How The Police Defeated Lynching Via Torture

hip hop artist propaganda. Jason, how are you continuing to do pulling a ham sandwich out the damn cabinet? There we go, there we go. I don't yeah, I'm sorry, no, no, it's been hours, guys, there hasn't been enough freestyling on this podcast because I can't, No one's and shouldn't yeah, and and and I should not go right to something that would be incredible, that would be very fun you and like Glue Network asked annalists like you guys, just do a song and then just all of a sudden,

Robert Evans just wraps. Oh, man, if I had any musical talent that would be that would be cool. But yeah, we all have our gifts and My gift is reading things that are really depressing for I don't know, another ninety minutes or so, um, which is a kind of music. But yeah, anyway, Uh, we don't talk nearly enough about lynching, um today and and that's starting to change because of the recent you know, lynchings. I think we're at six right now possible lynchings. Um. But lynching has a long

and well, proud is the wrong word. I should have put proud in there. But it's a long history in the United States, and the history of lynching in the US is not entirely a racist what I mentioned this before, but actually the term came out of like people hanging British tax collectors by their thumbs and stuff. Um. Yeah, so like the first lynching victims were British people, um, and kind of had it coming because they were they

were being dicks colonialistics. Um. Obviously nobody thinks of British people and they think about lynching victims. Um. It's also fair like worth noting that during the period where lynching was most common in the United States, um, like the late eighteen hundreds to the mid nineteen hundreds, Um, not every person lynched was black. Although the vast majority were um.

Lynching was used to enforce racial terror from whites against blacks, but it was also a really common method of what we'd call, you know, thinking back to our first episode, public spirit law enforcement, you know, communities dealing with people that they saw as problematic, some of whom were surely guilty, some of them probably who certainly weren't. I found one analysis of four thousand, four hundred and sixty seven lynching

victims from eighteen eighty three to ninety one. Four thousand and twenty seven victims were men, were women, in three forty were of unknown or more accurately, nobody wrote down what the gender was. Three thousand, two hundred and sixty five of these four thousand, four hundred sixty seven victims were black, one thousand and eighty two were white, seventy one were Mexican, and thirty eight were American Indian, while

ten were Chinese and one was Japanese. All of these numbers are, of course, likely somewhat low, because we'll never know the total number of people who were lynching victims UM. Now, historians who studied lynching generally divided into three separate regimes. The Wild West, where lynching was mostly white people lynching a lot of other white people in areas where there just wasn't law enforcement in a way, so like this

was like how you dealt with people who were a problem. Um. And then there was the slavery regime, which was found in former slave states were lynching existed as a form of social control against black people. And then a smaller regime of lynching on the Texas Mexican border where Latinos were lynched by white Texans. So there's a kind of the three broad areas that most lynchings during the lynching period in the U S history kind of come come

down to. Uh. Um. Now, in all of these cases, law enforcement was about as likely to support any given lynching as it was to oppose it. Uh. There are many cases and the lynchings of white and black people alike where police officers would just hand over their keys to an angry mob to let them in the jail. Sometimes this was due to the officers supporting the crowd's efforts. A lot of times it was simple pragmatism, because a ton of lynch mobs would burn down jails when the

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

fucking loved vigilante violence, still kind of do. But like, oh man, historians who study this are like Oklahoma, those are like the yeah. Um. And this was particularly the case in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Now, the Sooner State was in general a big lynching state. It was number eleven in the nation for lynchings, and Oklahoma was famous for having a public that loved taking justice into its own hands. We're gonna talk about the Tulsa race riot of nine in a bit and the burning a black Law Street, um,

Wall Street and on Law Street. Um yeah. And and obviously this is in the consciousness of a lot more white folks recently because the TV show Watchman featured it. But the year before that all happened a mob of white Tulson's rushed the county courthouse to lynch a prisoner, a white prisoner. The local sheriff's department did nothing, and

the local police were supportive. The chief called the lynching of real benefit to Tulsa and the vicinity, but the sheriff actually got fired for kind of well you're not fired, like we're called for standing down, uh to this lynching. And again, historians will often note that prior to the race riot or racist riot of nineteen Tulsa had relatively

minimal history of mass violence from white people against black people. Right, We're not gonna say it was like congenial friendly relations between the races, but like the racist riot in ninety one was really it was shocking to a lot of people because yet hadn't happened before ul Yeah, and and if you think about it, like it's logical because the black community had time to develop infrastructure and flourish and stuff like that, because they're relatively just like, look, you

stay over there, we stay over here, we'll figure this out. And yeah. One of the kind of actually one of the precipitating factors of that is that like in the weeks before the racist riots, some like local white preachers and stuff. Had started getting very very angry about the fact that white people were starting to hang out with black people in parts of town and like developing friendships and like using it like and that was like they

were like, this has to stop. Yeah, it's like the weird part of like the ven diagram of like racism and capitalism and just normal friendship to where you're like, I don't know, this rest the run is just it's good food. So I came down here. Yeah, they're way better at my Yeah, yeah, it's better. It turns out, contrary to what my uncle Dave told me, that's a nice lady, that's a nice food networks here. I don't know. It's kind of cool. It's good food, it's good company.

I don't understand the problem. You know. I'm starting to think racism might not be the right call. I'm starting to think maybe we benefit from having these folks in our community. Now now, now we're time to shoot, I guess. So. Yeah. So, in the years after World War Two, large numbers of veterans of both races had come back to Tulsa and armed themselves in fear of escalating interracial tensions in Muskogee. In nineteen sixteen, an armed black crowd had stopped a lynching.

In May of nineteen one, prior to the Big Racist Riot, an armed group of black citizens had again stopped the lynching of a black man for an alleged rape. Now about lynchings of black men nationwide were justified because the crowd accused the black man of rape or sexual assault

in some way. Now, only about two percent of incarcerated black people nationwidehead were actually convicted of rape, So we can assume that the vast majority of these lynchings um were unjust right um because the anyway what occurred, and Tulsa later in reinforces this suggestion. On Monday, a young black man named Dick Rowland gotten to an elevator that also contained a young white woman. We will never know

exactly what happened. The most common story here is that he likely tripped and bumped into her and she freaked out and the police were called. There's a bunch of different stories around this. Nobody knows what happened, but white black guy walks into an elevator with a white woman. White woman screams, black guy runs away. He gets tracked down and arrested by two officers, one of whom was black, and these men were sheriff's deputies. So Dick wound up

in the care of the sheriff's office. And the sheriff was a guy named Williard McCullough. He'd gotten his job as a result of the lynching of that white guy a year earlier, which his predace sessor had let happened, and Willier didn't want to make the same mistake. So a crowd of angry white folks formed outside the jail, which is pretty much standard procedure in Oklahoma when a black man was accused of this kind of crime. The police chief and again there's a police chief, and there's

a sheriff. The police chief, a guy named Gustafsson, warned the sheriff to take Roland out of town. H The sheriff refused, arguing that the kid was safer in jail than in an open car, and he may have been right about that. The police chief felt that moving him out of town would disperse the crowd, and he may have been right about that. Um, we don't know exactly how it started, but you know, basically, a black crowd with a lot of guns showed up next to the

white crowd who had a lot of guns. And at some point there was a struggle between an armed black guy and a white guy and the black fella's gun went off or he fired it again, we don't know. But it turned into a giant, fucking mob of of white rioters gutting down black people. Black people shooting back in self defense. And it will continue to talk about how it gets worse. This is not an episode about the burning of Black Wall Street. We will have to

cover that in more detail one of these days. Like, Yeah,

there are a couple of points I should make. Um, I will say this before you get to this point, like there's an interesting thing that happened there all the way to Emmett Till and to like, um, this this particular moment is like just this idea of like weaponizing the white woman, you know, and um, in a in a, in a, it's just this weird mix of just how social and supremacy and stuff like that works where it's like you can use her fear, you know that was

implanted in her. You know what I'm saying, uh, as an excuse to carry out violence towards black men, right, and play the whole damsel and distress thing, you know what I'm saying, and then them being their own white women having their own versions of oppression, right and misogyny, being like, well, this is a way to get these men to do something for me, like a position of power which evolves into the Karen's you know what I'm saying.

But it's just essentially like just you're you're It's almost like yo, your oppressor has weaponized you, and now you've become that, you know what I'm saying. So just the like the awareness of just that, the mind scramble that which is it's like I said, it's your own unique thing, just this idea like the voice of the white woman.

