Speaker 1: Welcome to Behind the Police, a production of I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Welcome back to Behind the Police of Behind the Bastard's
Speaker 1: special mini series about you know, the police in America, Uh,
Speaker 1: some of the most persistent bastards in our nation's long
Speaker 1: and bastardful history. I'm Robert Evans Uh, the host and
Speaker 1: the the researcher and the writer. And my guest today
Speaker 1: is Jason Petty, better known as hip hop artist propaganda
Speaker 1: prop How are you doing today? What out? What up?
Speaker 1: What up? Socially and emotionally prepared for this train Did
Speaker 1: you like how professional my introduction was? That was some
Speaker 1: NPR ship. Here's the thing, bro, like you're you are
Speaker 1: unmatched in intros and transitions. There's nothing like this. I
Speaker 1: want to be the voice. I want to retrain yourself
Speaker 1: talk voice and just cont tendue to say you nailed
Speaker 1: it even when you didn't, just even when I didn't. Beautiful.
Speaker 1: I will continue to point out when you suck it
Speaker 1: up and praise you when you don't. Like now, wonderful intro, Robert,
Speaker 1: very professional, Thank you, Thank you, way better than that
Speaker 1: time I just shouted Hitler. That was That was a
Speaker 1: train wreck. Yeah, I know what to do with that one.
Speaker 1: Have you ever walked by like a wall of chords
Speaker 1: and just felt the need like I'm going especially like
Speaker 1: that stage somewhere in festivals. Yes, no, or like I'm
Speaker 1: gonna yank them all out. It's gonna happen, And it's
Speaker 1: like I'm holding my hand away, like I I can't
Speaker 1: be backstage. I'm an a yank one of these out.
Speaker 1: I feel like that was like you and like the
Speaker 1: Hitler thing to where you're just like, yeah, don't say it,
Speaker 1: don't say it, don't say it. Oh my god, I
Speaker 1: want to say yeah. Because you can't script an introduction, right,
Speaker 1: Like that's the first rule of of of broadcast as
Speaker 1: you can never script an intro. So we're left with
Speaker 1: me winging it so prop Yesterday we talked about the
Speaker 1: origins of American policing with a focus on like the
Speaker 1: slave patrols, and that is the thing like online since
Speaker 1: kind of this whole uprising against the police began, that's
Speaker 1: the thing everyone's been focusing on that, like police came
Speaker 1: out of slave patrols, and that is very true for
Speaker 1: a huge chunk of American policing. Today, we're gonna talk
Speaker 1: about the other chunk because it was not just slave patrols,
Speaker 1: because a sizeable chunk of American policing came out of
Speaker 1: a desire to suppress folks number one that we today
Speaker 1: would call white, but at the time kind of the
Speaker 1: people with money didn't really consider to be white. Um.
Speaker 1: But also more than anything, it came out of a
Speaker 1: desire to police labor, like the working class. So today
Speaker 1: we're going to kind of hit that other side of
Speaker 1: the of the where cops come from, uh divide, um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is there's a lesson in intersectionality, guys, right now. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And and like all good lessons and intersectionality it comes
Speaker 1: from it includes uh, people being racist when that's directly
Speaker 1: in the opposition to their needs and an actual benefit. Yeah,
Speaker 1: a deep seated oppression, yeah, and an oppression that's taken
Speaker 1: advantage of by the ruling class in order to continue
Speaker 1: to Yeah yeah yeah. And we're going up norf to
Speaker 1: you know they free up there, you know, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: lord yeah, yeah, the North, the North. I mean it
Speaker 1: was better than the Confederacy. But that's like saying, yeah,
Speaker 1: like vomiting in the toilet is better than vomiting on
Speaker 1: your friends floor, which like yes, but it's both are
Speaker 1: non ideal strict Yeah. So, um, you may not know this,
Speaker 1: but President John Fitzgerald Kennedy designated the week of May
Speaker 1: fifteen to be National Police Week. I don't think we
Speaker 1: celebrated it this year. Yeah, I was like, I never
Speaker 1: heard that. Yeah, it must have missed that one. Um.
Speaker 1: During his speech announcing this, he stated that police officers
Speaker 1: had been protecting Americans since the birth of the United States. Now,
Speaker 1: we of course know this is untrue. First formal police
Speaker 1: department was started in Boston in eighteen thirty eight. And
Speaker 1: you know, slave patrols existed earlier, but they sure weren't
Speaker 1: protecting people. Now. One of the inciting incidents that led
Speaker 1: to the creation of the Boston Police, who again that's
Speaker 1: the first police department, was the Broad Street Riot. And
Speaker 1: the basic story of the Broad Street Riot is that
Speaker 1: a funeral procession of Irish immigrants in eighteen thirty seven
Speaker 1: ran into a volunteer firefighting company of US born Protestants
Speaker 1: who are on their way back from fighting a fire.
Speaker 1: And obviously, like now, I think most people just like, oh,
Speaker 1: you know, Protestants and Catholics, they're all just sort of like,
Speaker 1: you know, relatively mainstream Christian denominations. But you know, it
Speaker 1: was like it was like a huge deal when JFK
Speaker 1: became the first Catholic president. People were like, is he good? Sorry, yeah,
Speaker 1: I was gonna say, yeah, that's how like open to
Speaker 1: diversity and melting pot we are as a country that
Speaker 1: like it was a scandal at this fool was at Catholic. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I got like, yo, that's the that's just the other
Speaker 1: room with the same house. Yeah. If you really want
Speaker 1: an idea of like how funked up America has been
Speaker 1: about diversity. Like we were like not even a decade
Speaker 1: away from putting a man on the damn moon and
Speaker 1: JFK came to power and people were like, is he
Speaker 1: going to take secret pope orders? Oh yeah, And the
Speaker 1: news flash to every Protestant was like, you know, we
Speaker 1: was all Catholic until five years ago. I don't know,
Speaker 1: but we was all Catholic you know. Yeah, uh, it
Speaker 1: was It's wild. So yeah, um, Catholics and Protestants back
Speaker 1: then had some real issues with one another. So this
Speaker 1: this irish funeral procession like runs into the middle of
Speaker 1: this Catholic or a Protestant firefighting company and the two
Speaker 1: just start beating the ship out of each other, and
Speaker 1: all of this spills out into a riot that eventually
Speaker 1: involves one fifth of Boston's population, which is like fifteen
Speaker 1: thousand people, which is still a pretty good sized riot today.
Speaker 1: Um yeah, so ethnic tensions being what they were, the
Speaker 1: riot quickly turned into erase riot, and Protestants burned and
Speaker 1: looted the entirety of the heavily Irish Broad Street neighborhood,
Speaker 1: just like Jesus would call him. Yes, he was a
Speaker 1: big fan of burning and looting. Just burning, you know,
Speaker 1: you turned it. He was like, hey, he flipped over
Speaker 1: the tables. He clipped over the temple tables. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: those weren't like his homies tables anyway. Yeah. And what
Speaker 1: he didn't, he say, burned the other cheeks something like that,
Speaker 1: So I may be missing. Yeah yeah, so yeah, very
Speaker 1: very taking their religion seriously here. Um So, in decades
Speaker 1: prior um to the Broad Street Riot, merchants had been
Speaker 1: forced to finance their own guards to secure the transportation
Speaker 1: of their goods. Establishing police, which were paid more by
Speaker 1: the commonwealth shifted the burden for protecting capital off of
Speaker 1: capitalists and onto the community. But even prior to the
Speaker 1: establishment of the first police departments, law and order in
Speaker 1: the United States was primarily a for profit endeavor and
Speaker 1: not a manner of public safety. Um, the broad street
Speaker 1: right was kind of used as an excuse for, like
Speaker 1: why we need a police force. But the tensions had
Speaker 1: been building and like frustration had been building, like, oh,
Speaker 1: we gotta pay to take care of our own ship
Speaker 1: from you know, the merchant class. So this was of
Speaker 1: an opportunity for them to get people on board. Now,
Speaker 1: as we covered in the first episode, most policing in
Speaker 1: the English speaking world prior to the eighteen hundreds was
Speaker 1: primarily a community affair. Enforcement of the law was done
Speaker 1: by members of the community who tended to rotate through
Speaker 1: shifts keeping order in their own towns. Public spirit is
Speaker 1: generally the term used is what was like the primary
Speaker 1: method of social control in those days, rather than centralized authority.
Speaker 1: And that is kind of the thing that like, I
Speaker 1: was just in the Seattle autonomous zone or whatever you
Speaker 1: wanna call it, you know, may not be really an
Speaker 1: autonomous zone. I don't think they've actually kind of firmly
Speaker 1: decided yet because the police got back in briefly, but
Speaker 1: like public spirit is the primary manner of social control there.
Speaker 1: There's no centralized organization, there's no like even mass kind
Speaker 1: of votes because people are so distributed there. But there
Speaker 1: is kind of a broad public spirit of like what
Speaker 1: if we don't have cops here? Right, that's kind of
Speaker 1: the ideal idea. Um And that was kind of the
Speaker 1: way that it worked for a very long time, UM
Speaker 1: in in particularly like English speaking chunks of the of
Speaker 1: the world. UM. But but not just that. UM. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: this system began to fade out as like, you know,
Speaker 1: as the kind of industrial age dawn, and distinct communities
Speaker 1: that had been like more or less like somewhat isolated
Speaker 1: at least homogenized into cities and sprawling urban areas like
Speaker 1: now you know, we say London, but back in the
Speaker 1: day it was like a bunch of towns and then
Speaker 1: a much smaller London. And then as they all turned
Speaker 1: into like this big fucking metropolitan area. Um, this public
Speaker 1: spirit fades. So. Historian Henry Pringle writes that by the
Speaker 1: seventeen hundreds, the legal system had formalized enough that it's
Speaker 1: architects were quote confident that they could by a system
Speaker 1: of incentives and deterrence rewards and punishments, bribes and threats,
Speaker 1: so exploit human greed and fear that there would be
Speaker 1: no need to look for anything so nebulous and unrealistic
Speaker 1: as humans or as public spirit. So that's kind of
Speaker 1: like the real dawn of of formalized law enforcement is
Speaker 1: is things get big enough in these people are like
Speaker 1: public spirit, you can't really rely on it to do
Speaker 1: what I wanted to do. And I'm the guy with
Speaker 1: the money, So we need to build a system of
Speaker 1: the terrence and rewards. Yeah it's scans. Yeah, Yeah, it's scans.
Speaker 1: So gradually, yeah, it keeps scans. And I was also
Speaker 1: gonna say, as a side note, the and I hate,
Speaker 1: I hate the very principle of what I'm about to say. Sure,
Speaker 1: but at the old folks in the church would say
Speaker 1: it's true anyhow. Uh, I absolutely love like the Irish
Speaker 1: like culture. It's just because it's just so irreverent and
Speaker 1: like they just don't take themselves serious. Everything is sarcastic, Yeah,
Speaker 1: drinking and going to sing at parties and I'm just like,
Speaker 1: it's just it's just your normal slang, like old ball back,
Speaker 1: how you doing, Like you call your homeboy a ball bag.
Speaker 1: That's a strod um fam and that's what you refer
Speaker 1: to your friends as your friends and scrotums all ball
Speaker 1: back and it's like, look, I respect that so much.
Speaker 1: I just so I I respect him. They're just ready
Speaker 1: to fight at any moment. Yeah, drink a lot, you
Speaker 1: know what I'm saying. And then when you got to America,
Speaker 1: you created your own hood like just the South Boston,
Speaker 1: just south the Irish pissy, don't even don't even mess
Speaker 1: with your like your grandmother, ready to scrap. Like I
Speaker 1: respect that so much. Yeah, I love this is my
Speaker 1: favorite place to visit Ireland. I love the like what
Speaker 1: you're talking about, like this idea that even with like
Speaker 1: your elected leaders, like you should kind of be able
Speaker 1: to shout at him, right. That's there's a bit of
Speaker 1: that in England too, Like this idea that like we
Speaker 1: had a thing here and it happened in Minneapolis with
Speaker 1: Mayor Fray, where like he had to go out to
Speaker 1: this crowd and like when he said something, didn't like
Speaker 1: this crowd of thousands like told him to go to
Speaker 1: the Funk Home. And we had that in Portland with
Speaker 1: our mayor, Like he showed up in the middle of
Speaker 1: this crowd to take questions and if one just told him,
Speaker 1: like you had the cops shoot at us a bunch,
Speaker 1: and we don't like that, and you're a bad mayor,
Speaker 1: and everyone just got to like yell at the mayor.
