Yeah,
Speaker 1: just do respectable things. Yeah. Yeah. You know who I respect.
Speaker 1: My my neighbor across the street who has never tortured
Speaker 1: several hundred people. That guy, I respect him. Yeah, he's
Speaker 1: He's earned my respect by virtue of being a human
Speaker 1: being who doesn't commit random acts of violence. Yeah. It's
Speaker 1: not hard 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 Burge's victims, and this guy
Speaker 1: had an extensive violent criminal record when he wound up
Speaker 1: in Burge's 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 sh Ago Police Department in the
Speaker 1: Fraternal Order of Police in Chicago certainly uses to justify
Speaker 1: Burgess crimes even today, that thinking these guys were guilty,
Speaker 1: that thinking puts them all right in line with the
Speaker 1: law abiding interrogators who used the read technique. Richard Leo,
Speaker 1: a law professor from the University of San Francisco, spent
Speaker 1: nine months sitting in an almost two interrogations in Oakland
Speaker 1: during the mid nineteen nineties. He learned that most officers
Speaker 1: who are again these guys, were all trained in the
Speaker 1: read technique. He learned that most officers were skipping a
Speaker 1: critical aspect of the proper read technique. That aspect is
Speaker 1: having an initial interview with the suspect. You're supposed to
Speaker 1: like interview them, have like a normal conversation with them,
Speaker 1: and kind of decide if you think they're guilty before
Speaker 1: you move on to the interrogation. I'm going to quote
Speaker 1: from the New Yorker again. The read interrogation technique is
Speaker 1: predicated upon an accurate determination during behavioral analysis of whether
Speaker 1: the suspect is lying. Here to social scientists find a
Speaker 1: reason for concern three decades of research have shown that
Speaker 1: nonverbal signals so prized by the red trainers, bear no
Speaker 1: relation to deception. In fact, people have little more and
Speaker 1: coin flipping odds of guessing if someone is telling the truth,
Speaker 1: and numerous surveys have shown that police do know better. Aldert,
Speaker 1: a professor of psychology at the University of Portsmouth and England,
Speaker 1: found that law enforcement experience does not necessarily improve the
Speaker 1: ability to detect lies. Among police officers, those who said
Speaker 1: they paid close attention to nonverbal cues did the worst. Similarly,
Speaker 1: an experiment by Cason shows that both students and police
Speaker 1: officers were better at telling true confessions from false ones
Speaker 1: when they listened to an audio recording of an interview
Speaker 1: rather than watch it on video. In the experiment, the
Speaker 1: police officers who performed less well than the students but
Speaker 1: expressed greater confidence in their ability to tell who was lying.
Speaker 1: Cops will always tell you they know how to spot
Speaker 1: a liar they are lying. Wow, Yeah, you can't. Really,
Speaker 1: there's no way to know. Yeah, there's no way to know,
Speaker 1: you know. 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 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 carrier,
Speaker 1: or you just meet like a he's just like he's
Speaker 1: like really a good dude that 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 it's sometimes I'm like, why are we playing
Speaker 1: this game right now? Like this is your you're 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 initial interview,
Speaker 1: and I know this dude is trying to build rapport
Speaker 1: with me, you know what I'm saying, um, And I'm like,
Speaker 1: I know this is okay, I know I know what
Speaker 1: you're doing. Like I know what you're doing. Okay, what
Speaker 1: time of day was it? All right, word, how tall
Speaker 1: was the guy? Okay? Cool? Uh? So I'm just like,
Speaker 1: just get to it, man, Just get to it. Let
Speaker 1: me tell you want to know where I was? You
Speaker 1: want to know where I live? Okay, Here's where I live.
Speaker 1: Here's what I was doing at this time. Tell me
Speaker 1: what time it was? I fit, what description? Can we
Speaker 1: just get to that rather than addists riggamo, Yeah, I'm ranting. Yea.
Speaker 1: So I talked earlier about how police torture to force
Speaker 1: confessions didn't stop. It just got settler under pressure, and
Speaker 1: the same is true with the impact of racism and
Speaker 1: law enforcement. After Jim Crow ended, the most obvious justification
Speaker 1: for bigoted policing was gone, but the bigotry remained as
Speaker 1: a system that was built almost completely during a period
Speaker 1: of time where either slavery black codes or Jim Crow
Speaker 1: laws were the rule. In Minneapolis, where black people make
Speaker 1: up nineteen percent of the population, they are subjected to
Speaker 1: fifty eight percent of use of force cases by the
Speaker 1: city's police. A May night two and twenty studies showed
Speaker 1: that out of ninety five million traffic stops nationwide between
Speaker 1: two thousand and eleven and two thousand and eighteen, Black
Speaker 1: people were vastly more likely to be pulled over than
Speaker 1: white people, except at night, when the gap shrinks considerably
Speaker 1: Black people, because again, the cops can't tell what race
Speaker 1: you are is easily yeah, so they're not They're not
Speaker 1: able to judge this is a guilty person before the interaction. Black. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Black people are also more likely to be searched during
Speaker 1: a stop, even though white people are more likely to
Speaker 1: actually have contraband on them. I could go on and on,
Speaker 1: but 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 lawyer in 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 gym 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's 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 is just you know,
Speaker 1: our families work. My little brothers is a California highway patrolment,
Speaker 1: so confession I got law enforcement in my family. My
Speaker 1: brothers worked there for ten fits years. He's never pulled
Speaker 1: a gun ever in his life, right, never has he
Speaker 1: ever pulled a weapon out. He is one of those ones,
Speaker 1: like you said that it's like reporting dudes, that's like
Speaker 1: building community lass ons. He does it after school, he's living,
Speaker 1: he's in the valley, doesnt after school programs, runs a
Speaker 1: basketball league like the people know him. So like so
Speaker 1: so there's that my father. You know, we talked about
Speaker 1: my father. My father was a black panther. After he
Speaker 1: left the Black Panther Party because they killed it, right,
Speaker 1: he moved they be in the FBI. My father was
Speaker 1: l a county probation officer. He worked with like underage defenders.