You know, that's like there's there's history there, like Karen, don't come out of nowhere, and but Karen, don't understand that you're being leveraged, you know what I'm saying, to carry out voices of of of violence. And then now it's almost like now you're participating in that same violence,

you know what I'm saying. So like I don't know, it's just such an interesting thing like how interlocking systems of oppression work, you know what I mean, and like and how it all like keeps power in the same place. Interlocking system. That's a really important term, um, because I do think there is a tendency and a lot of groups to like, Oh, no, racism is rooted in capitalism. Racism is rooted in you know, religion, Racism is rooted in class, Racism rooted this or that. Racism is rooted

has a lot of roots. It's like it's like a hedgerow. That's why it's so hard to remove, Like you dynamite like hedgerows by these gigantic, sometimes centuries old, like huge fucking plant walls that existed in the exists in a bunch of places, specifically like in France during World War Two. They were used as like to stop tanks. And the only way to get rid of a fucking hedgerow, because there's so many roots and they're so deep and so tough, is to fucking dynamite it, like up right. Yeah. Yeah.

So again, this is not an episode about the burning up Black Wall Street and Tulsa, but there are a

couple of points I should make about Tulsa. In this period, Uh, it was unusual for having a large organized black community that controlled a really sizeable section of Town, Greenwood, Um, and that you know black Wall Street is it was called had its own banks, its own theaters, of vibrant business community, good schools, and this relative prosperity was really unusual for black communities in the South, which is why

it was called black Wall Street. Another thing I should note is what historian Carol Anderson wrote in her book White Rage quote the trigger for white rage inevitably is black advancement. It is not the mere presence of black people that is the problem. Rather, it is blackness with ambition, with drive, with purpose, with aspirations, and with demands for full and equal citizenship. So powerful, man, Yeah good, it's powerful.

Yeah yeah. Yeah. The comedian clip that would I Forget Home his name that was going around that where where he was just like, look, man, we're asking for the bare minimum. Like even the Civil rights movement that wasn't even equal rights, were just like just just civil yeah, you know, just just basic. I'm just saying black lives matter, yeah, like not like they're not. I'm not saying they're in important. I'm not saying they matter more than you're. It's just

just just matter, you know. So like you said, like just and and and and the ambition of Black America sparked so much rage. Michael Chase Special Yeah, yeah, yeah, and that's yeah. So two large mobs gather at the courthouse again, one white, one black. The white mob clearly wanted to just murder Roland, who was the kid who you know got in trouble. Uh, and you know they were in the mood to burn down the courthouse if the cops tried to stop them. The black mob obviously

wanted to save their guy, um. And this was a tricky situation for the police, particularly since two weeks earlier, the state Attorney General had finished an investigation that described the Tulsa police as corrupt, poorly lead, and so poorly equipped that they had to borrow cars from their civilian friends to get to crime scenes. They were hitching rides to like, not a great police force. So that's so funny.

The over when this all are ups into violence. The overall response of Tulsa's police to the massacre followed like kind of perfectly encapsulates the different ways US cops responded to lynching. Overall, Sheriff McCullough seems to have been probably kind of your best case scenario for a white cop in this period, he had black deputies. He seems to have listened to their advice, and he basically spent the

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

case scenario before the riot even started. He looked out at a huge crowd of armed and angry white people any much smaller crowd of armed black people, and he called the National Guard to ask for their help to quote clear the streets of negros. So police chief not the same as the sheriff here. Um. Now. One of the first things that happened after the riot was that large numbers of ang gree white dudes gathered outside of the National Guard armory to demand guns. The National Guard

was like, that's not how this works. You can't get we do have some stone, We don't just hand out guns to crowds. Dude, why can't somebody be that guy, Like, why can't we interview that guy when they got to the door and and being like, Nah, no, I'm not gonna keep what are you talking about? What are you talking about? So this crowd, which included a number of uniformed police officers, went over to a local sporting goods store.

This particular store sold ammunition to the police department, so the cops in the crowd knew that it was a good place to go to get guns and ammo. They broke in and looted it so that they could go murder black people. As the looting and killing worsen, the police chief called in his entire department and began commissioning special deputies, some four hundred random white dudes who were given guns and legal authority by the police to go

commit acts of horrific violence. By dawn the next day, the black community of Tulsa had pulled back to defend Greenwood, their neighborhood. A massive army of angry white dudes, described in media at the time as a force of citizens, police and members of the National Guard, numbering fiftundred, invaded Black Wall Street from two directions. They took unarmed black

people into protective custody. They killed anyone who resisted. Once again, what had started as white violence had been portrayed by authorities as a Negro uprising, which is how like the local press covered it. And now this uprising was being squashed. The last resistance in Greenwood happened at the newly built Mountain Zion Baptist Church, when the armed black men barricaded inside refused to leave. The police and the guardsmen burned

it down. The Tulsa Police department also enlisted the help of six J and four biplane aircraft. They claimed these were four reconnaissance purposes, but there is evidence that the planes were used to firebomb and stray civilians in Greenwood. And yeah, I'm gonna quote now from Tulsa World and a write up of the riot quote. Tulsa police also seemed to have been involved in the mayhem. More than

one witness identified officers, usually out of uniform, among the arsonists. V. B. Bostick, a black deputy sheriff, was rousted from his home by a white traffic officer named Pittman, who then joined in setting fire to Bostick's house. I. J. Buck, a white Greenwood property owner, set of policemen turned him aside. When Buck tried to save one of his buildings. He said, you ain't got no business building buildings for negroes. Buck testified in court. Some three hundred black men, women and

children were murdered during the Tulsa racist riot. We will never know. They are currently in the process of excavating and what they think might be a mass grave in Tulsa. Um, but we will never know how many people died. Probably

hopefully we'll get a better count soon. But yeah, and like just try to like try to get your brain around the humanity of the moment, Like you're just you're run a barbershop, you at church, and a US military plane well all own country, you know what I'm saying, Like a civilion plane that the police that the police were had common deered. Yeah, okay, yes, billion playing at the police common deer. Like it's just just a like you just bombed my church. Yeah, Like just try to

like get your brain around net you know. Yeah, yep, yep, um yeah, it's pretty yeah, like this is sitting bad. Yeah yeah yeah. And I wonder how many listeners, uh of all races have never heard this, you know what I'm saying, Like that's the part that blow Mama's black people that don't notice. You know, it's pretty fucking wild. Um. And you know, there are two cases that I'm aware of of air power bombing, like of of people on American soil being bombed by armed airplanes prior to uh

December seventh, nineteen attack on Pearl Harbor. And it is the attack on Black Wall Street and the attack on the white you well, no, actually not just white, um, largely white, but definitely mixed race union miners in Blair Mountain during the the Union uprising there. They were also bombed and had gas bombs dropped on them too. So those are the two cases before fucking Pearl Harbor that air power was used to kill Americans. Um yeah, by Americans, Yeah,

by Americans, sure yeah um so uh yeah. In the months that followed the racist riot in Tulsa, Tulsa became

the nexus of KKK organizing in the state. There's a debate about how much role they played in an actually the racist riot, it was probably not super huge, but the clan Tulsa becomes like the fucking headquarters of the Oklahoma Ku Klux Klan in the wake of the racist riot, and before much longer, Tulsa got a new clan backed sheriff a claimed back police chief, as did many cities in Oklahoma, clan members of the city council, and of course the clan brought with it violence not just against

black people, but against Catholic and Jewish Oklahoma's The governor of Oklahoma eventually had to bring the National Guard in again to deal with the Ku Klux Klan. So yeah, yeah, that's yeah, Tulsa. Uh. And again, like again, it goes to like the like God, the clans all over the place, like why how all of a sudden, why are we

mad at Catholic and Jews? Like when when did they become a card of the conversation like that, even just even you hearing even hearing you say, it makes sense to me that the clan is like, Yo, it's cracking over here. We don't go over here and get it, get it, get it cracking. Let's take over the city. And while we're at it, you know the Catholics like the Catholics, Yeah, what the hell that got to do

with anything? You know? Yep? Yeah, yep. Uh. So lynching and again, I think really one of the ways to look at the racist right and told you this is a mass a mass lynching. Yeah, they lynched the entirety of Black Wall Street because they were angry. You know. The that young woman screaming was the excuse, but it

was anger over black success in organization. And there's stories of like black or white people looting Greenwood after they you know, arrested all of the black people in town and as they were burning it down and coming out of black houses with like furniture and property and like angrily yelling like these inwards have nicer things than a lot of white people. Like that. That was a big part of why they did this. Uh, yep. So like we want segregation, okay, cool, we don't want you to

use our money, Okay cool. Damn y'all segregated and using your own money. I guess we'll kill you. I guess I hate that, man. What do you want? I think it's pretty clear what they want. Yeah, yeah, um lynch ng's peak was probably in the eighteen nineties, but it continued to be a massive problem. I mean throughout the nineteen hundreds. Of the nineteen twenties were a pretty bad

time for lynching. Most historians will tell you that lynching is best seen as a sort of non state uh auxiliary to Jim Crow, the civilian side of the enforcement of white supremacist laws. When the law fell short in the eyes of racists, it was time for a massive mob spectacle. Lynching generally was not just about murder. Victims were usually tortured to extract confessions um and the crowd generally took souvenirs and posed with the body of the

murdered black person. These were often family gatherings that were announced on the radio. Now, I'm gonna quote picnics. Yeah, picnics very kind. Yeah, go ahead and finish in your brain. I'm not gonna say I just finished. What you think picnic? What the end of that? What that's probably your short for? Yeah, Okay,

go on. I'm gonna quote next from a book that will be a major source for this part of the episode, The Color of the Third Degree by Sylvan Niedermeyer, and he writes quote during the nineteen tens into a greater degree from nineteen twenty on, where the white elite of the South voiced growing criticism of the practice of lynching.