Speaker 1: And that's how it ought to be with all elected officials.
Speaker 1: They should have to stand in the middle of a
Speaker 1: crowd of their voters and get heckled when they funk up.
Speaker 1: It's it's like, yes, every elected official should have to
Speaker 1: do some sort of like open mic, like stand up,
Speaker 1: just dive bar where you have to feel the heat. Dude.
Speaker 1: My first few years of touring like the heat of
Speaker 1: being like, okay, listen, it's it's almost it's it's eight fifteen,
Speaker 1: you know what I'm saying. Everybody's just pregame in trying
Speaker 1: to figure out who they're gonna hit on later, and
Speaker 1: I have to go up and wrap for fifteen minutes
Speaker 1: and try to convince this room to pay attention to
Speaker 1: me for I got ten minutes of atention. Commissions like
Speaker 1: that is the best school of hard knocks as like
Speaker 1: a live performer that anyone could ever I feel like
Speaker 1: every mayor should have to do that. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely,
Speaker 1: like the public the whole public spirit thing. Obviously there's
Speaker 1: a lot of more people now where there's a more
Speaker 1: complexity you need, you need more than just public spirit.
Speaker 1: But this idea that like, if everyone just kind of
Speaker 1: hates this dude, like he should have to stand in
Speaker 1: the middle of them and I try to convince them
Speaker 1: that they're wrong or at least just take the fucking
Speaker 1: fire for all right, if you could take that fire
Speaker 1: and or win some of us over, I would be like,
Speaker 1: you know what, Okay, maybe I was wrong, but maybe
Speaker 1: I was wrong about this dude. Yeah, yeah, anyway, anyway,
Speaker 1: back to the fucking cops. So um, Gradually the profit
Speaker 1: motive became the central motivating force behind law enforcement. So
Speaker 1: kind of public spirit moves aside for we just pay
Speaker 1: people to do this ship um, and the change started
Speaker 1: at the level of the constable. Traditionally, constables had been
Speaker 1: unpaid members of the community who took turns at the job,
Speaker 1: but most citizens came to dislike taking their turn as constable,
Speaker 1: especially since each turn involved a one year, unpaid period
Speaker 1: of working to enforce laws that were often very in popular.
Speaker 1: Because there was like centralized state authority, it just there
Speaker 1: was like super organized law enforcements like the king or
Speaker 1: whoever would make like a law that people didn't like,
Speaker 1: and then you would take your Turnity, you have to
Speaker 1: enforce that law, and that doesn't make you popular, um,
Speaker 1: which was an issue with the system who was making
Speaker 1: the laws. So over time, deputies began to realize that
Speaker 1: the power of their office held other opportunities for profit.
Speaker 1: According to a paper on the development of private police
Speaker 1: by Stephen Spitzer of Northern Iowa University and Andrew School
Speaker 1: of the University of Pennsylvania, quote once in office, the
Speaker 1: deputies soon found that profits could be gained from selling
Speaker 1: protective and investigative services, or demanding rewards and fees in
Speaker 1: return for recovered goods. Deputies often made such a profitable
Speaker 1: trade of their offices that many were prepared to serve
Speaker 1: for nothing. So this goes from like this ugly job
Speaker 1: that you take because you have to to a job
Speaker 1: that you know because you kind of find a way
Speaker 1: to you kind of you kind of find side hustles
Speaker 1: in your position allows you to exploit and then it
Speaker 1: it becomes really profitable even though there's not a salary
Speaker 1: for the gig. And so you're kind of freelance police
Speaker 1: at this point, right, like, that's the gig. So this
Speaker 1: suited early local governments in England and her colonies pretty
Speaker 1: well because these these governments and these people's like just
Speaker 1: because of an aspect of the culture, felt a deep
Speaker 1: resistance to the idea of paying for a salary and
Speaker 1: police force. Individual constables who were successful in their jobs
Speaker 1: could sell their services to the highest bidder, augmenting their
Speaker 1: official duties with what was essentially private security work. The
Speaker 1: system made it over to the North American colonies during
Speaker 1: the first decades of the eighteen hundreds. New York City
Speaker 1: police officers were noted as being more quote private entrepreneurs
Speaker 1: than public servants. The same was true in Boston before
Speaker 1: and after the formal establishment of their police department Spitzer
Speaker 1: and School right quote. Since the main concern of the
Speaker 1: victim was restitution, they functioned then as personal injury lawyers
Speaker 1: operate today on a contingency basis, hoping to get a
Speaker 1: large part, perhaps half, of the proceeds. So cops would
Speaker 1: kind of hang around like a like a bad lawyer.
Speaker 1: They would wait to see, Oh, somebody just got robbed,
Speaker 1: somebody just got beaten up, somebody's store got broken into,
Speaker 1: and then they would show up and be like, hey,
Speaker 1: if I get that stuff back and I have half
Speaker 1: of it? Like that was those were the first cop
Speaker 1: like in the North and stuff. Yeah, before there's like
Speaker 1: really police departments, you know, So like okay, so when
Speaker 1: you it's so crazy when you think of it in context,
Speaker 1: which is like the best thing to do as somebody
Speaker 1: that really wants to understand humans, it's like, can you
Speaker 1: blame them for being like, you know, maybe maybe we
Speaker 1: should centralize this, what if? Like yeah, kind of like
Speaker 1: maybe we should come up with some sort of department
Speaker 1: that maybe above this. You know, Yeah that sucks, you
Speaker 1: know what I'm saying. So you're like, it's it's maybe
Speaker 1: it's I don't know, maybe this maybe it's a bad,
Speaker 1: bad idea of the way we're doing. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's definitely like you you you kind of transition away
Speaker 1: for everybody taking turns as the cops to like cops
Speaker 1: being basically mercenaries, and people are like mercenaries kind of suck.
Speaker 1: A fan of this strike two guys like yeah, you know, yeah,
Speaker 1: so it's yes, You're you're absolutely right, Like you can't
Speaker 1: totally blame people for being like, well, what if we
Speaker 1: try to like make this a more official thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like we can identify them and it's not just like
Speaker 1: it's not just like my neighbor Dave down the street
Speaker 1: that this trust is full, Like I don't trust Dave. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, it's a shady son of a bit. It's
Speaker 1: kind of shady man. Yeah, yeah, so yeah, yeah, this
Speaker 1: was Yeah. Most police in this period worked as actually
Speaker 1: not even uniformed thugs, um, just kind of thugs protecting
Speaker 1: the businesses and streets that paid them, or as private
Speaker 1: detectives hunting down stolen goods or other criminals and a
Speaker 1: contingency basis. The system provided no real benefit for the
Speaker 1: average person and only marginal benefit for the capital holding class.
Speaker 1: See this was back before the dawn of the industrial economy,
Speaker 1: and people weren't used to the idea of just working
Speaker 1: all of the time because that was their job. Farm
Speaker 1: labor was seasonal, and skilled laborers usually didn't work more
Speaker 1: than they needed to in order to live comfortably. Law
Speaker 1: enforcement officers kind of work the same way. So these
Speaker 1: people would take enough jobs to maintain a decent lifestyle,
Speaker 1: and then when they had enough money, they'd stop working.
Speaker 1: So Suddenly the constably were like, yeah, I'm not gonna
Speaker 1: do anything for the next couple of months. Like I'm good.
Speaker 1: I had a big case, like sorry, you need help,
Speaker 1: but like why would I work right now? I don't
Speaker 1: need to and I'm not to work if I don't
Speaker 1: need to. Um. Yeah, So to make matters worse, at
Speaker 1: least for the business owning class, the way bounties were
Speaker 1: structured actually discouraged police from catching criminals. Historian James F.
Speaker 1: Richardson Rights and his History of the New York Police
Speaker 1: quote the police reports published in the newspapers in these
Speaker 1: years are filled with accounts of instances in which the
Speaker 1: property was returned with financial rewards for the police officer,
Speaker 1: but in which the criminal was not brought to justice.
Speaker 1: The officer received a larger fee or reward for recovering
Speaker 1: the stolen property than he would have received for bringing
Speaker 1: the criminal in Often the arrangement was consummated even before
Speaker 1: the robbery or burglary took place. An officer would be
Speaker 1: privy to a crime, and after its commission, would endeavor
Speaker 1: to recover the stolen property in return for a liberal reward.
Speaker 1: Part of the reward within go to the thief as
Speaker 1: a share she this is the shadow. So like you
Speaker 1: me to tell me by design, the cop was crooked.
Speaker 1: Like just yeah, it's just baked into the I am
Speaker 1: instead of like listen to what listen what Professor Evans
Speaker 1: just taught you. You know what I'm saying, I am
Speaker 1: incentivized to cheat. It is better for all of us
Speaker 1: if I just cheat, and y'all think and that's what's
Speaker 1: crazy about Like here's here's why. Like what just just
Speaker 1: pure unchecked capitalism does to your brain is you would think,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, it's just it's just competition. You know what
Speaker 1: I'm saying, Like, hey man, hey dude, if you get
Speaker 1: my stuff back, I just want you to know, like
Speaker 1: I'll pay you more if you get my stuff back.
Speaker 1: You're good at your job. I'm just gonna pay you
Speaker 1: more for it. It's like, well, I don't know, man,
Speaker 1: maybe there's a way I can get both. Yeah yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: what if I just work with the guy that's going
Speaker 1: to steal your stuff like that with a stuff he
Speaker 1: wants money, Yeah, we all win and that sit you
Speaker 1: got your stuff back, I mean it's money, like it
Speaker 1: just yeah, yeah, yeah, it's great because like a tax
Speaker 1: on rich people by I don't know, not necessarily poor people.
Speaker 1: Well maybe the thieves were, but like, yeah, that's whatever. So,
Speaker 1: up until the mid eight hundreds, policing in the cities
Speaker 1: of the American North had been a fundamentally reactive endeavor.
Speaker 1: Officers went off in response to specific criminal acts, rather
Speaker 1: than seeking to prevent set acts. You know, there were
Speaker 1: some exceptions, sometimes people will be like, well, let's hire
Speaker 1: some officers to like watch this neighborhood where we have
Speaker 1: a bunch of shops or whatever. But generally it was
Speaker 1: pretty reactive. Um and as the first major metropolitan police
Speaker 1: departments were established in the eighteen thirties and forties, this
Speaker 1: started to change. These new police departments focused on the
Speaker 1: dangerous classes. You remember hearing that in the first episode. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the dangerous classes were largely made up of poor immigrants
Speaker 1: who were seen as being fundamentally criminal. The idea began
Speaker 1: to spread that by patrolling, surveilling, and deploying force against
Speaker 1: these populations, police could stop crime from occurring. Now, whether
Speaker 1: or not someone counted as a member of a dangerous
Speaker 1: class had an awful lot to do with whether or
Speaker 1: not that person also counted as white. The full subject
Speaker 1: of what whiteness meant in the North in this period
Speaker 1: of time is much too complicated for series that's already
Speaker 1: going to be complicated. What is important to understand is
Speaker 1: that a lot of groups, again that we all lump
Speaker 1: in as white today, weren't really white yet during the
Speaker 1: mid eighteen hundreds. This included, at varying points, Germans, Italians,
Speaker 1: Jews of all national origins, and of course the Irish.
Speaker 1: Now again, as I noted in the last episode talking
Speaker 1: about this is is complicated or a fact that a
Speaker 1: lot of modern racists, or at least kind of people
Speaker 1: who like to deny the suffering of black people will
Speaker 1: claim that, like, oh, it was just as bad for
Speaker 1: the Irish, and it absolutely was not, but also anti
Speaker 1: Irish bigotry was still a motherfucker, Like there was a
Speaker 1: lot of that going around, and no one's yeah, it's
Speaker 1: from from from as someone from the black community, I'm like, okay,
Speaker 1: no one's arguing that the Irish who are not not
Speaker 1: treated unfairly. It was what they went through, It's not
Speaker 1: it was not the same. It's like, you know, I
Speaker 1: like I am a you know, cis gender heterosexual male.