Speaker 1: Retired from there, 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 Saneras and and and
Speaker 1: g D g D like graduations and stuff like that.
Speaker 1: But all these like random kids that I didn't know.
Speaker 1: Turns out there were kids on his caseload because he
Speaker 1: was shielding them from the system. He told me stories
Speaker 1: of 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 caseload and then
Speaker 1: watching that food go to prison. You know what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: So when you, when you, when you even in us
Speaker 1: bring all those things up to say this is that
Speaker 1: even if you find good men and good women, the
Speaker 1: system is flawed. And this is what we're trying to
Speaker 1: get to. The structure is wrong. Yes, the the these
Speaker 1: 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 u 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 further a system that
Speaker 1: is fundamentally abusive and enforces very supremacy and a period
Speaker 1: we are not what what we're not saying is that
Speaker 1: all cops should never have a job in that that
Speaker 1: that like there's there's homicide detectives who are good solving murders.
Speaker 1: When we get rid of the police and replace them
Speaker 1: with something, I want those people to still be solving
Speaker 1: murders because it's good. Yeah, yes, um, you know there are.
Speaker 1: If you know a a police officer who is a
Speaker 1: great person and is is an asset to the community,
Speaker 1: that person should probably still be doing a broadly similar
Speaker 1: a lot of the same things they're doing. But there
Speaker 1: shouldn't be I talked to cops a lot. I've talked
Speaker 1: to a lot of cops will talk about like being
Speaker 1: forced to arrest people for simple possession of drugs even
Speaker 1: though they personally agree with ending the drug war, and like,
Speaker 1: that's the problem that you're forced to do it, and
Speaker 1: that's the we don't We We decided as a as
Speaker 1: a species that just following orders is not a justification
Speaker 1: for violating people's civil rights. Yes, think about when we
Speaker 1: decided that and why, yes, and where it led and
Speaker 1: where it started. Yeah, yes, you are hearing the cries
Speaker 1: of both my father and my brother who both were like,
Speaker 1: I don't know if I could do this much longer.
Speaker 1: Even in me trying right, I'm trying to do the
Speaker 1: right thing. I'm trying to be an advocate for these
Speaker 1: young people, like I'm doing my best, Like at least
Speaker 1: they got some by you on the side, you know
Speaker 1: what I'm saying, And you're but you're still like I'm
Speaker 1: still I'm still throwing you to the wolves. I'm just
Speaker 1: giving you, you know, a protective jacket. But the point
Speaker 1: is I'm still throwing you to the wolves. Because this
Speaker 1: it's the the whole like it's what you're trying to say,
Speaker 1: It's like the whole thing needs a grenade. Because again,
Speaker 1: like you said, I want to be able to call
Speaker 1: somebody if my house is being broken into, of course
Speaker 1: I want to be able to call somebody, But most
Speaker 1: likely who's breaking into my house is a meth head
Speaker 1: just trying to steal the PS four because he wants
Speaker 1: a hit. Don't kill the guy, like just I just
Speaker 1: want him out my house. And you know what, I
Speaker 1: could probably you know what, I probably won't call him
Speaker 1: because I could get him by my house because he's hot.
Speaker 1: You know what I'm saying. Yeah, it's it's this I mean.
Speaker 1: And again, when you actually we'll talk about this some
Speaker 1: next week. But when you look at, for example, homelessness,
Speaker 1: you find out that cost the state less money to
Speaker 1: give homeless people homes, then it costs to police and
Speaker 1: incarceraate them. It costs less money to give drug addicts
Speaker 1: drugs than to police them and to deal with the
Speaker 1: results of them stealing ship for drugs they found out
Speaker 1: on like Denmark where they give heroin addicts heroin and
Speaker 1: it saves them huge amounts of money Toronto to Yeah,
Speaker 1: like safe injection zones, you don't have to police this ship.
Speaker 1: And in fact, most things shouldn't be policed. Maybe only
Speaker 1: violence should be policed exactly. If you're like I try
Speaker 1: to like as as simple as we can make it.
Speaker 1: If my daughter comes in and she don't do her
Speaker 1: chores because she's got a cold, and I ground her,
Speaker 1: rather than say here's some tail and all, like you
Speaker 1: would be like, that's ridiculous. You've had a ground her
Speaker 1: because she got a cold. That's stupid. Okay, that's putting
Speaker 1: an addict in prison. You know what I'm saying. It's like,
Speaker 1: this is what 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. I'm 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 then, um, I
Speaker 1: don't know. We'll talk about Bill Cooper or something at
Speaker 1: some point. Yeah, we have you all for some like
Speaker 1: for something like like a like a dictator. Yeah yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: talk about somebody, somebody fun, you know, well, somebody not
Speaker 1: connected to my own safety. And yeah, well we'll do
Speaker 1: We'll talk about chairman now or somebody here. Yeah, everybody
Speaker 1: loves a good chairman mouse story, Oh my dad, or
Speaker 1: maybe Tito Tito. Yeah, Tito was cool as hell. I
Speaker 1: mean he was a monster, but he was a cool monster.
Speaker 1: 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: the end up policing is very easy reading. The Color
Speaker 1: of the Third Degree is some rough ship. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and 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, Amen, shall we collect? Offering? Behind the
Speaker 1: Police is a production of I Heart Radio. For more
Speaker 1: podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.