This changed attitude was the result of the economic modernization taking place in the region, which was accompanied by efforts to bolster the business and political ties between the southern and Northern states, along with an increasing orientation among the Southern white middle and upper classes towards the cultural values of the North. This led in nineteen thirty to the establishment of the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching a s w p L or as WHIPPLE,

under the leadership at Jesse Daniel Lames. These white women activists work primarily in church circles and their tireless work against lynching. These women disputed the traditional rationalization of this form of violence as a means of protecting white women, and argued that white men were using the code of chivalry merely as a pretext to justify violence against African Americans. Good yeah, yeah, good work, good ally ship, or whatever

you wanna call it. Uh. Nineteen twenty was actually the first year in which more lynchings were averted by law enforcement than carried out. Between nineteen thirty two and ninety two,

two hundred and ninety lynchings were stopped by police. The activism of groups like as WHIPPLE helped helped your do lynching through the nineteen twenties, and while it saw an upswing during the Great Depression, The number of lynchings dropped precipitously by the end of the nineteen thirties, and for most of the last few decades, the anti lynching campaigns were seen as a major feather in the cap of

U s law enforcement. An example about the police kind of modernizing and reforming, and of Southern cops rising to the occasion to protect black people from violence. This is wildly inaccurate. Um Niedermeyer argues with exhaustive documentation that rather than protecting black people from murder quote, law enforcement authorities in the South were generally taking initiatives to protect black

suspects from being seized by lynch mobs. Now. The way they did this was by loading suspects up into police cars, which were a new thing then and allowed for faster transport, and taking them away to distant jails. Law enforcement did sometimes use violence and even call out malicious to disperse lynch mobs, but the anger that had spawned those mobs still had to be sated, and police sayd it by making damn certain that black suspects got what those mobs

thought they deserved, a swift and violent death. Quote. In his study of the state of Kentucky. Historian George Wright comes to the conclusion that the number of executions of blacks carried out during the first decades of the twentieth century continually rose, while the number of lynchings steadily declined

during the same period. Likewise, the findings of the political scientist James W. Clark show a clear correlation in the nineteen twenties and thirties between the declining lynching violence and the growing number of convicted African American offenders who were

executed by state authorities. The available statistical data on the number of executions carried out in the United States between nineteen thirty and nineteen seventy also suggests the dwindling number of lynchings was tied to the growing use of the

death penalty. Although there is no conclusive evidence to support the theory that lynching violence was gradually replaced by the death penalty, it can be said that the legal system in the South increasingly assumed the function of maintaining social control over the black population during the early twentieth century. See that is dizzying, Yeah, caught it. It's so diggery.

It's it's like because I to to try to sort that out is to go you're you're off celter because like you said, you think, oh it's cool man, maybe they're maybe these people are evolving and they're like, no, this is I'm They're just you just want to control of your county and you just like So, the point is I can't be having these I can't be having the city think they got more power than me because I'm the law. So but they're like, but I feel you. You know what I'm saying, like low key, I feel you.

I'm just saying, you don't get to tell me what to do. So when so from the black perspective, do I can I make any distinction between that mob and this jail? No, because I still end up dead, you know what I'm saying. So, and then when we say and then like you said, all the signs we're talk about the other ones, that mass incarceration and the deputy and the law for just it's same ease. This is what we're trying to say. And here is right in your history it's SAME's. This is why we don't make

no distinction. You know what I'm saying. This is why we keep saying the orchards bad orchards. Badis apples, Yes, they're piss apples. You keep going away individual piss apples, hoping and then trying to point out one it ain't got pissed, and I'm going what it's the Yes, Oh you know what's not an apple filled with urine. First of all, I've never heard of the term piss apple. But that's great anyway. But I hope these products and services are not because they are not. They are not.

That's our one line for advertisers. No apples filled with urine. We're back, all right, Um? Cool? Uh all right. So when you really look at it through a gimlet eye, the inevitable conclusion one comes to in all of this, um is, you know, while police often enabled violence, you know of the clan in the late eight hundreds, in the early nineteen hundreds, and with the race riots in

nineteen nineteen, you know Tulsa. While police often enabled such things on an individual level, collectively, they were more than anything else powerless to stop this violence. Um. Although you could argue that didn't tryal that hard, um, but they weren't really set up to stop that violence either. And to both the state and the kind of people who tend to become police officers, that lack of control over the mob was worse for them than whatever violence the

mob was committing. Often white sheriffs and police chiefs were absolutely fine with killing black people. Would bug them? Was the disorder um because power people. In nineteen thirty three, a sociologist with the the just tremendously unfortunate name of Arthur Raper, which, oh, that's a rough one to dry out of the names. Arthur Raper published a study that suggested lynchings were most often permitted by making it clear to the mob that the alleged offender would be quickly

convicted and punished. Southern politicians came to rely on the death penalty is an easy way to appease the mob and avoid uncivilized violence. Local journalists supported the state and its massively increased rate of executions, seeing them as a victory for law and order. Yo, when I was so nice to teach high school that's a high school for a couple of years at ninth graders, And one time we went on this field trip, uh to Lacma to the Museum of um you know, the museum in in

on Libreya. And so it's four teachers to a hundred and fifty fourteen year old, right, So I had me and an other teacher had control a half of them. So I got seventy five freshmen. Right, We're walking by the park and there's a dude selling like inflatable toys, so like hammers and dolls and such like this. And at this point it's seventy five of y'all and two of us. They're gonna the kids are gonna beat each other with it. There's no You're not gonna stop these

freshmen from hurting each other with these inflatable hammers. So my thought was, Okay, if they're gonna do it, they're gonna do it. You're you're freshman, and I'm not gonna stop you. And Loki, it seems kind of fun. I'm not gonna lie to you. Seems kind of fun. So what I did was I broke them up into their

home rooms, right, and made them be feuding clans. So I made them send gladiators from their home room to the middle for the purpose of as the greatest teacher ever, for the purpose of being able to make make sure that no one gets actually injured. Right. So, because the point is the same thing that this sheriff is saying, I just need to maintain order, right, of course, I don't want you to beat each other, and well, I just don't want to lose control. It's really the point.

The point is I don't want to lose control because your mama gonna kill me if I lose one of y'all, right, and I'm probably gonna lose my job. So I don't want to lose control. But y'all gonna beat each other. So in my mind, I'm like, at least I can make sure that everyone's engaged, and I can then it's not everybody beating each other, but you all sent Gladdie is one of the funniest things. I really got reprimanded by the vice principle. But then the principal was like,

you're brilliant. Yeah, it's like that again. Uh detty problematic cop in England who was like, well, they were going to throw the statue in the river and we could either pull it out of the for later and put it back, or we could beat a bunch of our citizens for throwing a statue in the river. And that seemed like the wrong call, you know, like yeah, yeah,

um yeah. This also dovetails into. I won't go on to a long rant about my ideas for school reform, but why all children should be forced to carry claw hammers at all times in public schools, um and private schools for that matter, and all teachers to everybody should have a real big hammer. Um, that's very important to me for a variety of reasons. Yeah, I'm very pro hammer man. I don't get into that. I just found.