Speaker 1: And when my wife got pregnant. No part to me
Speaker 1: said we're pregnant. Yeah, that's just like I can't stand
Speaker 1: when husbands say that, Yo, we're pregnant. I'm like, nigga, no,
Speaker 1: we're not. You understand what I'm saying. She is doing
Speaker 1: it while I'm in there with her, and you know
Speaker 1: you are not. I remember standing on the side of
Speaker 1: the room when my wife was about to go and labor,
Speaker 1: being like, women are magical superheroes because then I don't
Speaker 1: know a single male on earth that could do this.
Speaker 1: So I'm like, no, no, man, it is not the same. Okay,
Speaker 1: it's not the math same. We are not pregnant. Shut
Speaker 1: your mouth. All I gotta do is go get weird
Speaker 1: fucking ice cream and Dorito's. That's my job. Go get
Speaker 1: somebodyce cream and Doritos. She is cooking a human. We
Speaker 1: are not pregnant. So in the same way, I'm like, look, okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: we're both going through this experience. I'm tired to I
Speaker 1: gotta get up in you know, feed His child is
Speaker 1: three in the morning. I'm tired, But I am not
Speaker 1: the child's food source. The milk ain't coming out of
Speaker 1: my boob is coming out of her boob. It is
Speaker 1: not the same, just and it's like that's not a
Speaker 1: disk I'm not It's just it's just not the same. Like,
Speaker 1: let it not be the same, you know. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: okay that different groups suffer in different ways. It's even
Speaker 1: in the same place that Yeah, we we can, we can.
Speaker 1: We can explore the ways in which the suffering is
Speaker 1: unique and also the ways in which it has common
Speaker 1: roots of origin without conflating thing. I'm not going to
Speaker 1: play the oppression Olympics. Like, that's what I'm not going
Speaker 1: to do, not playing the oppression Olympics anyway. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: we're talking a lot about how police departments developed out
Speaker 1: of the desire for the capital holding classes to publicly
Speaker 1: fund the protection of their ship, but also the increasing
Speaker 1: populations and racial mixtures of American cities had a big
Speaker 1: impact on it too. Race riots became increasingly common in
Speaker 1: the eighteen thirties and forties as long as well as
Speaker 1: other riots. There were just a shipload of riots in
Speaker 1: this period of time, and all this unrest helps set
Speaker 1: old the growing middle class on the idea of police departments.
Speaker 1: Policing also opered offered an opportunity for non white groups
Speaker 1: of white people like the Irish to gradually gain social acceptance.
Speaker 1: The first Irish policeman in the United States is generally
Speaker 1: believed to be have been a Bostonian dude named Barney mcginniskan,
Speaker 1: which is an incredibly wow Barney mcginniskans. It's like they
Speaker 1: made him in a lab at cartoon. Yeah. So Barney
Speaker 1: mcginniskan was hired in eighteen fifty one, and a local
Speaker 1: alderman was infuriated by this on the grounds that it
Speaker 1: would create a dangerous precedent irishman. He continued commit most
Speaker 1: of the city's crime and would receive special consideration from
Speaker 1: one of their own wearing the blue Now. Mcginniskan's career
Speaker 1: lasted only three years when the nationalist, anti Catholic No
Speaker 1: Nothing Party took over the Massachusetts legislature. The Irish would
Speaker 1: not make major inroads into northern police departments until their
Speaker 1: population grew large enough that the Democratic Party realized they
Speaker 1: could guarantee Irishes by giving irishman jobs on police departments.
Speaker 1: And that's why there's kind of a stereotype of the
Speaker 1: Irish police officer today. Like the Patty wagon went from
Speaker 1: being a wagon that you throw Irish people onto on
Speaker 1: their way to jail because they're all criminals to just
Speaker 1: like a term for a cop car because all cops
Speaker 1: are Irish like that. That that change happened over the course,
Speaker 1: and it was kind of it wasn't the only thing
Speaker 1: that had to do with this, but it was kind
Speaker 1: of a part of Irish people sort of becoming white,
Speaker 1: you know, as they kind of take up positions helping
Speaker 1: to enforce the social order and stop being kind of
Speaker 1: on the fringes of it. Yeah, that's the thing that
Speaker 1: has rebellion type stuff. Okay. Yeah, So one thing all
Speaker 1: scholars seemed to agree on is that these early police
Speaker 1: departments were uniformly corrupt and violent. Local police party ward leaders,
Speaker 1: who were like local politicians in charge of neighborhoods and
Speaker 1: ship tended to appoint the police officers in charge of
Speaker 1: their neighborhoods. In society being what it was back then,
Speaker 1: these ward leaders often also owned the local cavern and
Speaker 1: ran the local gambling prostitution rackets. So if you were
Speaker 1: like if people like the equivalent of like a local
Speaker 1: like senator or whatever, or an alderman or some ship
Speaker 1: city council member, you would also own the bar in
Speaker 1: your area, and you would run like the prostitution and
Speaker 1: gambling rackets, and you would also run the police. Like
Speaker 1: that's kind of how it worked, and so everybody was
Speaker 1: it was just a bunch of gang bosses. Yeah, gang yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: And that's you know, that's not that different from the
Speaker 1: way the ancient rome worked too, to be honest, like
Speaker 1: pretty similar. Yeah. Yeah. So these ward leaders controlled both
Speaker 1: the police and the gangs um and both the police
Speaker 1: and gangs mostly of local youths who would help organize
Speaker 1: voter drives and would intimidate people into making the right
Speaker 1: choices on voting day. The first police departments then were
Speaker 1: just one of several violent tools available to these early
Speaker 1: political bosses in the big cities of the north and
Speaker 1: you know, kind of the middle of the country. It
Speaker 1: wasn't really the middle. It would have been like the
Speaker 1: fringe at that point. But like whatever, you get what
Speaker 1: I'm saying, we get it. Yeah. Police salaries were also
Speaker 1: augmented by bribes paid by the owners of illegal businesses.
Speaker 1: And I'm gonna quote again from Dr Gary Potter here,
Speaker 1: in the system of ice, organized violence and political corruption,
Speaker 1: it is inconceivable that the police could be anything but corrupt.
Speaker 1: Police systematically took payoffs to allow i legal drinking, gambling,
Speaker 1: and prostitution. Police organized professional criminals like thieves and pickpockets,
Speaker 1: trading immunity for bribes or information. They actively participated in
Speaker 1: vote buying and ballot box stuffing. Loyal political operatives became
Speaker 1: police officers. They had no discernible qualifications for policing and
Speaker 1: little if any training in policing. Promotions within the police
Speaker 1: departments were sold, not earned, police drink while on patrol.
Speaker 1: They protected their patrons vice operations, and they were equipped
Speaker 1: to use peremptory force. Yeah, yeah, yeah, all scans, scans. Yeah.
Speaker 1: What's funny to me as two is like when you
Speaker 1: from the street level. Part of the like outrage is
Speaker 1: when that cop all of a sudden, just one day,
Speaker 1: decides to ag like an upright citizen. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: and and so if if you know, it's like any
Speaker 1: other relationship to where it's like, Okay, you and your brother,
Speaker 1: your little sister, like you're all scumbags, you're all stealing,
Speaker 1: you're all you're all sneaking out, and then one day
Speaker 1: your brother goes, you know, mom, Robert's been sneaking out
Speaker 1: all week, You're like, what the so you serious? Are
Speaker 1: you serious? Bro? Like, what are you talking about? You
Speaker 1: know why I snuck out to steal you some weed?
Speaker 1: You know what I'm saying? So like, yeah, anyway, So
Speaker 1: it's like when you when you look at it from
Speaker 1: that perspective, like why somebody would in turn being like, man,
Speaker 1: you know what, I ain't got no time and I
Speaker 1: got no mercy for y'all. Don't treat you no different
Speaker 1: than anybody else, is because you don't act no different
Speaker 1: than anybody else. Yeah, it's fucking uh yeah, it is
Speaker 1: weird that like in this period to most people would
Speaker 1: have looked at like a dude who was like a
Speaker 1: fucking a pimp or uh yeah, like as the same
Speaker 1: way they would a cop, Like you guys are two
Speaker 1: sides of the same fucking coin. Yes, and then the
Speaker 1: yeah this and we'll talk in a later episode we
Speaker 1: will get to sort of the media operation that was
Speaker 1: kind of helped to form what are what up Until
Speaker 1: very recently, we're sort of the modern kind of mainstream
Speaker 1: consensus on police officers as like upstanding members of the
Speaker 1: community and ship um. But like, yeah, for a very
Speaker 1: long time, they were just seen as another kind of thug, like,
Speaker 1: yeah they're gay, Yeah, they're gay. Yeah. Now. Samuel Walker,
Speaker 1: a professor and expert on the history of police accountability,
Speaker 1: says that during this period, municipal police were used as
Speaker 1: delegated vigilantes by the empowered classes of the new United States.
Speaker 1: That's an interesting term. Now. They were men entrusted with
Speaker 1: power by those in power to use violence against again,
Speaker 1: the dangerous classes who were seen as fundamentally criminal. Interestingly enough,
Speaker 1: Walker seems to believe this idea of having delegated vigilantes
Speaker 1: grew into a central aspect of American identity. Quote, many
Speaker 1: of the worst abuses of official criminal justice agencies represent
Speaker 1: a form of delegated vigilantism. The public has tended to condone,
Speaker 1: if not encourage, police brutality directed against the outcasts of society,
Speaker 1: or the mistreatment of inmates in penal institutions. So this
Speaker 1: thing that we all recognize, I think I don't have
Speaker 1: to go into detail about this idea that like we
Speaker 1: should have delegated vigilantes. It's okay if we have people
Speaker 1: we all agree should be fucked up, that some people
Speaker 1: go fuck them up. Like this really central aspect of
Speaker 1: American culture starts in this period with this idea of
Speaker 1: like the police as delegated vigilantes to damage the dangerous classes. Wow, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know. And then yeah, it's the idea of like
Speaker 1: something built in its like in the very construction of
Speaker 1: the concept, like it's alts as. Compare this too, when
Speaker 1: you try to tell somebody that, like, hey, your story
Speaker 1: about like the founding of our nation wasn't It's not
Speaker 1: as like pretty as you think it was. Just you
Speaker 1: know what I'm saying, When you try to like start,
Speaker 1: you're missing some paragraphs. Guys. It's like how earth shattering,
Speaker 1: and just like I have to reconstruct reality. So like
Speaker 1: so when you so when you fast forward and we go, no,
Speaker 1: most of your most of our founding fathers slave owners,
Speaker 1: they weren't. They were not at all Christians. I don't
Speaker 1: know where you get this founding on Christian thing from.
Speaker 1: You know what I'm saying, Like that's earth shattering. So
Speaker 1: I think like like this one, this this series is
Speaker 1: gonna be that for people. When you're they're just like, well,
Speaker 1: then is the sky blue? Can I trust my eyes
Speaker 1: with my hands? And like like the weird this is
Speaker 1: multiverse level reality shattering for people. You know what I'm saying,
Speaker 1: when you go back as far as you go on. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I hope. So, I mean it's it's pretty it's interesting.
Speaker 1: It's interesting to me because like if you, if you,
Speaker 1: if you really sort of like dig into this idea
Speaker 1: of delegated vigilantism. Um, it's kind of a central thing
Speaker 1: that Americans believe in. Um. You you You're You're led
Speaker 1: to some uncomfortable kind of patterns or pathways of thought
Speaker 1: because like so one of the most popular methods used
Speaker 1: today even to justify the violence of the police is
Speaker 1: the supposed criminality or deviance of the people that the
Speaker 1: police are victimizing. Um. And I it's interesting to me
Speaker 1: that you can draw you really can't draw a direct
Speaker 1: line between the delegated vigilantism that started in the eighteen
Speaker 1: hundreds fucking Batman and the right wing reaction to the
Speaker 1: murder of Trayvon Martin. Yeah, like, yeah, who he's a hero.