I just found the first thing we disagree on. There'd be a lot less statues, all kinds of statues, but a lot less of them. It would be a great lesson on like pulleys and physics. Though, I'll tell you that. Like we was like, all right, guys, this was this, this is the freshman second semester project has come up with the best pulley system to tear down a Confederate statue. Yeah, the person I could do it with the where the smallest little person in my row is able to pull

down this whole statute. That person get to a yeah, you do you pulled? You have the little kids pulled on the statue. And then you're like, and this is why Aliens didn't build the pyramids. Yes, you've figured this out, and so did the Egyptians. Yea, so did the Egyptians. Alright, alright, alright, we gotta get back to the subject. So in nine three, yeah, Arthur Raper published a study again like yeah, basically that the southern politicians came to rely on the death penalty's

a way to appease the mob and avoid uncivilized violence. Now, you can't easily get a swift conviction if you have a real trial. Obviously, remember the data we have suggests that the vast majority of black people targeted by lynch

mobs were innocent of any serious crime. Uh. If this ship went to court, even a crooked court, it would take time, and during that time, like it, like if it if you were if you were doing this the way police are supposed to handle cases like this, it would take a lot of time and then it might be yeah, it might be off. And it's way easier if you go into court with a confession, because then

you're like, well he confessed. Uh So police in this time focused on securing confessions because a suspect who confesses isn't really a suspect anymore. During the early nineteen hundreds, the a CP documented fifty one cases of forced confessions in Southern States. These were a tiny fraction of the total number of cases, which numbered in the hundreds of the thousands. The d a CPS resources were limited, and they were picking out specific cases that they were challenging

in courts. These were a percent of what was going on um In three fourths of the cases they documented, the black defendants alleged that they had been tortured into confessing by the police. The vast majority of these cases were either alleged murders or rapes. The color of the third degree goes into significant detail about a number of cases that illustrate this transition. One I want to highlight to you all is the case of the murder of

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

A lynch mob form to go and murder them, which prompted the local sheriff to call an e extra deputies and fortified the jail with machine guns and tear gas grenades. The National Guard was almost called in and a state of emergency was declared in order to preempt white mob violence. The Sheriff's department immediately set to torturing the absolute ship

out of these three kids. Confessions were quickly obtained, but when the case actually went to court, one of the young defendants began to complain that his confession had been forced out of him. Near to Meyer writes, quote Brown, who was this one of these kids, testified that after his arrest, he had been subjected to violent treatment, above all by Deputy Sheriff Cliff Dial to force him to admit the crime. He told me to come on out here that he had to heard. I told I killed

Mr Raymond. I come out of the jail house and I said, I declare I didn't kill Mr Raymond. He said, come on in here and pull your clothes off. I'm gonna get you. I said to the last that I didn't kill him. There was two more fellows about like that there, and they was whipping me. They had me behind a cross chairs kind of like that. I said, I didn't kill him. They said to put him on again, and they hit me so hard. I had to say yes, sir. Mr Cliff Dial said give the strap to me, I

will get it. He took it and he had two buckles on the end. They stripped me naked and bit me over a chair, and I just had to say it. I couldn't help it. As the court transcript shows, Brown supported his testimony by pointing to the injuries from the blows to his body. Question they whipped you hard there? Answer yes, sir, I will show you. There are places all the way up. Question did you bleed any? Answer?

Did I bleed? I sure did. Brown testified that after Dial had forced him to confess, he threatened him with additional beatings if he were canted his statement. Furthermore, he emphatically maintained that he did not kill Raymond Stewart. If I die right now, I am going to say it. I ain't never harmed Mr Raymond in my life. If they want, they can kill me because I said that, But I ain't never harmed Mr Raymond. Afterward, Henry Shields was called to the next to the witness stand. He

was another one of the boys arrested. He testified that after his arrest, he had been whipped by Deputy Sheriff Cliff Dial in the murder. In jail, Shields said that due to the relentless whipping, he eventually gave a false confession and declared that he had a hand in Stuart's murder. Mr. Cliff Dial and then come back that evening and whipped me first. I tried to tell the truth, but he wouldn't let me. He said, no, you ain't told the truth, and I tried to stick to it. He whipped me

so hard I had to tell him something. Ellington, who was the third boy who was forced subsequently to the stand, also testified that he was innocent and had been forced to confess. He stated that shortly after word of Stuart's murder started making the rounds, he was seized by a mob of roughly twenty people, several of whom were employees of the sheriff, including the previously mentioned Cliff Dial. He said that the men had tied him to a tree

and whipped him. He went on to say that a rope which had been thrown over a tree limb, was then tied around his neck and members of the mob pulled him up in the air twice to force him to divulge information about the murder. Yeah, it's pretty bad. It's real real. Yeah, you know, from a practical standpoint, like hey, you know, um, you know, rocket scientists shareff you know, if you beat me, there's evidence, so I can go Yeah, this right here, that's that's his buckle.

That's where that came from. Rocket science. And then secondly, I think remember that the To Catch a Murderer, the little series on Netflix. Remember how like when they finally showed that interrogation of the little dude that clearly was autistic, you know, and when they bullied him into saying something just so they bullied him in to say it. Yeah. We'll talk about um that in a bit, because that there's yeah that ties into this actually rather directly. Yeah.

Yeah like this so yeah, all that to say, like this isn't this is a normal practice. Yeah if yeah, if you treated your domestic partner the way that police routinely treat people in interrogations, they would have easy legal standing to get a restraining order against you and take your guns away if you own guns. Yeah, Like yes, it's emotional abuse. So um, it's worth noting that further on in their testimony, uh, these boys made statements to the effect that a great deal of the local white

population knew they were being tortured at the jail. Now they've been specifically taken to a separate, geographically isolated jail on the other side of the state line in order to hide the fact that they were being tortured. Um. This was common behavior for police around the country, But at the same time, it was important to the police that enough white people knew these black prisoners were being tortured to stop mobs from burning down one of the

jails under questioning. Officer Dial did eventually admit to having beaten the boys. He said that it was not too much for a negro, not as much as I would have done if it was left to me. That statements, yeah, yeah, yeah, And again it's people can handle a lot. That's exactly what I'm getting into. This is part of a very long standing trend in in not just law enforcement, but white racism, the idea that black will feel les pain

than white people. It's, for one thing, documented that black men and women are prescribed lower doses of pain killers by doctors for the exact same ailments as white people are prescribed higher doses. And this is like a large Black doctors do this. This is a largely unconscious thing. It's it's so deeply woven into the fabric of our society, the idea that black people feel pain somehow less than

white people. Yep, yeah, I don't even maybe that's there. Yeah, yeah, I might have something to do with police officers, for example, putting a knee on one of their necks for eight minutes and forty six seconds because you're soume, we're fine. Yeah, now, yeah, And you can draw a direct line from the whipping of slaves in the pre war South and like justifications for why that wasn't cruel. It was the only way they would learn, you know, they don't feel pain the same,

this is what you have to do. You can draw a direct line from that to officer dials abuse to the fact that, for example, today black an Hispanic people are fifty likelier in the United States to experience non lethal use of force from police. Yeah, yep, all tied together, yeah yeah. Diale and his fellow officers insisted that despite the force used, all three black boys made free and open confessions to the murder, and this convinced the all

white jerry. Part of white convinced the white Jerry is that a reverend who had been in the jail at the time testified that they had given free confessions. By the way, that reverend repeatedly referred to all of the boys as darkies. Um yeah, yeah, unbiased religious official there. Yeah. And again I'm highlighting a single case because it is important for you to know. But also this happened in every state, particularly in the South and a lot of

parts of the North. On a regular basis. Most police officers, particularly in the South, had similar participated in similar things. This was the norm, This was a common occurrence. Um yeah, uh uh. If they didn't participate, like officer dial, they were aware of other officers doing it. That's probably more common than than doing it, just because most people aren't comfortable with with carrying out random physical violence, even most police officers. Um, but they let it happen. Yeah, broadly

supported it. Yeah. Yeah. The fear that's already striking in somebody, that's like obviously the person you talk to, the sociopath, you know what I'm saying, So like the fear of being like, well, I'm not going to get in his way because he won't turn it on me. You know, this guy's crazy. Look at him. Yeah, this is crazy, I mean, um, And of course he's not crazy, Officer Dial, I have no doubt. Um was completely in possession of his white right mind, white mind, um, and not not

any way mental real. He was a He was enforcing white supremacy through violence in a way that was effective and rational. Um. Yeah, So the white jury, after a day and a half of proceedings, voted to convict all three boys of murder and have them executed. And thankfully this was a case where the double a CP managed to get involved in time. They appealed and the lives of all three young men were saved. So as happy

and ending as a story of torture can happen. Um, there's a there's a trial like right before Brown versus Board of Education that uh missed, missed all the missed all the fame because of Brown versus Board of Education. When yeah, about the white jurors like being able to like the law of saying like I have a right to be you know, tried in front of a jury of my peers, but it wasn't until after this case,

because our documents only recognized two races. So so if this is a Latino dude, and that's that's what the case was. It was a Latino dude who got in a bar fight with a Latino dude, right, But according to the eyes of the constitution, Latinos are white until this case. Right, So if you've got an all white jury, they're like, but they're still looking at a Mexican dude and he's like, dude, like, these are not my peers, Like, and then they're going, what are you talking about? You

guys are both white people. It's like, but no, where you can't you can't play it both ways, man, Like you know what I'm saying. So, so what's interesting about this case, like you said, is like, there's clear evidence, there's obvious evidence. They the dude that did it said he did it, and then the jury acquitted. You know what I'm saying, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. Um. And the case that I just related to you was only

exceptional because some version of justice was eventually done. Thanks to the hard work of the end of a cp unknowable numbers of black men and boys were tortured and executed without the end of a CP, ever, coming to their aid um just because you know, that's not a criticism of the end of a CP. The resources were limited, um, playing whack a mole man like you can't be everywhere, you know. Yeah, And the FBI did not start to really look into the problem of torture enforced confessions by