Speaker 1: I mean it was the guy I shouldn't been back
Speaker 1: there anyway. Yeah, it's exactly. Oh my god, it's Batman's Batman.
Speaker 1: I never thought of it because I'm always like, because
Speaker 1: I'm more of the trailer. Like I'm the seventeen year
Speaker 1: odkay with a bag of skittles, cut in through a backyard,
Speaker 1: you know what I'm saying, just trying to get home.
Speaker 1: So my dad is the man, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: And if some dude is like following me, my thought
Speaker 1: is I better beat this fool to a pulp because
Speaker 1: it's scary, because I just don't want to, you know
Speaker 1: what I'm saying. So like I never thought of it
Speaker 1: as like, oh, this fool thinks he's Batman. Damn, this
Speaker 1: fool thinks he's the fucking he's the vigilante hero that
Speaker 1: Oh my god, I'm gonna check the city from scum
Speaker 1: gum shoes. It's the same, Oh my gosh, Yeah, it's white.
Speaker 1: Fucking cops have punish your patches on their fucking cars,
Speaker 1: and it's white. All sorts of people are fucking punished.
Speaker 1: Like it's it's this core, very core, even maybe even
Speaker 1: more core than this, like nebulous love of freedom that
Speaker 1: we have is like this. There should be people who
Speaker 1: beat the funk out of people I think are bad.
Speaker 1: Like it's just an origin story DNA strand, Okay, want
Speaker 1: to take an advert real quick. Yeah, you know, who
Speaker 1: won't beat the funk out of people who don't deserve
Speaker 1: it and placed desire for vigilante justice. These disembodied products
Speaker 1: that are keeping the lights on kind of constitutionally incapable
Speaker 1: of of violence as as products. Yes, on autonomously, that's
Speaker 1: not the word I'm looking for. Ontologically, that's not the word.
Speaker 1: I'm like, I don't know. Okay, we're done, We're rolling
Speaker 1: some ads, yes, all right, and we are returned. So
Speaker 1: the system of American policing would have its next major
Speaker 1: evolution in the late eighteen hundreds as a result of
Speaker 1: the growing like union movements, So obviously like the late
Speaker 1: eighteen hundreds is kind of the period in which Americans
Speaker 1: really start to unionize. There had been unions in the
Speaker 1: United States. I think the first one was seventeen seventy eight,
Speaker 1: but their existence had been fairly scattered and of kind
Speaker 1: of minimal consequence until eighteen sixties six, when the National
Speaker 1: Labor Union formed to convince Congress to limit the workday
Speaker 1: for federal workers to eight hours. For the eighteen eighties,
Speaker 1: union membership had spread widely across the private sector, and
Speaker 1: union strikes were constant across the big cities of the North.
Speaker 1: From eighteen eighty to nineteen hundred, New York had more
Speaker 1: than five thousand strikes involving more than a million workers.
Speaker 1: Chicago had seventeen hundred and thirty seven, and I think
Speaker 1: more than half a million workers. So I called these strikes,
Speaker 1: and I think modern historians call these strikes, and modern
Speaker 1: people would recognize them as strikes. But at the time, politicians,
Speaker 1: business owners, and like the wealthy classes called them riots. Uh,
Speaker 1: And they turned there's still fairly new police departments to
Speaker 1: the task of breaking up these riots. They turn. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the where riot police starts. Like all these people
Speaker 1: don't want to work more than eight hours a day,
Speaker 1: better have the cops beat the ship, like kyo yah man.
Speaker 1: I before I did music full time, like I taught
Speaker 1: high school for a todd ninth graders, you know, and uh,
Speaker 1: I just knew instinctually, you know, I was a young teacher.
Speaker 1: You know. I'm like before I thought neither, I thought seniors.
Speaker 1: And I'm like, I'm four years older than you. So
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna like I'm not gonna send you to
Speaker 1: the office, Like that's stupid. Like I'm not gonna try
Speaker 1: to act like some sort of boss here. I just
Speaker 1: figured it was real simple. I performed better for teachers.
Speaker 1: I liked, yeah, it's just that simple. So I'm just like, yeah,
Speaker 1: so I just felt like this, you know, my best
Speaker 1: the best way to have classroom management is if these
Speaker 1: kids like you. Yeah, it's the It's the thing that
Speaker 1: I said that made so much sense when I was
Speaker 1: in Rojava in Northeast Syria, which is the idea that
Speaker 1: like kind of the basic the stuff that we would
Speaker 1: consider like the core of law enforcement is like patrolling
Speaker 1: around a neighborhood making sure ship's fine. Like that's often
Speaker 1: done by like local counsels heavily made up of like
Speaker 1: old folks like fucking grandma and stuff, because like, yeah,
Speaker 1: you don't want to you don't want to be acting
Speaker 1: like a fucking piece of ship in front of your grandma,
Speaker 1: Like grandma, you know what I'm saying, Yeah, yeah, straighten up,
Speaker 1: fly right, Grandma, come around the corner. You know. So yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's the prince. So I just I've never understood
Speaker 1: how the boss and I mean I got I got
Speaker 1: like an assistant and you know, management and stuff like that.
Speaker 1: Those people on my payroll, and I just never like,
Speaker 1: why would they work? Why would I who want to
Speaker 1: work for somebody they don't like? Yeah, you know what
Speaker 1: I'm saying, Like, so if you just if you run
Speaker 1: things like I just it just seems so logical to
Speaker 1: me that you it's like two for bag security purpose.
Speaker 1: Even if I'm just go that like, I'm just trying
Speaker 1: to secure this bag. I feel like my employees should
Speaker 1: feel like I like them. Yeah. Maybe that's why I'm
Speaker 1: not a kajillionaire, because yeah, there's something I don't get
Speaker 1: caring about what people think. Yeah, man, I'll never account
Speaker 1: being accountable to feeling like I don't have to be
Speaker 1: the smartest guy in the room all the time. That's
Speaker 1: why I hired an accountant, because you better needing this
Speaker 1: shout out to my accountant to thank you, Sean. So right,
Speaker 1: yeah again, So riot police kind of get started to
Speaker 1: break up these fucking um these these what what are
Speaker 1: essentially strikes are definitely strikes um. And you know, this
Speaker 1: was a really good deal for the owners of businesses
Speaker 1: because since the police departments were now funded by the state,
Speaker 1: they got to break up strikes against their businesses without
Speaker 1: spending you know, their own money to do it, and,
Speaker 1: as Dr Potter notes, the use of delegated vigil anties
Speaker 1: to break up strikes confused the issue of workers rights
Speaker 1: with the issue of crime. So people might be sympathetic
Speaker 1: towards workers who are striking for a better deal, but
Speaker 1: they're not sympathetic towards criminals who are rioting. So you
Speaker 1: frame a strike as a riot, then you have a
Speaker 1: freer hand and just beat the ship out of everybody involved.
Speaker 1: These they're just thugs. They had drugs on them. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: definitely got it. So early police broke up strikes in
Speaker 1: the same way we're familiar with riot cops breaking at
Speaker 1: protests today unspeakable violence. But they all had subtler methods
Speaker 1: of achieving the same end. Public order arrests, which were
Speaker 1: essentially police declaring someone's behavior a crime for a non
Speaker 1: specific reason and then arresting them. These gave police a
Speaker 1: way to break up union meanings and gatherings before they
Speaker 1: could turn into strikes. In Chicago during this period, eight
Speaker 1: percent of all arrests were public order arrests of workers.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, so the infraction is y'all standing around, Yeah, yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: that's that's the that's the okay, Yeah you're loitering. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you just know you're going to jail. Yeah, allowed to
Speaker 1: stand here? Yeah. Again. You can make some comparisons to
Speaker 1: all the states that put in curfews and then suddenly
Speaker 1: said now it's illegal to be out after five, So
Speaker 1: if you're out after five, we can funk you up.
Speaker 1: Did you see it once? I forget. I think there
Speaker 1: was a few of them out here in California. One
Speaker 1: of the one of the cities was like, things you
Speaker 1: can do after the curfew, go to the store, go
Speaker 1: to the groceries, pick up your children, being stuck in traffic.
Speaker 1: Things you can't do after after curfew, gather in large
Speaker 1: groups in front of city hall. Yeah. I was just like, oh, work, okay.
Speaker 1: So yeah, really like, oh we're okay, too much free
Speaker 1: speech going on here. You gotta stop that ship. Yeah,
Speaker 1: carry cardboard signs you can't do after got it? Yeah yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: great first amendment we have. So between eighteen seventy and
Speaker 1: nineteen hundred, nearly a million workers were jailed for public
Speaker 1: order offenses and just Chicago. Now, a lot of cities
Speaker 1: also made use of what we're called tramp acts. These
Speaker 1: criminalized traveling without having a visible means of support. So
Speaker 1: if you were moving around in the city or the
Speaker 1: world and you didn't weren't you didn't have money, clearly
Speaker 1: like you didn't clearly have a job, Um, you were
Speaker 1: committing a crime. So in other words, it was illegal
Speaker 1: in a lot of cities to be an unemployed, poor
Speaker 1: person who left their home. So when workers would go
Speaker 1: on strike and would lose their jobs for going on strike,
Speaker 1: they were then breaking the law because they were out
Speaker 1: side in the city and doing something besides looking for
Speaker 1: a new job. What the I know, right, Land of
Speaker 1: the Free, Like maybe serious? How good? Lord? Pretty good?
Speaker 1: Pretty good? Yeah? And again like the arrests are of
Speaker 1: these people. So if you're talking about, like the police
Speaker 1: protecting people, who are they protecting? Who are they serving?
Speaker 1: It's not most of the people anyway. Yeah. Yeah. Tramp
Speaker 1: acts were of course not applied to members of the
Speaker 1: middle class or wealthy individuals. It was only illegal to
Speaker 1: be out and not laboring if you are a member
Speaker 1: of the dangerous classes. Meanwhile, good citizens, respectable citizens, these
Speaker 1: were all regular terms used, which again we're all kind
Speaker 1: of terms for fully white citizens with money and property. Yeah,
Speaker 1: these people were increasingly able, rather than being increasingly suppressed
Speaker 1: by the police. Those folks were increasingly able to call
Speaker 1: on the police when they felt uncomfortable or afraid. The
Speaker 1: very first alarm boxes were set up in major cities
Speaker 1: during this period of time, and these were similar to
Speaker 1: the dedicate you know in like on a college campus
Speaker 1: there will be like very well lit like police phones
Speaker 1: that like, you know, presumably if you're getting sexually assaulted
Speaker 1: or something, you'd like run over to it and call
Speaker 1: the cops. Um. This this was the same basic idea, um,
Speaker 1: and they were set up started being set it up
Speaker 1: in cities in this area, particularly in like parts of
Speaker 1: cities where they were like businesses and you know, upper
Speaker 1: upper income housing and stuff. Um. And but they were locked,
Speaker 1: so you couldn't most people couldn't actually use the alarm boxes,
Speaker 1: but local businessmen and wealthy people were all given keys
Speaker 1: because the police existed to be their on call personal security.
Speaker 1: She oh my gosh, like just all allowed in the open. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's not a lot of not a lot of i
Speaker 1: don't know, masks on it and stuff, so it doesn't
Speaker 1: even seem convenient. I'm like, if I'm not if I'm rich,
Speaker 1: and I'm being robbed. You think I got time to
Speaker 1: like figure out which key to this is. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: I don't think that was mostly them being robbed. I
Speaker 1: think they would see like, oh, there's a bunch of
Speaker 1: fucking Italians hanging out in this corner. I'd better get
Speaker 1: the cops over here to kick their asses, Like I don't.
Speaker 1: I don't want Italians on my street corner, like they're
Speaker 1: caring ing, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah, they're all there's
Speaker 1: more than one of them, must be a gang. So yeah.