US law enforcement until ninety two. And the Bureau does again get a little bit of credit for intervening to try and protect black Americans faster than any other wing of the US government, But as near to Miyer notes, their efforts were limited in scope and saw very limited success and absolutely did not stop the problem or really arrested in any major way. Some of this has to do with the history of police torture, and this is

where we get into stuff that's both white and black history. Um, you know, in in a in a in a way um or a history of at least police abuse of both white and black people. For all of the eighteen hundreds in the first half of the twentieth century, it was not illegal for the police in the United States to torture people. Charges could be brought against the cops that they committed assaulter battery and breach of their regulations, but that was as hard to prove as you might suspect.

Some states had laws to prohibit the use of violence to force confessions, but that was not an across the board sort of thing, near to Miyer notes quote as investigative reports from that date. From this period reveal, however, penalties were rarely imposed because district attorneys, judges, and jury members were highly reluctant to limit the power and authority

of law enforcement officials. While the white press in the South generally avoided using the term torture and its reporting on cases of police violence during interrogations, the term was purposefully used by the Black press to expose and announce the violent abuse of African American suspects, often in a bid to gain public support for the fledgling civil rights struggle.

A more common and prevalent term was the third degree, which was adopted as police jargon in the late nineteenth century and entered the general American vocabulary in the early twentieth century. And I'm gonna guess most people know this term, right, that's yeah, as I say from the TV from the choree, and what that means is I'm going to torture the ship out of Yeah. Yeah, it's bad. Um yeah, so yeah, and it is like it. It is a term that was used to justify police, to dress up police torture

something else. Torture sounds like a crime. Giving them the third degree is something that like a hard bitten but goodhearted dragnet type cop has to do it. He doesn't like it, but I gotta keep a city safe, you know. Um yeah. The term really took off in the nineteen thirties, right alongside a massive increase in police use of torture. In ninety one, President Herbert Hoover established the National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement, better known as the Wickersham Commission.

It reported that the third degree was used throughout the country, most often in big cities like New York, Chicago, Detroit, and Los Angeles. In the South, torture was used to control black bodies and white mobs, but in the urban North it was just used to make cop lives easier by guaranteeing them quick convictions. People at the time were rightly angry at this, and initiatives were enacted after the

Wickersham Commission to reduce the use of the third degree. Police, for their part, denied that the third degree existed and worn with any additional legal restrictions on cops, would cause crime to rise. Yeah. Yeah, they have one tool and they use it real well. You know, yeah, well, you know, you know, if you do this, then you're gonna you're

gonna call it's gonna be more crime. And as you hear props say that, imagining it's coming from the voice of a police officer actively pulling a man's fingernails off, yes, yes, so yeah. For a long time, historians thought that government scrutiny successfully reduced the use of police torture. And maybe it did reduce it, but it did not eliminate it, and modern scholarship suggests that it just caused cops to get kgier and a little bit more clever with how

they tortured people. One way to do this was to transition to methods of torture that left no physical marks on the victims. In nineteen thirty, a New York Legal aid organization listed two cases of suspects who were brutalized by police during interrogations. Most of the torture victims were uneducated whites. Under the age of thirty. A large number of those white boys were immigrants. While black people were a minority of torture victims in the North, they were

a disproportionate percentage of the victims. Thirty six percent of New York Police Department torture victims were black men, and black people made up only five percent of New York's population. So that's follow me, now, that's pretty bad. Yeah, yeah, that ain't good. Dog. When you think of like, so when I think of like just just statistics of like okay, uh, some like some like three times three times more likely if you're a black miner boy to be tried as

an adult. Uh, and then and given the harshest, like the harshest possible sentence. It's like I used to wonder, like, okay, when like when did how did y'all pull this off? Like how like I just I couldn't, I couldn't do the math, Like okay, so like why why why try us as adults? Like I don't. I don't understand why

you think and why us more than anyone else. And then you hear stories like this to where you're like, well, yeah, I mean they you know, they routinely just you know, we could take a lot of pain and then they you know, it's well, I mean they've been torturing us for a while, you know, so like and now you know, you go you get to a time where, you know, post civil rights, where like you said, like you can't you can't just leave physical marks, and like, can I

actually torture fools? We have to figure out other ways to do it, you know, we just Yeah, it's got so you're continuing the problem. So it's like them getting cunning. That's what I'm trying to get to. Them being cunning is the tradition? Yes, yes, and then saying also this thing that you have extensive documentation of happening never happens when you're a liar. Believe us we're the cops. Yes, uh, and it gets it gets, it gets worse. I'm gonna

quote again Fromniedermeyer Um. The report by the Wickership commit Should highlighted numerous cases from Southern states in which police officers and sheriffs used batons, fists, and whips to extort confessions from black suspects. The report also documented the use of the so called water cure on black suspects, a forerunner to water boarding that US soldiers used during the

Philippine American War eighteen two. The water cure consisted of tying suspects flat on their backs and using a hose to force water into their mouths or noses until they provided the requested information and made a confession. Furthermore, the report mentioned torture methods on African Americans that included the use of electricity. One of these involved in improvised electric chair, which was used until nineteen twenty nine by the Sheriff's

office and Helena, Arkansas to extract confessions. The report also pointed to individual cases of police torture of people of Mexican origin and white suspects. The cases collected by the Wickersham Commission indicate that the vast majority of the victims in the South were African Americans, primarily men, but also women. Moreover, they showed that police torture of African Americans in the

South was already commonplace before nineteen thirty. Diverse historical studies could afirmed that this practice could be traced to the days of slavery. It never ended. They just got cunning. Yes there it is, yes, and and I love like I love how you're you're bringing out the idea that like, we're not we're not historical or visionists in the sense to say that this is a uniquely black experience. That's not to say that black have had Blacks have had

a unique experience in this. This is not a unique experience. This is a This is a continual abuse of power and a protection of wealth, resources and supremacy. And and nobody is safe. Nobody is safe. That's part of the that's part of the people started to realize a lot of liberals who would have been broadly pro police, uh, you know, have started to realize since getting tear gassed and shot with rubber bullets by the cops, like safe, if you give them the right to violently oppress one

group of people, they will start fucking with you. Yes, it's the whole, it's the whole. First, they came for the communist and I was not a communist. Like that's how it works. It's fascism, Robert. You know what isn't hopefully fascism the products and services that support this podcast, Yeah, yep, not fascism all legally antifa, Um, hopefully Yeah, we're back. Okay, So the through line, the direct line you can draw from the use of force to suppress black people during slavery,

through the KKK and lynching to the third degree. That through line is critical because what ties all of this together is a desire by white people, in particularly not just white people but white moneyed people, um in terms of who's organizing this to fight against the establishment of black autonomy and equality and sort of weaponizing the rage that white poor people feel over being poor and turning that in a racist direction. Anyway, there's a lot that

goes into this. Historian William Brundage, cited by Niedermeyer, sees white supremacy as continually contested to reign and when black people would fight back and gain the upper hand. However, briefly in this struggle, police were the most reliable tool whiteness had to fight back. This has been obvious to

serious researchers for a very long time. Swedish sociologist Gunner Myrtle wrote in a nineteen forty four study titled an American Dilemma quote the policeman stands not only for civic order as defined in formal laws and regulations, but also for white supremacy and the whole set of social customs associated with this concept. It is demanded that even minor transgressions of cast etiquette should be punished, and the policeman is delegated to carry out this function. Nineteen forty four,

Gunner saw it. Yeah, there's don't say you weren't warned. Yeah, people and tried. Yes, and yes, I love the idea that it's a Scandinavian country. Now. Yeah, the whitest dude in the world. What are y'all doing? This is a problem. Yeah. The federal government and federal law enforcement made attempts in the nineteen forties and nineteen fifties to push back against

the torture and murder of black people by police. There were numerous investigations in two different sheriffs and police departments. Some of these investigations even lad to punishments, But as we saw in the Red Summer of nineteen nineteen, at the end of the day, black Americans had to rely on themselves in order to fight back. They did this in large part through the double a CP. These cases helped to drum up both public awareness of the problem

and public support for changes to the system. You could draw an elect line between the double a CP spending decades fighting these cases. And why the murder of Emmett Till caused a massive nationwide reaction, even among a lot of white people. It's because they had laid the groundwork.

And you can make a similar case for not just the end of a c P at this point, but like why specifically the murder of George Floyd finally caused for more seeing now, Yes, because you gotta you gotta go back from like from Rodney King all the way to Mike Brown. This. Yeah, there's like it's a continual like, oh my god, enough enough. Yeah, you gotta really prepare the white majority to give a shit about the murder of a black person. Is that I guess negatively looking

at this yere yeah so um yeah. And again, the up eventually was successful through a number of cases, in in getting a series of Supreme Court decisions that significantly regulated and reduced the admissibility of forced confessions. Um. And that's that had that helped. But again regulation of the police in this regard, while it was a good thing, it did not cure the problem of confessions obtained under the third degree. It again just inspired the police to

get subtler yes. In nineteen eighty nine, Gary Dotson became the first wrongfully convicted person to be proven innocent by DNA testing, and Gary was white. If you're curious. In the decades since, more than two people have been exonerated by DNA testing. In fifty of these cases, police induced

false confessions were involved. Overall, twelve percent of overturned wrongful convictions in the last thirty years have involved a false confession, which we don't call a forced confession anymore but probably ought to. Yes, yeah, yeah, because no one falsely confesses. Yeah, they are forced to. Nobody's like, ah, you know, it's like you have a fender bender in traffic, Like I confess to rape. I'm so sorry. That was my like totally he just like, wait, you know what my bad?

Did I say? Did I say I killed that guy? No? No, I mean I didn't kill that guy. My bad. You know I thought that Tuesday, I thought you saw my Tuesday. Yeah. No, no, no, No, I didn't say I admit to murder. I said I liked Fox Molder. I've been watching rewatching the X Files recently. It's my bad. It's you know what I'm saying, Like I fumbled my words. Yeah. The most shocking example of this might be the case of the Central Park five, also in nineteen nine. In this case, a white female

jogger was beaten and raped. Five black and Hispanic children, all between fourteen and sixteen years old, were taken into custody. All five confessed, and then all five recanted their confessions, claiming they had only confessed after hours of terrifying and stressful police interrogation. They claimed that they had only admitted to committing the crime because officers had heavily insinuated they would get to go home if they did. All five

were convicted and sent to prison. Donald Trump, then a prominent con man, repeatedly urged that the boy should be executed. In two thousand two, the real rapist confessed and DNA evidence confirmed his guilt in the innocence of all five boys. They were released. The case of the Central Park five sounds remarkably similar to the case of those three boys

in Mississippi, doesn't it. Yes, and it should seem very familiar with you, because just because a certain uh uh, certain elected official was invested in making sure that they stayed in prison. Yes, yes, uh and yeah. The case of the Central Park five. Yeah, in this case, the boys you know, in the case that we read earlier, um in Mississippi, those boys were straight up physically tortured. What the Central Park five endured is much subtler, but

some people might call it torture. And this brings me to discussion of the read technique. The read technique is an interrogation tactic invented in nineteen sixty two by a former cop and a polygraph expert. You may recognize the nineteen sixty two is just right around the same time the Supreme Court said, y'all got to stop forcing people

to confess the crimes they didn't commit via torture. John Reid, the techniques creator, had a reputation for being the kind of guy who used psychology to get confessions rather than violence. The origin of his technique came from a nineteen fifty five case when a guy named Darryl Parker came home to find his wife raped and murdered. Parker was interrogated, and, according to the New Yorker quote, Reid hooked Parker up

to the polygraph and started asking questions. Parker couldn't see the movement of the needles, but each time he answered a question about the murder, Reid told him that he was lying. As the hours wore on, Reid began to introduce a story contrary to appearances. He said the Parker's marriage wasn't a happy one. Nancy refused to give Parker the sex that he required, and she flirted with other men. One day, in a rage, Parker took what was rightfully his.

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

hours of interrogation. Read opened a consulting company which, by two thousand thirteen trained more interrogators than any other company in the world, working for everything from local police to

the FBI, the CIA, in the Secret Service. The company any brags that the people that trains get their suspects to confess of the time, bro just think, think about what we're telling you right now, you have to be a absolute like Navy seal level mental agility and fortitude to defend yourself when you're innocent, like when I actually didn't do the thing. I have to be this skilled, you said, which is why you wait for your lawyer, which is why you have a right to remain silent.

Shut the fuck. Uh. Yeah, the Read technique was used on the Central Park five and numerous other people who have confessed to crimes they did not commit. Now, the Read company h and its president will say that that is not accurate, that they were not using the Read technique, and it's largely because they didn't do it right. That's what they'll claim is that, like false confessions are only there is of abuse or misuse of the technique because the technique has safeguards in it to make sure that

no false confessions are obtained by it. So when people who are trained in the Read technique get confessions from innocent people, it's not because of the Read technique, it's because they were wrongly using the Read technique. That makes it cool? Can you the pretzel you just put your body in? Wow? Okay, Yeah, it wouldn't be great to be able to just like to be able to just with a straight face and no like soul conviction. Your soul is so dead inside that you could make that

sentence and be okay with it. Yeah. It's like if I have a school that trains people to fire over the heads of crowds with assault rifles, and then some people fire into the crowds with assault rifles. Clearly none of that's my Like, I have nothing to do with that. The heads I've fled fire told you shoot over the head. Yeah, there's a safeguard to make sure no one gets hit. Uh. Yeah.

So the read technique has started to fall out of favor in the last really in the last few years, and seventeen was when like one big agency stopped sending interrogators and to be trained in it. And it this seems to have like you know you mentioned earlier. I think it was to catch a predator, right, Um that that the like the fact that a lot of interrogations are videotaped and that some of those came out in documentaries and people got to see, oh my god, is

this what cops are doing? Yeah, this isn't okay. So it is still very common, still widely in use. But the tide might seems to be turning on the read technique. We'll see. Um, it is not legal for police to beat the ship out of suspects to force a confession, not anymore, and I guess you could see even the

read technique as an improvement over literal physical torture. Um. But it is legal for police to lie about evidence, to withhold food and water from suspects for what I would consider to be long periods of time, and to subject them to verbal abuse and psychologically torture them until

they see confessing is the only way out. I can't say if the read technique is responsible from most false confessions in the modern United States, but I can't tell you the police department that is responsible for more false confessions than any other. You want to guess, No, Chicago, it was gonna be one of the two, right, Yeah, yeah, yeah.

More than thirty of all exonerations that involve false confessions were people who confessed in Illinois state, and most of those were people who confess to the Chicago p D. And the question to why is this happening has a

lot to do with a dude named John Burge. Yeah yeah, so yeah, like a little a little side note especially about what what you're talking about, like how some of these confessions happen, and how slick they are because like say, for example, you hear on the news that somebody died on Fourth Street, right, So then when you get picked up and then cops go, hey, did you hear about

the shooting on Fourth Street? And you're like yeah, and then he goes, yeah, that the that the lady was coming out of the house, and you're like, yeah, I heard that. First of all, the story wasn't that there was a shooting. The story was somebody died. So when he said did you hear about the shooting, what he's doing is making sure you just confessed to information. They said he had information about the crime. And because you

it's like, I didn't say shooting. You said shooting. Well no, no, no no, no no, I just asked if you heard about You said you heard about it. I didn't tell you. The story isn't that there's a shooting. So like how slick that type of like practice is. And you listen, I'm telling you this stuff out of experience, you know what I'm saying, Like somebody saying, hey, you hear the liquor store got robbed out. Hey you heard about that liquor store robbed Like I had to learn to be like, nah,

I ain't heard ship, I don't heard nothing. I mean, I don't know, you know what I'm saying. What mean you don't know? You're not your square, You're not part of You're not part of the streets. You know. I've seen you with your friends and I'm like, uh, sorry, I don't live here, you know, just like you have to like be Yeah. Anyway, all that to say, this stuff is like as like heinous as we're telling you.