Speaker 1: Thanks to the advances of technology that allowed alarm boxes
Speaker 1: to exist, property owners were able to call on the
Speaker 1: police department, which was funded by everyone's taxes, in order
Speaker 1: to protect their private wealth and increasingly just to kind
Speaker 1: of protect their sense of comfort. So policing tools developed
Speaker 1: with the need to break up strikes and riots. Patrol
Speaker 1: wagons began taking to the streets. This allowed police to
Speaker 1: easily travel in large groups and easily arrest large groups
Speaker 1: of people. Police on horseback also started to appear, because
Speaker 1: horses were seen as the most effective way to break
Speaker 1: up a group of protesters. Officers began carrying long night
Speaker 1: sticks because breaking an activist skulls was an increasing part
Speaker 1: of their job. Yeah. Throughout the later half of the
Speaker 1: eighteen hundreds, early police departments were faced with the of
Speaker 1: whether or not officers should be uniformed and given firearms.
Speaker 1: Sir Peel, the father of police work, the guy who
Speaker 1: created the London Metropolitan Police, was pretty stringently against cops
Speaker 1: packing heat. American police, though, began carrying guns independently by
Speaker 1: virtue of arming themselves years before such equipment became standard.
Speaker 1: So decades really before police departments are giving everyone a gun.
Speaker 1: Cops are just kind of buying their own guns because
Speaker 1: it is America. Yeah, and you know what, you're right,
Speaker 1: it's effective if it's just like it's like drinking again,
Speaker 1: it's like drinking bleach y. Yeah, i mean it'll cure.
Speaker 1: I mean I'm pretty sure it'll. You will. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: won't die from coronavirus. You if you drink enough bleach.
Speaker 1: If you drink enough bleach. Just like, you know what,
Speaker 1: if you really want to send everybody home, you know what,
Speaker 1: you're right, beat the ship at him with billy clubs
Speaker 1: and guns. You're right, that will end the protest. So
Speaker 1: the US police departments first started a kind of like
Speaker 1: in an organized way issuing arms to police and like
Speaker 1: the eighteen forties, um, and when this started to happen,
Speaker 1: the American public was extremely skeptical of the idea because again,
Speaker 1: we are a freedom loving people, and the idea that
Speaker 1: police would be allowed to deploy deadly force at will
Speaker 1: against citizens was extremely unpopular. At first, people are like,
Speaker 1: what the funk are you talking about? You? Like, again,
Speaker 1: these people, we all understand, these people are basically the
Speaker 1: same as thugs. And you want to you want to pay,
Speaker 1: have the state pay for them to have guns. Now, Like,
Speaker 1: that's not a great idea. Yeah, yeah, But, as Dr
Speaker 1: Gary Potter writes, quote, the value of armed paramilitary presence
Speaker 1: authorized to use indeed deadly force served the interests of
Speaker 1: local economic elites, who had wanted organized police departments in
Speaker 1: the first place. The presence of a paramilitary force occupying
Speaker 1: the streets was regarded as essential because such organizations intervened
Speaker 1: between the property and elites and property less masses, who
Speaker 1: were regarded as politically dangerous as a class. Now, these
Speaker 1: propertied classes also considered it essential that police be uniformed
Speaker 1: so that actable citizens could identify them when they needed help,
Speaker 1: and so that they would create an obvious, visible presence
Speaker 1: to clamp down on unrest by the dangerous classes. Now again,
Speaker 1: uniforms would appear kind of scatter shot in different police departments,
Speaker 1: and not for never for all of the police, but
Speaker 1: for like some units and stuff would be uniformed for
Speaker 1: a period of time. Many officers resisted uniforms because again
Speaker 1: they're basically criminals, and it made them into a target.
Speaker 1: The very first like uniformly uniformed, like everybody wears a uniform,
Speaker 1: and that's that's part of the definition of what this
Speaker 1: this group is. The very first police force for that
Speaker 1: to be standard in was the Pennsylvania State Police. This
Speaker 1: is in the United States at least, so the Pennsylvania
Speaker 1: State Police the first explicitly fully uniformed police force we
Speaker 1: have in this country. Now. The Pennsylvania State Police were
Speaker 1: formed in nineteen o three in the wake of the
Speaker 1: Great Anthracite Coal Strike of nineteen o two. For reference,
Speaker 1: the strikers were fighting for a pay increase, a reduction
Speaker 1: from ten to eight hours a day in their work day,
Speaker 1: and a fairer system for weighing coal. This strike caused
Speaker 1: the price of coal to skyrocket right as winter hit,
Speaker 1: which put enormous pressure on the state government and on
Speaker 1: the federal government to put Pennsylvania's minds back to work,
Speaker 1: because Pennsylvania's like the fucking the coal basket. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So the Great Anthracite Coal Strikers were opposed by a
Speaker 1: mix of Pinkerton's who were essentially a mercenary police force.
Speaker 1: We'll talk more about him a bit later, and the
Speaker 1: Coal and Iron Police. Now, the Coal and Iron Police
Speaker 1: was a five thousand man army run by the coal
Speaker 1: companies in Pennsylvania but empowered and funded by the State
Speaker 1: of Pennsylvania to basically do whatever they had to do
Speaker 1: to break strikes. This generally involved terrific violence, and over
Speaker 1: the course of the Great Anthracite Coal Strike, the Coal
Speaker 1: and Iron Police gunned several people down. But the strikers
Speaker 1: were able to put pressure on mine owners for a
Speaker 1: hundred and sixty three straight days, and they eventually gained,
Speaker 1: you know, modest concessions, and they didn't get a raise
Speaker 1: in an eight hour work day, but they got a
Speaker 1: ten percent raise in a nine hour work day, so
Speaker 1: you know, take what you can. Yeah, this was okay.
Speaker 1: Now I was gonna ask the question, but I answered
Speaker 1: it myself. I mixed it with like I thought maybe
Speaker 1: that was like the railway company guy that like started
Speaker 1: a city and had a Yeah, that's something else. Okay,
Speaker 1: never mind that is happening during this period, you know
Speaker 1: you're having and that the coal and iron police are
Speaker 1: kind of the same thing, like they're these communities are
Speaker 1: all miners and using state partially ely state funds, the
Speaker 1: mine companies establish a police department to keep their minds
Speaker 1: in order and really to keep their workers from striking.
Speaker 1: So the Pennsylvania State Police was established after the Great
Speaker 1: Anthracite Coal Strike or Anthracite Strike or whatever, because the
Speaker 1: state was governed by mine owners and their friends and
Speaker 1: the state wanted a dedicated paramilitary unit to violently suppress
Speaker 1: future strikes. The coal and iron police weren't good enough
Speaker 1: at their jobs, so this is where we get the
Speaker 1: first uniformed police department in US history. Is specifically, like,
Speaker 1: we didn't kill enough people last time. We needed like
Speaker 1: a force that can really funk with people who go
Speaker 1: on strike. So in our last episode, we discussed the
Speaker 1: fact that police departments in the American South of all
Speaker 1: out of slave patrols, which were essentially a counter insurgency force.
Speaker 1: That similar evolution at least occurred elsewhere in the United States,
Speaker 1: even outside of the South. In eighteen ninety eight, the
Speaker 1: United States went to war with Spain, one of the
Speaker 1: least justified wars in our long history of unjustified wars.
Speaker 1: But because Spain was at the time also a terrible
Speaker 1: colonialist empire, the US wound up fighting them for control
Speaker 1: of the Philippines. Now Spain had controlled that massive islands
Speaker 1: quite brutally, and the US continued this tradition, murdering as
Speaker 1: many as two thousand civilians battling the insurgency that followed
Speaker 1: our occupation of the Philippines. Much of this murdering was
Speaker 1: done by the Philippine Constabulary, the occupation force our government
Speaker 1: put in place over those islands. And back in the
Speaker 1: United States, the Pennsylvania State Police were formed directly an
Speaker 1: imitation of the Philippine Constabulary. So, yeah, the the and
Speaker 1: this is still the state police in Pennsylvania today. They
Speaker 1: started out as people looking at Okay, you remember when
Speaker 1: we killed we committed that quasi genocide in the Philippines.
Speaker 1: What if we take all of that advice use it
Speaker 1: to make the Pennsylvania State police and have them sunk
Speaker 1: up anyone who goes on strike. That's where the Pennsylvania
Speaker 1: State Police come from. What the okay god, Like, oh yeah,
Speaker 1: so Pennsylvania residence. The next time you see a Pennsylvania
Speaker 1: State Police car, be like, hey, man, granddad's an asshole anyway. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the Pennsylvania State Police were formed as an all white,
Speaker 1: all native meaning you know, born in the United States force.
Speaker 1: So that's what you mean by native. Yeah, exactly, white
Speaker 1: people born in the US, as opposed to white people
Speaker 1: who immigrated here, right, Like that's what they mean. Yeah, okay, buddy. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the singular purpose of the Pennsylvania State Police was
Speaker 1: to break the strikes that increasingly popped up in Pennsylvania's
Speaker 1: coal fields near the turn of the century. Mine workers
Speaker 1: tended to be a mix of Irish, German, and Eastern
Speaker 1: European immigrants. A lot of checks were in this kind
Speaker 1: of like mining population. Also lot of Russians and kind
Speaker 1: of people we don't call Russians today, but we're Russians
Speaker 1: back then because Russian was bigger um and it was
Speaker 1: only logical to the rich white mine owners and their
Speaker 1: friends in government that the same tactics that worked on
Speaker 1: undesirable races in Southeast Asia would also work on undesirable
Speaker 1: races right here in the United States. It was seen
Speaker 1: as critically important then to stop the Pennsylvania State Police
Speaker 1: from developing any kind of rapport from the people they controlled.
Speaker 1: The state police lived in special barracks is outside of
Speaker 1: the mining towns, and this was done to avoid any
Speaker 1: kind of social intermingling. The only time these people should
Speaker 1: see the folks that were policing is when they were
Speaker 1: cracking their fucking skulls the road horses to allow them
Speaker 1: to more effectively trample strikers. In nineteen o six, five
Speaker 1: thousand Windburg, Pennsylvania miners went on strike against their employer,
Speaker 1: the Berwin White Coal Mining Company. Berwin White was anti union,
Speaker 1: and the largely Slovak miners of Windbur wanted to join
Speaker 1: the United Mine Workers of America. The Pennsylvania Police responded
Speaker 1: by writing into town, murdering three adult miners and one
Speaker 1: young boy, by firing while lee into crowds, and brutally
Speaker 1: trampling anyone who fell down, and letters home to their families.
Speaker 1: The immigrant miners referred to the Pennsylvania State Police as Cossacks.
Speaker 1: Do you know what the Cossacks were? I mean, they're
Speaker 1: still around, Like, where have I heard that word? It's
Speaker 1: um it's an ethnic group in Russia. But it was
Speaker 1: during the period of the Czar. These were like basically
Speaker 1: kind of like these tribes of horse mounted warriors who
Speaker 1: the Tsar used as his shock troopers. Primarily like they
Speaker 1: fought in wars, but like their biggest job was fucking
Speaker 1: up riots and protests and comedics and genocide occasionally. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So these people who are like used to the Czar
Speaker 1: sending in his Cossacks when there's unrest to murder people.
Speaker 1: They come to the US and they see the Pennsylvania
Speaker 1: police murdering them and they're like, oh, these are like
Speaker 1: the same fucking things as the Czar's shock troopers. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The risk you know, coming across the whole ocean before
Speaker 1: airplanes just to get this what do we even doing?
Speaker 1: Like it was different here? Yeah yeah, I'm like, yo,
Speaker 1: this saying like the five will American you know American
Speaker 1: tale story I thought was I thought there was no
Speaker 1: cats in America? You know what I'm saying. This supposed
Speaker 1: to be when we get here. Yeah, yeah, yeah, y'all
Speaker 1: came by choice. So that's the part where I'm just like,
Speaker 1: why didn't y'all look at each other and be like,
Speaker 1: you know what, guys, this was a bad call. Beer's
Speaker 1: worse too, beers. So on a related note, while doing
Speaker 1: my research, I came across a January article in the
Speaker 1: Pittsburgh Post Gazette about the Pennsylvania State Police. In case
Speaker 1: you're curious about how the Pennsylvania State Police is doing
Speaker 1: to day, this article points out that in two thousand two,
Speaker 1: following a New Jersey scandal over state troopers engaging in
Speaker 1: racial profiling, the Pennsylvania State Police began collecting racial data
Speaker 1: on their traffic stops and sending it to the University
Speaker 1: of Cincinnati for analysis and to its credit. To their credit,
Speaker 1: the data revealed that the Pennsylvania State Police were not
Speaker 1: exhibiting any racial bias and who they pulled over, so
Speaker 1: that's nice. However, the data did show that they were
Speaker 1: exhibiting hell of bias when it came to who they searched.
Speaker 1: Troopers were two to three times as likely to search
Speaker 1: black or Hispanic drivers as white drivers, even though black
Speaker 1: and Hispanic drivers were vastly less likely to have contraband
Speaker 1: on their persons than white drivers. Now and again, this
Speaker 1: is pretty true across the nation, but it was specifically
Speaker 1: true for the Pennsylvania State Police. They're like three times
Speaker 1: it's likely to search you if you're black or Hispanic,
Speaker 1: but white people are the ones actually bringing all the
Speaker 1: drugs in. So when this data was made public, the
Speaker 1: Pennsylvania State Police ended their relationship with the University of
Speaker 1: Cincinnati because the University of Cincinnati show that they were
Speaker 1: being racist as hell. Uh. And the Pennsylvania State Police
Speaker 1: is now the largest of only eleven statewide law enforcement
Speaker 1: agencies in the nation who do not collect racial data
Speaker 1: during stops. Wow, so that's good, good on you. Okay,
Speaker 1: there it is Pennsylvania State Police. Yeah, if I can,
Speaker 1: if I can draw some logical like ties with this one,
Speaker 1: Like you know, why black and brown people are less
Speaker 1: likely to have contraband on them is because we more
Speaker 1: likely to be searched. That's just as reels. It's real simple,
Speaker 1: you know, like you know, so we're not gonna have
Speaker 1: it on us. Also, and and I a little a
Speaker 1: little tangent on this, but like your and it's so
Speaker 1: crazy that like it's it's all out of this fear
Speaker 1: of these you know, this dangerous class. But like the
Speaker 1: truth is, we're probably not gonna rob that Chad or
Speaker 1: Tyler or Hunter or Karen because the police will come
Speaker 1: if we rob you. So the truth is you're actually
Speaker 1: more safe than the rest of us because because if
Speaker 1: if one of us die, if one of us get robbed,
Speaker 1: please don't care, you understand I'm saying. But but I
Speaker 1: know the police come in if if Karen has issues.
Speaker 1: So it's such a like this like this this bias
Speaker 1: that like is just a reality of our life, you know.
Speaker 1: In some ways, again, I get how it's worked. If
Speaker 1: we're talking sheer pragmatism in favor for this white ruling class,
Speaker 1: which is why we called it privilege. If you can't
Speaker 1: follow along, you know what I'm saying, Like, it's but
Speaker 1: it's just it's but it's privileged, but not how you
Speaker 1: think it's. Like, it's it's different. It's not it's not
Speaker 1: the way you set it up for. Yeah, yeah, it's
Speaker 1: this thing. It's like there was that video going around
Speaker 1: of I don't know a week or so ago and
Speaker 1: maybe a wee get into the protests when like those
Speaker 1: I think it was in l A. This like big
Speaker 1: group of like white people all like recited a thing
Speaker 1: renouncing their white privilege, and I'm like, it doesn't work
Speaker 1: like that. You can't just it's guys. Thanks, Like yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm sure you feel good. But like now, if you
Speaker 1: were to get rid of the l A p D,
Speaker 1: then you actually have reduced your white privilege. That's that's
Speaker 1: a step then you have. Yeah, I'm like you could
Speaker 1: just like use it for good, you know, Like there's
Speaker 1: that I'm saying. Yeah, it's so funny. It's like we're
Speaker 1: like man, some some some somebody somebody's and it sucks
Speaker 1: to say it because I'm like I am deeply and
Speaker 1: intimately involved with and love white progressive circles. I am involved.
Speaker 1: These are my friends in my family, you know what
Speaker 1: I'm saying. Um, But it's so funny to watch them
Speaker 1: like simultaneously do the most and nothing at all at
Speaker 1: the same time, you know what I'm saying, Like, that's
Speaker 1: such a such a grand statement to be like I'm
Speaker 1: denouncing my privilege, but that literally does nothing for me.
Speaker 1: So like it's like it's it's I can't It's like
Speaker 1: I don't know, I don't know what to tell you
Speaker 1: guys like I just just you know, treatus fairly and
Speaker 1: help was to fund the police, that's all. Like, you know,
Speaker 1: you ain't gotta what fun you were wearing a kintake
Speaker 1: cloth for, Like, just make some good laws, makes some
Speaker 1: good laws. Just makes some good laws or remove bad
Speaker 1: ones either helps, just just one of the things. Yeah,
Speaker 1: thank you, I appreciate it. I see you're we're here,
Speaker 1: we're listening. I see it. Can you just like make
Speaker 1: some laws though, you know, unfuncked the funks a little bit? Yeah, anyway, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that feels like a good note to take a break on.
Speaker 1: I'm just saying, speaking of unfucking the funcknus. You know
Speaker 1: what what fuck the funcknus? More is these product We're
Speaker 1: back and we're talking about talking about for good. And
Speaker 1: one way you can use your privilege to good for
Speaker 1: good is I don't know, if you're listening and you
Speaker 1: happen to have purple heart plates and you have a
Speaker 1: bunch of friends who have to drive substances somewhere, maybe
Speaker 1: you ought to be the one driving the substances because
Speaker 1: the police aren't going to give a shit about you.
Speaker 1: That's what I'm saying that's what I'm saying, Yeah, veterans
Speaker 1: for drug smuggling, is that, yes, yes, record that, like,
Speaker 1: I'm not trying to go hard. I'm not trying to
Speaker 1: go hard at my wife progressives like I appreciate something
Speaker 1: to cast. It's just I just want to say that, Okay,
Speaker 1: this is fun day. So yeah, It's worth considering within
Speaker 1: the broader context of the development of US law enforcement
Speaker 1: that the cops did not always site enthusiastically when cap
Speaker 1: with capital when it came to struggles over labor. We
Speaker 1: previously did a two part episode on the Battle of
Speaker 1: Blair Mountain, which was a massive coal strike that ended
Speaker 1: it in an enormous, pitched battle that included aerial bombardment,
Speaker 1: machine guns, and thousands of combatants on both sides. One
Speaker 1: of the great Union heroes of that whole mess was
Speaker 1: Sheriff Sid Hatfield, who gunned down several mercenaries from the
Speaker 1: Baldwin Felts Detective Agencies. Many strikes did take place in
Speaker 1: small communities out in the middle of nowhere, and law
Speaker 1: enforcement in those places was much more kind of rooted
Speaker 1: in public spirit, these old attitudes of what law enforcement
Speaker 1: should be than kind of the new attitudes about law enforcement,
Speaker 1: and in those cases, you know, cops who were sort
Speaker 1: of like elected or brought up within the community and
Speaker 1: felt like a part of it, and the community was
Speaker 1: all union law enforcement would regularly side with the strikers
Speaker 1: in those situations, or it would at least feel too
Speaker 1: frightened of their neighbors to enthusiastically back the mind companies.
Speaker 1: And this was enough of a problem. This wasn't everywhere,
Speaker 1: but it was enough of a problem that, starting in
Speaker 1: the eighteen seventies, capitalists also began using private police as
Speaker 1: strike breakers with increasing frequency, and no private police agency
Speaker 1: did a better jop of this than the Pinkerton's. You
Speaker 1: know about the Pinkerton's. We're talking some Pinkerton's. Now, I
Speaker 1: do know about the Pinkers. Yeah, we're talking about some
Speaker 1: motherfucking Pinkerton's. She's. Yeah, we're gonna have to do a
Speaker 1: whole two partner probably in the Pinkerton's at some point.
Speaker 1: But but you can't talk about the history of US
Speaker 1: law enforcement talking about some motherfucking Pinkerton's. Yes, yeah, the
Speaker 1: cock sucking Pinkerton's to pull pull from fucking deadwood. Yum,
Speaker 1: So here it goes Alan Pinkerton was born in Glasgow, Scotland,
Speaker 1: in eighteen nineteen. His father was a policeman of the
Speaker 1: for profit freelance variety, and he was killed on the job.
Speaker 1: So Alan grew up dirt poor, laboring from an early
Speaker 1: age to help keep his family fed. He became an
Speaker 1: activist in his youth, agitating for democratic reform in Great Britain,
Speaker 1: and he was violenced by the state for speaking out
Speaker 1: against it. By eighteen forty two, he had been forced
Speaker 1: to flee the country with his wife. The pair wound
Speaker 1: up living in Dundee, Illinois, and Alan set up a
Speaker 1: barrel making business. In eighteen forty seven, twenty year old
Speaker 1: Allan Pinkerton traveled out to an uninhabited island to look
Speaker 1: for wood that he could make into more barrels, because
Speaker 1: that was his thing. He found a campsite there, and
Speaker 1: the camp site was abandoned but clearly fresh. And because
Speaker 1: he was a born and bred cop, this guy was
Speaker 1: like kind of in his fucking bones a cop, Alan
Speaker 1: decided not to mind his own damn business. He returned
Speaker 1: to that night and hid nearby until the camp's occupants,
Speaker 1: a group of counterfeiters, returned. Alan instantly went to the
Speaker 1: sheriff and reported them and the gang was arrested. So
Speaker 1: not my kind of dude, but like fundamentally a cop,
Speaker 1: like emotionally a cop. So ounterfeitting was a massive problem
Speaker 1: for business owners in the early United States, and the
Speaker 1: local merchants made Pinkerton into a hero for busting this group.
Speaker 1: He started getting offers to investigate other crimes, and very
Speaker 1: quickly Allan Pinkerton had become the go to man for
Speaker 1: busting counterfeit coin operations in Illinois. He was soon deputized
Speaker 1: by the sheriff of Kane County, Illinois, and in eighteen
Speaker 1: forty nine he became the city of Chicago's first full
Speaker 1: time detective. By eighteen fifty, Allen founded Pinkerton's Detective Agency.
Speaker 1: In less than twenty years, it had expanded to include
Speaker 1: branches in New York and Philadelphia. Allen quickly expanded outside
Speaker 1: of just detective work. He created Pinkerton's Protective Police Patrol,
Speaker 1: a group of uniformed night watchmen that local businesses could
Speaker 1: hire to protect their shops. Pinkerton Men, some of whom
Speaker 1: were women, also acted as undercover cops, often feeding information
Speaker 1: on criminal syndicates directly to regular police. The Pinkerton's grew
Speaker 1: to become a legendary force in the Old West, helping
Speaker 1: to hunt down criminals like Jesse James. And there is
Speaker 1: some moral complexity years. This isn't an easy story because
Speaker 1: while Alan Pinkerton was absolutely just a total fucking cop,
Speaker 1: he was also a really staunch and consistent abolitionist. Part
Speaker 1: of what drew him to hunt down Jesse James was
Speaker 1: the fact that James had been an enthusiastic Confederate soldier. Pinkerton, meanwhile,
Speaker 1: had worked for the Underground Railroad and had helped to
Speaker 1: guard Abraham Lincoln. But even when Pinkerton targets were clearly
Speaker 1: bad people like James, their methods were often still unaccountably brutal.
Speaker 1: The Pinkerton Agency actually rated Jesse James's house. It was
Speaker 1: basically like a no knock raid that they carried out,
Speaker 1: and they fucked up and attacked during a time when
Speaker 1: James was not present, and instead, during the raid they
Speaker 1: blew off his mother's arm and murdered his eight and
Speaker 1: a half year old younger brother. Um like, yeah, this, this this,
Speaker 1: this is a fucking no knock right. Yeah, So again,
Speaker 1: even when they picked the right bad guys. They wound
Speaker 1: up murdering an eight year old. She's not great, not great.