It's so subtle and it's so slick, you know what I'm saying, Like everybody swears, Well, well, if I was in the situation, I'm like, na, you, you would do exactly what everyone else does in the situation. Yeah, yeah, which is why you don't talk and you wait for your fucking lawyer. Yes yeah. John, John motherfucking birds, John Burge is proof that the old tactics of the third degree still aren't as much a part of the past

as some folks might like to believe. John Burge was a decorated Vietnam veteran who served as a military police officer, working for a time as a provost marshal investigator during that conflict. After the war, he returned to Chicago and became a cop. In nineteen seventy two. He was promoted to detective one year later. In nineteen seventy three, he

tortured his victim. According to the Marshall Project quote, his officers had arrested a man named Anthony Holmes on suspicion of murder and wanted to him to identify an accomplice. When Holmes refused, the officers left him handcuffed in an area to investigation room and went to find Burge. A few minutes later, Bird strolled into the interrogation room with a mysterious box in a brown paper bag. The box had a hand crank on one end and two wires

with alligator clamps coming out the other end. According to trial testimony decades later, Burge then picked up the alligator clamps and barked inward, you're going to tell me what I want to know. He fastened the alligator clamps and pulled a plastic bag down over Holmes's head, warning him not to bite through it when the pain hit. Then he started turning the crank. He was electrocuting him. She's

over the next few yeah uh yeah yeah. Over the next few years, Burge continued to be his department's go to torture man. Department rumors stated that he had learned the techniques he employed during his time in Vietnam on the bodies of North Vietnamese po ws. You call we call this fucos boomerang, the tactics used in colonial wars overseas. Coming back to the United States, Birge denies that he tortured anyone in Vietnam. He also denied torturing people here,

so maybe you don't take that super seriously. Um yeah. He quickly perfected what he called his inward box, which is what he named the box he used to electrocute black people, often electrocuting their testicles. I've talked to one of Burge's victims, and that's what Birch did to him as he electrocuted his testicles with his inward box. Um yeah, there's there's a there's which is a whole other story

I want to get to. But there's this weird fascination with torturing of black genitalia with It's very common in lynching, very common in lynching, that they would be severed and even taken as like souvenirs. Yeah, and it's one of those like my eternal question putting through how much detail do I go into? We could have done six episodes on lynching, and it deserves six episodes, but not trying to give a broader No, I appreciate it like that

not being mentioned. Yeah, yeah, it's a thing because of his high case clearance rate, because he gave boy John's real good at getting criminals to confess. He's solving all these murders. Because of his high case clearance rate, John was promoted to sergent and then to lieutenant and eventually to commander. John Burge's behavior was not hidden from other men in the Chicago Police. He kept his inward box out on open display at a table in the police station.

He trained dozens of other Chicago officers in his techniques, which expanded over the years to include electric cattle prods, simulate and simulated executions. Burgess officers often beat subjects with telephone books, flashlights, batons, and bats. They burned men with hot radiators and cigarettes. They put plastic bags over the heads of others and suffocated them. This went on for

a very very long time. The end began in nineteen eighty two, when two police officers were murdered and Burge and his team tortured the ship out of a pair of black brothers until they confessed. The injuries one of them suffered were significant enough that a medical official reported on them, and that was the first crack in the

Burge system. Allegations of torture by Burge and his men, though, didn't break through the blue wall of silence until a nineteen eighty nine civil lawsuit by the People's Law Office. One of the attorneys behind this case, who later represented

many Burge victims, was Flint Taylor. He described the existence of Burge's unit as an unremitting official cover up that has implicated a series of police superintendents, numerous prosecutors, more than thirty police detectives and supervisors, and most notably Richard M. Daley, the city's former longtime mayor and a previous state's attorney. The whole story came out in bits and pieces through a mix of victims coming forward in anonymous sources within

the department. One of these anonymous sources was a cop who left again anonymous voice messages for Flint Taylor. Taylor and his fellows nicknamed this guy Deep Badge. So part of the lesson here is that after seventeen years of torture that was enthusiastically supported at every level of the Chicago p D, a couple of good cops did finally work up the courage to leave anonymous voice mails after a law year had figured out the basics of the

case and publicized them. That's what good cops get you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's like three of them and then and it takes me seventeen years to do anything. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. Burge was eventually accused of torturing more than a hundred people, virtually all of whom were black, between nineteen seventy two and nineteen ninety one. That means recent. Yeah, at this point,

we know that there's probably over two hundred victims. We will never know the true number of Birge victims because been a lot of these guys were executed, a lot of them died in prison. In the Chicago Police Board voted to fire John Burge. This interrupted plans the local Fraternal Order of Police had made that same year to honor Burge and four of their officers with a parade float. All of the other four officers were also accused of torturing people, but the time he was fired, Burge had

risen to the rank of commander. He was not charged criminally until two thousand eight and not sent to prison until two thousand eleven. He got out of prison in two thousand fourteen. Chicago has paid out millions of dollars in reparations to victims, but an unknown number of Burge's victims still remain in prison. Multiple people were released from death row as a result of all of this coming to light, but we will again never know how many

innocent men were executed. Burge died in two thousand eighteen, four years after he was released from prison. Chicago's police union issued a statement on their Facebook page offering condolences to the Burge family and insisting it does not believe the full story about the Burge cases has ever been told. Dean Angelo, former head of the Chicago Reternal Order of Police, told reporters, I don't know that John Burge got a fair shake based on all the years and years of

service that he gave the city. He insisted that Burge put a lot of bad guys in prison two thousand eighteen. The cops who believe this are still on the force. Just guys there, most of the force. Ah, yeah, guys. Yeah. Yeah, you're asking you're asking us to respect you, and it's like I would love to I would love to respect. Yeah, just do respectable things. Yeah. Yeah. You know who I respect. My my neighbor across the street who has never tortured

several hundred people. That guy, I respect him. Yeah, he's He's earned my respect by virtue of being a human being who doesn't commit random acts of violence. Yeah. It's not hard to earn respect. You just have to not yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm sure that Burge did go to his grave believing that, like what he did had been worth it, because he again put a lot of bad guys in prison. I talked to one of Burge's victims, and this guy had an extensive violent criminal record when he wound up

in Burge's hands. He had done bad things, and John probably figured we've got a crime. This guy's a scumbag fucket, he's got to be guilty. And oddly enough, that thinking, the thinking that John Burge probably used to justify his crimes. The thinking that the sh Ago Police Department in the Fraternal Order of Police in Chicago certainly uses to justify Burgess crimes even today, that thinking these guys were guilty, that thinking puts them all right in line with the

law abiding interrogators who used the read technique. Richard Leo, a law professor from the University of San Francisco, spent nine months sitting in an almost two interrogations in Oakland during the mid nineteen nineties. He learned that most officers who are again these guys, were all trained in the read technique. He learned that most officers were skipping a critical aspect of the proper read technique. That aspect is

having an initial interview with the suspect. You're supposed to like interview them, have like a normal conversation with them, and kind of decide if you think they're guilty before you move on to the interrogation. I'm going to quote from the New Yorker again. The read interrogation technique is predicated upon an accurate determination during behavioral analysis of whether

the suspect is lying. Here to social scientists find a reason for concern three decades of research have shown that nonverbal signals so prized by the red trainers, bear no relation to deception. In fact, people have little more and coin flipping odds of guessing if someone is telling the truth,

and numerous surveys have shown that police do know better. Aldert, a professor of psychology at the University of Portsmouth and England, found that law enforcement experience does not necessarily improve the ability to detect lies. Among police officers, those who said

they paid close attention to nonverbal cues did the worst. Similarly, an experiment by Cason shows that both students and police officers were better at telling true confessions from false ones when they listened to an audio recording of an interview rather than watch it on video. In the experiment, the police officers who performed less well than the students but expressed greater confidence in their ability to tell who was lying. Cops will always tell you they know how to spot

a liar they are lying. Wow, Yeah, you can't. Really, there's no way to know. Yeah, there's no way to know, you know. And I feel like in all my police interactions, Um, and I'm saying this as someone with like I don't I don't think I have a criminal record. Maybe you

know what I'm saying. But in all of the interactions I've had, whether it was overtly racist or very aggressive, or the guy was being a nice guy, or you just meet like like you guys playing a nice carrier, or you just meet like a he's just like he's like really a good dude that really doesn't care. He's

just he's just doing his job. You know. I feel like I've had all of those you know what I'm saying, um, But in the ones, invariably, you know you're being sized up, you know, and it's like so even then like this, it's just it's sometimes I'm like, why are we playing this game right now? Like this is your you're horrible actors.