Speaker 1: So later in life, Alan Pinkerton hit upon the brilliant
Speaker 1: idea of writing semi fictionalized accounts of the most famous
Speaker 1: detective cases in Pinkerton history, and these books became some
Speaker 1: of the very first true crime stories in the history
Speaker 1: of literature. But while the agency was famous for tales
Speaker 1: of sleuthing and daring do while confronting bandits and bank robbers,
Speaker 1: the bulk of the Pinkerton Agency's business came from protecting
Speaker 1: capital by fighting labor. The first Pinkerton strike breakers were
Speaker 1: hired in eighteen sixty six when miners in Illinois went
Speaker 1: on strike and the mining company needed protection for their scabs,
Speaker 1: which are the people like the company brings in to
Speaker 1: work the mines when the workers refuse. Now, over the years,
Speaker 1: the Pinkerton's developed a standard set of procedures, with armed
Speaker 1: men escorting scabs into factories and mines while Pinkerton guards
Speaker 1: and towers aimed machine guns at strikers to keep them away.
Speaker 1: Alan Pinkerton died in eighteen eighty four, and his son
Speaker 1: took over the agency and doubled down on strike breaking.
Speaker 1: By eighteen nine two, the Pinkerton's had helped to break
Speaker 1: seventy seven strikes. Now, after eighteen ninety two, though the
Speaker 1: agency really stopped doing as much over at strike breaking.
Speaker 1: They shifted more into industrial espionage and infiltrating labor movements
Speaker 1: rather than confronting them with guns. And the reason for
Speaker 1: this was because of a vicious battle that took place
Speaker 1: in the town of Homestead, Pennsylvania. Here we go, Yeah,
Speaker 1: the Homestead strike. So Homestead was a steel town built
Speaker 1: around and for a huge steel plant owned by the
Speaker 1: Carnegie Steel Company. You know, you've all we all here
Speaker 1: know the Carnegie Foundation. We hear about him in like
Speaker 1: PBS and ship. Yeah, this is where that money comes from.
Speaker 1: So in eighteen ninety the price of rolled steel products
Speaker 1: has started to fall, and the manager of the Homestead plant,
Speaker 1: a dude named Henry Frick, decided to cut wages. Neither
Speaker 1: his wages nor his boss are Andrew Carnegie's wages were
Speaker 1: to be cut, of course, and in fact have maintained
Speaker 1: their wages. They had to take the company losses out
Speaker 1: of their workers pockets, and they decided the best way
Speaker 1: to do that was to destroy the Amalgamated Association of
Speaker 1: Iron and Steel Workers, which was at the time the
Speaker 1: nation's largest craft union. Now here's where it gets interesting,
Speaker 1: because Andrew Carnegie was, you know, one of the good
Speaker 1: ones if we're talking about millionaires, Like, that's how a
Speaker 1: lot of people would have viewed him at the time. Um,
Speaker 1: he was vocally pro labor, Like he made public statements
Speaker 1: in favor of labor and saying that unions had a
Speaker 1: reason to exist. And this was in keeping with his
Speaker 1: reputation as a philanthropist, you know, a millionaire you could trust.
Speaker 1: But of course, the instant his profits were threatened, Carnegie
Speaker 1: had no time for the union anymore and resisted, uh
Speaker 1: like efforts. Yeah exactly. So like he's he's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: unions are fine when the money is good, but when
Speaker 1: his money has threatened, union's gotta go. That's Andrew Carnegie. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it sounds about right, sounds about right. So in the
Speaker 1: in the spring of eight two, Carnegie instructed Frick to
Speaker 1: push company workers to make as much steel as possible
Speaker 1: before the union contract expired that June, because the union
Speaker 1: contract expired and then they were gonna have to negotiate
Speaker 1: a new one, and the union didn't want to make
Speaker 1: less money, but Carnegie wanted to pay them less. So
Speaker 1: if the union had failed to accept the new terms
Speaker 1: that Carnegie and Frick offered, Andrew was just going to
Speaker 1: have the plant managers shut the factory down until the
Speaker 1: laborers were lented. He wrote to Frick, we approve of
Speaker 1: every anything you do. We are with you to the end.
Speaker 1: Now Carnegie wasn't physically with Frick. How of course, he
Speaker 1: was off at one of his many palaces. This one
Speaker 1: was in Scotland, just kind of chilling um. So Frick
Speaker 1: was left to figure out how to confront labor on
Speaker 1: his own. And I'm going to quote now from a
Speaker 1: write up on the strike and PBS is American Experience Series.
Speaker 1: With Carnegie's carte blanche support, Frick moved to slash wages.
Speaker 1: Plant workers were responded by hanging freaking effigy. The union
Speaker 1: fought not just for better wages, but also for a
Speaker 1: say in America's new industrial order. Though Carnegie and Frick
Speaker 1: had brought unions to heal at their other mills, Homestead
Speaker 1: remained untamed. Workers believed that because they had worked in
Speaker 1: the mill, they had mixed their labor with the property
Speaker 1: of the mill, explains historian Paul Krauss. They believed that
Speaker 1: in some way the property had become theirs, not that
Speaker 1: it wasn't Andrew Carnegie's, not that they were the sole
Speaker 1: proprietors of the mill, but that they had an entitlement
Speaker 1: to the mill. And I think in a fundamental way,
Speaker 1: the conflict at Homestead in two was about these two
Speaker 1: conflicting ideas of property. Now, on June, Freak announced that
Speaker 1: he would no longer negotiate with the union. Now he
Speaker 1: would only deal with the workers individually. Leaders had amalgamated.
Speaker 1: We're willing to consider eat on almost every level except
Speaker 1: the dissolution of their union. On June nine, despite the
Speaker 1: union's willingness to negotiate, Frick closed down his Open Heart
Speaker 1: and Armor Plate mills, locking out thirty men. So there's
Speaker 1: a lot that's interesting here. One of them is that
Speaker 1: like a lot of these guys, you know, these these
Speaker 1: guys aren't super educated, they haven't read you know, their
Speaker 1: marks or whatever, but they kind of recognized this idea
Speaker 1: of like, oh, you know, not that like worker. They
Speaker 1: weren't like workers should own the means of production, but
Speaker 1: they were like workers should co own the means of production. Yeahatly,
Speaker 1: that's kind of the idea. These guys kind of come
Speaker 1: to of their own accord. Now, the union men desperately
Speaker 1: tried to contact Andrew Carnegie once a Frick closed the plant,
Speaker 1: because again they thought he was a good guy, like
Speaker 1: he'd said that unions were okay. They thought that he
Speaker 1: just didn't understand what was really happening because he was
Speaker 1: so distant, and if they if they could let him
Speaker 1: know how bad things for the were for them and
Speaker 1: how bad Frick was treating them, then he would back them.
Speaker 1: But of course Andrew Carnegie didn't give a shit about
Speaker 1: these people. He was on vacation and he had no
Speaker 1: time for them. He did, however, have time for Frick.
Speaker 1: He advised Frick that now was their time to destroy
Speaker 1: the union, believing that his workers would surely give it
Speaker 1: up if it meant keeping their jobs, even it reduced salary.
Speaker 1: His workers disagreed. Only seven hundred and fifty homestead men
Speaker 1: had belonged to the union before all this happened, but
Speaker 1: three thousand of the plants thirty eight hundred workers agreed
Speaker 1: to strike once Frick closed the doors. Now to combat them.
Speaker 1: Frick built a fortress to keep them out, including a
Speaker 1: twelve ft high, three mile long fence topped with barbed wire.
Speaker 1: Deputy sheriffs were sworn in to man the fence with rifles.
Speaker 1: But those sheriffs and their families lived in Homestead, and
Speaker 1: when three thousand of their neighbors marched on Fort Frick,
Speaker 1: as it was known, all these deputy sheriffs were like,
Speaker 1: I'm not I'm not gonna kill all these people I
Speaker 1: live with. Like, that's that seems like a bad call.
Speaker 1: So they laid down their arms and left. Now workers
Speaker 1: then occupied the plant and effectively took over the entire
Speaker 1: town of Homestead. For the very first time in American history,
Speaker 1: laborers had quite literally seized the means of production. Now
Speaker 1: Andrew Carnegie was not a fan of this. They didn't
Speaker 1: take it lie down. Well, he actually probably was lying
Speaker 1: down in Scotland, but he hired a bunch of armed
Speaker 1: Pinkerton's to not take it lying down for Yeah, So
Speaker 1: the Pinkerton's, three hundred and some out of them got
Speaker 1: on a bunch a couple of barges and attempted an
Speaker 1: aquatic landing at Homestead, essentially a sort of capitalist normandy,
Speaker 1: or more accurately, Gliboli. The heavily armed Pinkerton's expected this
Speaker 1: to be like any of the other dozens of strikes
Speaker 1: they broken. You know, they might have to gun down
Speaker 1: a few people, but these dirt poor factory serves surely
Speaker 1: would not be able to compete with their modern Winchester rifles.
Speaker 1: Three D mercenaries with modern guns were sure to be
Speaker 1: enough to break Homestead's resistance. And again, Carnegie and Frick
Speaker 1: had underestimated the men of Homestead, as one leader recalled,
Speaker 1: to be confronted with a gang of loafers and cutthroats
Speaker 1: from all over the country coming here there as they
Speaker 1: thought to take their jobs. Why they naturally wanted to
Speaker 1: go down and defend their homes and their property with
Speaker 1: their lives, with force if necessary. Course. Yeah, and defend
Speaker 1: their lives the men of Homestead did. When the Pinkerton's landed,
Speaker 1: they were warned not to step off their barge. When
Speaker 1: they ignored that warning, people started fucking shooting at them,
Speaker 1: and a huge gun battle began. And yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: where's that movie? I know there might be a movie
Speaker 1: about it. They probably there should be. More so, the
Speaker 1: Pinkerton's used their steel barges as floating bunkers, firing out
Speaker 1: at a crowd of homestead citizenry. The homesteaders had shipped
Speaker 1: for guns, mostly a handful of hunting rifles and old muskets,
Speaker 1: but they had a lot of those, and they also
Speaker 1: had a twenty pound cannon that they got from somewhere.
Speaker 1: They had dynamite, which they tossed like grenades. A local
Speaker 1: hardware merchant donated all of the ammunition in his store
Speaker 1: to the crowd, and for twelve hours the gun battle
Speaker 1: raged on. By six am the next day, more than
Speaker 1: five thousand spectators from Pittsburgh had shown up to watch
Speaker 1: from the river banks. At eight am, Yes, like a
Speaker 1: live movie. Yeah, we're gonna go see the war. There's
Speaker 1: a war going on next all. Yeah, I guess I'll
Speaker 1: take a look. Yeah. By eight am, the Pinkerton's had
Speaker 1: tried to land again. Workers fired their cannon and attempted
Speaker 1: to scuttle the barges by ramming them with both a
Speaker 1: burning raft and a burning railroad car. None of this
Speaker 1: quite worked. Yeah, they were. They were really giving it
Speaker 1: a shot. They committed just like look, look you hold Yeah,
Speaker 1: we can't shoot through these barges. But we can throw
Speaker 1: giant flaming things at the barges and that'll probably funk
Speaker 1: them up a bit. Now, none of this sunk the barges,
Speaker 1: but the sheer rate of fire from the crowd was
Speaker 1: terrifying to the Pinkerton's, who cowered inside. One recalled the
Speaker 1: noise that they made on the shore was awful, and
Speaker 1: it made us shake in our boots. We were pinned
Speaker 1: in like rats, and we went at the fighting like
Speaker 1: desperate wild men. All of the men were under the
Speaker 1: beds and bunks, crying and trembling. Another Pinkertons were called.
Speaker 1: It was a place of torment when men were lying
Speaker 1: around wounded and bleeding and piteously begging someone to give
Speaker 1: them a drink of water, but no one dared to
Speaker 1: get a drop, although water was all around us. It
Speaker 1: was a wonder we did not all go crazy or
Speaker 1: commit suicide. The Pinkerton's tried to surrender four times, and
Speaker 1: each white flag they rose up was shot down by
Speaker 1: a sniper on the like, we're not done shooting it,
Speaker 1: you guys yet, Friendship. Yeah. Eventually, though the crowd did
Speaker 1: except the Pinkerton's surrender, The mercenary cops were led onto
Speaker 1: the shore, beaten and clubbed and pelted with stones as
Speaker 1: they were taken to the local jail and eventually sent
Speaker 1: out of town by train. Three to eight Pinkerton's were killed,
Speaker 1: along with a similar number of strikers, and dozens and
Speaker 1: dozens of people were wounded. It was a victory for
Speaker 1: the laboring folks of Homestead, but sadly, not one that lasted.
Speaker 1: Frick next asked the governor to send in the militia,
Speaker 1: and since the state government basically existed to serve the
Speaker 1: desires of wealthy mine owners and the like, the government
Speaker 1: said yes. The strikers knew better than to try to
Speaker 1: do battle with the militia who had machine guns, and
Speaker 1: so they surrendered. Yeah. Yeah, Homestead was put under martial law.
Speaker 1: Carnegie was able to move in his scab workers, and
Speaker 1: of course this is where things get morally complex again
Speaker 1: because the scab workers Carnegie picks were a lot of
Speaker 1: them were black, UM and in fact, these were like
Speaker 1: the very first black steel workers in the state UM.
Speaker 1: And this led to a horrible race riot, as two
Speaker 1: thousand white union men assaulted fifty black families and a
Speaker 1: number of people were badly injured in the resulting gun battle.
Speaker 1: And this is a regular story throughout the labor movement,
Speaker 1: is like, our workers are on strike, black people, we
Speaker 1: can bring them in, we can pay them less um
Speaker 1: and like it'll, it'll. Like they don't like there's not
Speaker 1: a solidarity between these poor black and these poor white people.
Speaker 1: Um for obvious reasons, because poor white people real shitty
Speaker 1: to poor black people. But like it provided an opportunity
Speaker 1: for people at Carnegie. Yeah, yeah, who desperately needed work.
Speaker 1: And yeah, yep, yep, not great. It's complicated, complicated history here.
Speaker 1: So by November of eighteen nine two, the Amalgamated Union
Speaker 1: was finished. Strike leaders were charged with murder and a
Speaker 1: hundred and sixty union men were charged with lesser crimes. Now,
Speaker 1: local juries did refuse to convict them, because again the
Speaker 1: juries were made up of the people who had taken
Speaker 1: part in this uprising. But this was the end of
Speaker 1: unionization in Homestead for a while. Once victory was well
Speaker 1: and truly achieved, Carnegie cabled Frick Life worth Living again,
Speaker 1: first happy morning since July. To celebrate, he immediately cut wages,
Speaker 1: expanded the work day of twelve hours, and fired five people,
Speaker 1: good stuff, good stuff. But after Homestead, the Pinkerton's were
Speaker 1: never quite the same, and it would be fair to
Speaker 1: say that the whole experience made the agency a lot
Speaker 1: less willing to go engage in physical aggression. But the
Speaker 1: agency still exists to this day and still works as
Speaker 1: a private police force for the rich and powerful. In
Speaker 1: two thousand and eighteen, when workers for Frontier Communications went
Speaker 1: on strike in West Virginia and Normal Virginia, the company
Speaker 1: hired the Pinkerton Agency, now part of Securitas, a massive
Speaker 1: Swedish corporation. Pinkerton basically acts as a rentable FBI for
Speaker 1: mega corporations dealing with labor disputes. I'm gonna quote now
Speaker 1: from a write up in The New Republic. Okay, wait
Speaker 1: before you quote this, Yeah, yeah, yeah, did you say
Speaker 1: West Virginia regular Virginia? I sure did that? Is I
Speaker 1: say this as a statement of act. I attribute no value,
Speaker 1: good or bad to this statement. But West Virginia is
Speaker 1: a time warp. I'm like, West Virginia is currently a
Speaker 1: hundred years ago. Yeah, it's not regular Virginia. Yes, that's
Speaker 1: so when you said that, and it's something that you know,
Speaker 1: I'm in a group text with a bunch of different
Speaker 1: touring artists, like we're all just homies, but we all
Speaker 1: talked about like yo, I feel like West Virginia is
Speaker 1: back to the future, Like it's the Internet hasn't been
Speaker 1: invented in West Virginia, Like we don't what why is
Speaker 1: this state forty years ago? Yeah? Yeah, it's a trip
Speaker 1: to me anyway, So West Virginia and regular Virginia. Just
Speaker 1: I I almost feel vindicated that I'm not I'm not
Speaker 1: the only person me and my eight friends and the
Speaker 1: only people that feel like, yeah, I understand what's happening
Speaker 1: in West Virginia right now. Like I feel like everyone
Speaker 1: who has driven from regular Virginia to West Virginia immediately
Speaker 1: had the realist Asian like, oh, I'm not in regular
Speaker 1: Virginia any this is in Virginia anymore. I don't even
Speaker 1: know why it's both called. Yeah, should change on name
Speaker 1: because this is this is not the same North Carolina
Speaker 1: South Carolina. A few differences Carolinas, but you're Carolinas Virginia,
Speaker 1: West Virginia. That's a different planet. I mean, I'll say
Speaker 1: there's a big South Dakota North Dakota split. But also
Speaker 1: why the two there's like nine people in both spaces.
Speaker 1: Come Poppy Seeds is nine people poppy seeds in Dakotas. Yes,
Speaker 1: all right, we've anyway, I just read the quote. I
Speaker 1: just had to acknowledge regular Virginia. That's how I feel.
Speaker 1: That's how I feel. Yeah. So in the modern day,
Speaker 1: the Pinkerton Agency, basically and it's just called Pinkerton, now
Speaker 1: acts as a rentable FBI for megacorporations fucking over their workers.
Speaker 1: And I'm gonna quote now from a write up in
Speaker 1: the New Republic. Pinkerton is hardly the only firm to
Speaker 1: advertise such services, but its history sets it apart, and
Speaker 1: the company embraces its legacy. With one to Pinkerton, you
Speaker 1: gain access to our global networker resources, providing boots on
Speaker 1: the ground when and where you need them. It promises
Speaker 1: a securitis aid for the firm, lists labor demonstrations as
Speaker 1: among the risks it can monitor. Trouble can happen anytime anywhere.
Speaker 1: A narrator in tones tones tone is just was so
Speaker 1: treating like a physical response to that, Like God, Yeah,
Speaker 1: the Pinkerton promise is attractive to some Silicon Valley firms.
Speaker 1: The Guardian reported on March sixteenth that Facebook and Google
Speaker 1: have both retained Pinkerton to monitor staff for leaks. Among
Speaker 1: other services, Pinkerton offers to send investigators to coffee shops
Speaker 1: or restaurants near a company's campus to eavesdrop on employee conversations.
Speaker 1: Olivia Salon reported, Pinkerton's still out there, still fucking with labor. Yeah,
Speaker 1: just just rich boy hall monitors. Yeah. What if they relaxed, bro? Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know how you know how little accountability the FBI
Speaker 1: has currently? What if it just had none? Okay, guys,
Speaker 1: stay with me here, FBI that we could pay to
Speaker 1: do whatever we want. Yeah. Yeah, Like you know how
Speaker 1: that FBI agent who was doing a backflip at a
Speaker 1: club and accidentally shot that guy when his gun fell out,
Speaker 1: You know, he got in trouble. What if there was
Speaker 1: even less accountability than that. I almost I almost forgot
Speaker 1: that happened. Yeah, that happened. Yes, good lord. Wow. So
Speaker 1: prop we're at the end of another episode, another chapter
Speaker 1: in police history. UM, I haven't as of yet finished
Speaker 1: writing the third episode, but we're going to talk some
Speaker 1: about the KKK, We're gonna talk some about lynchings. We're
Speaker 1: gonna talk some about how the police departments stopped lynchings
Speaker 1: by just deciding to torture black people instead. It's not
Speaker 1: gonna be It's not pretty good. Yeah, talking about l
Speaker 1: APD recruiting Southern people from post gym. Yeah, we're gonna
Speaker 1: have to talk about that something. Yeah, we have a
Speaker 1: lot more to talk about, but yeah, for now, what
Speaker 1: we should talk about is your plug doubles. Yes, uh
Speaker 1: prop hip hop dot com. Uh, that's all the poetry
Speaker 1: in the in the music and the art and the
Speaker 1: uh the coffee paraphernalia and the podcasts um hood politics
Speaker 1: and the red couch pod couches me and my wife
Speaker 1: hood politics exactly what it sounds like. I'm basically taking
Speaker 1: all that you know about politics and just explaining them
Speaker 1: in street terms, um as to a lot of ways.
Speaker 1: I just I really just want people to like realize
Speaker 1: your politicians aren't smarter than you. You just you You
Speaker 1: think you're you think you don't belong at the table.
Speaker 1: But what I'm trying to tell you is what this
Speaker 1: whole episode in series has proven. They just people and
Speaker 1: they just gang banging. They're just gang bang it. So
Speaker 1: if you understand, if you accept that your politicians are
Speaker 1: gang bang years in all, this is just gang life.
Speaker 1: You can understand politics. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah that's
Speaker 1: the thing. I like that Nobody Speak video that like
Speaker 1: it did real well. It's like, you know, this is
Speaker 1: like all these people, these are just different gangs, and
Speaker 1: we decide this gang gets all the respect. This's just
Speaker 1: basically it. You know, when when okay, so when we
Speaker 1: all know, I mean, I like, really, name a Republican
Speaker 1: politician that actually likes Donald Trump. Like y'all don't like him,
Speaker 1: but I get it. He's from your hood. So since
Speaker 1: he's from your hood, you keep your mouth shut in public.
Speaker 1: That's just that's why nobody's that's why he told the
Speaker 1: lines like from my hood. I can't. I mean, he's
Speaker 1: from my hood. I get it. Yeah, don't you don't
Speaker 1: you sell a shirt that says, uh, yes, you have
Speaker 1: a shirt that politics is just gang banging or something
Speaker 1: like that. Yeah, politics is gangbanging in nice suits. Yeah
Speaker 1: that's the T shirt. And I actually I'm gonna help
Speaker 1: your plug. I ordered a worst Year Ever T shirt.
Speaker 1: It's not here yet store they'll get it. Look at
Speaker 1: that synergy. I like the one he has a shirt
Speaker 1: that store, that says a Republican democrat, I'll wake. I
Speaker 1: was like, okay, I need that. I need that immediately.
Speaker 1: I do want to while we're talking about gangs and
Speaker 1: what they are in reality, I wanted to, have you
Speaker 1: ever heard of Smedley Butler? Prop I want to talk
Speaker 1: about Smedley Butler for just a second. Before he put
Speaker 1: down put Smedley Butler was a major general. He's one
Speaker 1: of the highest decorated soldiers in US history. Home did
Speaker 1: one two Medals of honor Um for gallantry under fire,
Speaker 1: and became a hardcore anti capitalist in in his his
Speaker 1: later days. I want to quote from like two different
Speaker 1: speeches of his. I spent thirty three years and four
Speaker 1: months in active military service as a member of this
Speaker 1: country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served
Speaker 1: in all commissioned ranks from second lieutenant to major general,
Speaker 1: and during that period I spent most of my time
Speaker 1: being a high class muscle man for big business, for
Speaker 1: Wall Street and for the bankers. In short, I was
Speaker 1: a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. She's yeah, She's yeah,
Speaker 1: Smedley Butler. Smiley Butler, you said you said that, you
Speaker 1: said the quiet thing out loud. Yeah, and it's and
Speaker 1: it's like and it's the obvious man. Yeah day, all right,
Speaker 1: all right, dude, we got some Smedley in here. We'll
Speaker 1: get back to cops on part three. Have a great one, everybody,
Speaker 1: Thank you again, prop and thank you. See you all
Speaker 1: next week with more of the Police. Not the Band,
Speaker 1: Not the Band Behind the Police is a production of
Speaker 1: i Heeart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio,
Speaker 1: visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
Speaker 1: you get your podcasts.