I know what you're doing, you know what I'm saying. Like, and then when you when I hear you say like they were supposed to train train to do initial interview, and I know this dude is trying to build rapport with me, you know what I'm saying, um, And I'm like, I know this is okay, I know I know what you're doing. Like I know what you're doing. Okay, what time of day was it? All right, word, how tall was the guy? Okay? Cool? Uh? So I'm just like, just get to it, man, Just get to it. Let

me tell you want to know where I was? You want to know where I live? Okay, Here's where I live. Here's what I was doing at this time. Tell me what time it was? I fit, what description? Can we just get to that rather than addists riggamo, Yeah, I'm ranting. Yea. So I talked earlier about how police torture to force confessions didn't stop. It just got settler under pressure, and the same is true with the impact of racism and

law enforcement. After Jim Crow ended, the most obvious justification for bigoted policing was gone, but the bigotry remained as a system that was built almost completely during a period of time where either slavery black codes or Jim Crow laws were the rule. In Minneapolis, where black people make up nineteen percent of the population, they are subjected to fifty eight percent of use of force cases by the

city's police. A May night two and twenty studies showed that out of ninety five million traffic stops nationwide between two thousand and eleven and two thousand and eighteen, Black people were vastly more likely to be pulled over than white people, except at night, when the gap shrinks considerably Black people, because again, the cops can't tell what race you are is easily yeah, so they're not They're not able to judge this is a guilty person before the interaction. Black. Yeah.

Black people are also more likely to be searched during a stop, even though white people are more likely to actually have contraband on them. I could go on and on, but the basic point is the same. All of these cops, from Officer Dial to John Birge to current police officers who are today two and a half times likely to shoot a black man than a white one, all of these cops are making, at a certain level, the same decision. They are judging black people as guilty before they know

anything more than their skin color. And this is persistent through every single level of law enforcement in our country. Over the decades, activists and good lawyer in Supreme court justices, and even a few decent cops here and there have worked to make forced confessions and admissible in court. They have worked to report and charge police for torture. They have worked to tear down the gym Crow laws that provided legal justification for a lot of police aggression, and

yet the aggression is still there. We have learned to channel it and probably to make it less fatal. We've gotten better at punishing the most blatant expressions of it, but we have not stopped it. And American police today are still doing the same thing they have been doing since the eighteen hundreds. They are enforcing white supremacy through violence. Period. Yep, period. I'll say this in like period. I say this's like

on a personal note. So, my little brother, you know, not by blood, but we just grew up together and I lived in our house. Whatever is just you know, our families work. My little brothers is a California highway patrolment, so confession I got law enforcement in my family. My brothers worked there for ten fits years. He's never pulled a gun ever in his life, right, never has he ever pulled a weapon out. He is one of those ones, like you said that it's like reporting dudes, that's like

building community lass ons. He does it after school, he's living, he's in the valley, doesnt after school programs, runs a basketball league like the people know him. So like so so there's that my father. You know, we talked about my father. My father was a black panther. After he left the Black Panther Party because they killed it, right, he moved they be in the FBI. My father was l a county probation officer. He worked with like underage defenders.

Retired from there, right, so worked in a special handling unit. He wanted to deal with the violent ist of young offenders thirty years thirty years never at once recommended jail time, never right, because of what he's talking about, the systems designed to destroy these young black and brown men. So his answer was, let me have them. I remember as a child, like going to King Saneras and and and g D g D like graduations and stuff like that. But all these like random kids that I didn't know.

Turns out there were kids on his caseload because he was shielding them from the system. He told me stories of like looking at the judge telling the judge full well, do not send this kid to prison, do not send him to prison. The cops doing the same thing. The cops arrested this guy, showing them, showing them the transcript and being like this is a false confession. This kid is innocent. He shouldn't be on my caseload and then watching that food go to prison. You know what I'm saying.

So when you, when you, when you even in us bring all those things up to say this is that even if you find good men and good women, the system is flawed. And this is what we're trying to get to. The structure is wrong. Yes, the the these statement all cops are bastards, I think has been traditional, like historically kind of unproductive in terms of actually getting people to to u confront the real issues of of

of law enforcement. But what people mean by it is actually very accurate, which is that it is it is impossible to be like, even if you are a good person, a nice person who is a police officer and is legitimately aware of the problems and policing and trying to do your best, you are also partaking and helping to con and helping to maintain and further a system that is fundamentally abusive and enforces very supremacy and a period we are not what what we're not saying is that

all cops should never have a job in that that that like there's there's homicide detectives who are good solving murders. When we get rid of the police and replace them with something, I want those people to still be solving murders because it's good. Yeah, yes, um, you know there are. If you know a a police officer who is a great person and is is an asset to the community, that person should probably still be doing a broadly similar a lot of the same things they're doing. But there

shouldn't be I talked to cops a lot. I've talked to a lot of cops will talk about like being forced to arrest people for simple possession of drugs even though they personally agree with ending the drug war, and like, that's the problem that you're forced to do it, and that's the we don't We We decided as a as a species that just following orders is not a justification for violating people's civil rights. Yes, think about when we decided that and why, yes, and where it led and

where it started. Yeah, yes, you are hearing the cries of both my father and my brother who both were like, I don't know if I could do this much longer. Even in me trying right, I'm trying to do the right thing. I'm trying to be an advocate for these young people, like I'm doing my best, Like at least they got some by you on the side, you know what I'm saying, And you're but you're still like I'm still I'm still throwing you to the wolves. I'm just

giving you, you know, a protective jacket. But the point is I'm still throwing you to the wolves. Because this it's the the whole like it's what you're trying to say, It's like the whole thing needs a grenade. Because again, like you said, I want to be able to call somebody if my house is being broken into, of course I want to be able to call somebody, But most likely who's breaking into my house is a meth head just trying to steal the PS four because he wants

a hit. Don't kill the guy, like just I just want him out my house. And you know what, I could probably you know what, I probably won't call him because I could get him by my house because he's hot. You know what I'm saying. Yeah, it's it's this I mean. And again, when you actually we'll talk about this some next week. But when you look at, for example, homelessness, you find out that cost the state less money to give homeless people homes, then it costs to police and

incarceraate them. It costs less money to give drug addicts drugs than to police them and to deal with the results of them stealing ship for drugs they found out on like Denmark where they give heroin addicts heroin and it saves them huge amounts of money Toronto to Yeah, like safe injection zones, you don't have to police this ship. And in fact, most things shouldn't be policed. Maybe only violence should be policed exactly. If you're like I try to like as as simple as we can make it.

If my daughter comes in and she don't do her chores because she's got a cold, and I ground her, rather than say here's some tail and all, like you would be like, that's ridiculous. You've had a ground her because she got a cold. That's stupid. Okay, that's putting an addict in prison. You know what I'm saying. It's like, this is what did do you? What do you? What are you grounding? That doesn't make sense. We're ranting, Yeah, we're ranting, and um it's it's time for some plug

doubles to get plugged. Yes word. Uh all My instagrams and socials are prop hit pop. Go to prop hit pop dot com for poetry, rap, for some podcasts, for some sustainable merch, some cups, some coffee if you want to, you want to support non corporate coffee. I'm a coffee head. Hit me up. Let's talk about like Jeff tweetye and cigarettos because I am the most unicorny black dude you'd ever meet that I can talk to you about cigarettes and I am. I'm gonna keep reading and writing about

police for another week or so. Um then, um, I don't know. We'll talk about Bill Cooper or something at some point. Yeah, we have you all for some like for something like like a like a dictator. Yeah yeah, yeah, talk about somebody, somebody fun, you know, well, somebody not connected to my own safety. And yeah, well we'll do We'll talk about chairman now or somebody here. Yeah, everybody loves a good chairman mouse story, Oh my dad, or

maybe Tito Tito. Yeah, Tito was cool as hell. I mean he was a monster, but he was a cool monster. Still talking about bastards, but the point is, yeah, yeah, well we'll do something more lighthearted, but um, you can find us online it behind the Bastards dot com, where there will be sources for this episode, including the really important book The Color of the Third Degree, um, and all the other really important book The End of Policing,

both of which are important, if not easy reading. Well, actually, the end up policing is very easy reading. The Color of the Third Degree is some rough ship. Um. Yeah, and you can find me on Twitter at I right, okay, and go be a good person and disband um the American system of policing. Um, I'll do do both of those things ideally, Amen, shall we collect? Offering? Behind the

Police is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.