Behind the Bastards - Behind the Police: How The Police Defeated Lynching Via Torture
Aired: 2020-06-25
Duration: 01:48:21


=== Welcome to Behind the Police (04:40) ===

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[00:00:20]  Yes.
[00:00:20]  Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time.
[00:00:23]  I actually, I thought it was.
[00:00:24]  I got that wrong.
[00:00:25]  But hey, no one's perfect.
[00:00:26]  We're pretty close, though.
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[00:01:57]  What's fact, what's fake, and sometimes what the F.
[00:02:01]  So let's cut the crap, okay?
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[00:03:21]  On April 4th, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King was shot and killed in Memphis.
[00:03:27]  A petty criminal named James Earl Ray was arrested.
[00:03:30]  Case closed, right?
[00:03:32]  James Hill Rey was a pawn for the official story.
[00:03:37]  Some of the evidence, as far as I was concerned, did not match the circumstances.
[00:03:42]  This is the MLK Tapes.
[00:03:44]  The first episodes are available now.
[00:03:46]  Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:03:55]  Welcome to Behind the Police, a production of iHeartRadio.
[00:04:02]  Depressing shit!
[00:04:04]  I mean, hello, I'm Robert Evans, and this is Behind the Police, the podcast that's normally behind the bastards, but is for this week, last week, and next week, giving a detailed history about the, you know, the cops and such.
[00:04:21]  The systemic manifestation of white supremacy.
[00:04:26]  Yeah, and bastards.
[00:04:28]  Yeah.
[00:04:29]  And the voice that you heard that's not mine just then is Jason Petty, better known as the hip-hop artist propaganda.
[00:04:35]  Jason, how are you continuing to do?
[00:04:38]  Pulling a ham sandwich out the damn cabinet.

=== Systemic White Supremacy History (15:40) ===

[00:04:40]  There we go.
[00:04:42]  There we go.
[00:04:44]  Yeah, I'm sorry.
[00:04:45]  No, no.
[00:04:46]  It's been hours, guys.
[00:04:47]  There hasn't been enough freestyling on this podcast because I can't.
[00:04:51]  No one's rapping.
[00:04:52]  And shouldn't.
[00:04:54]  Yeah, and I should not.
[00:04:56]  Bro, let me ghostwrite you something.
[00:04:58]  That would be incredible.
[00:05:00]  That would be very fun.
[00:05:01]  You and like Glue Network astronautalists, like you guys just do a song and then just all of a sudden Robert Evans just raps.
[00:05:10]  Oh man.
[00:05:11]  If I had any musical talent, that would be cool.
[00:05:16]  But yeah.
[00:05:18]  We all have our gifts and my gift is reading things that are really depressing for, I don't know, another 90 minutes or so, which is a kind of music, but yeah.
[00:05:28]  Anyway, we don't talk nearly enough about lynching today.
[00:05:32]  And that's starting to change because of the recent lynchings.
[00:05:36]  I think we're at six right now, possible lynchings.
[00:05:40]  But lynching has a long and, well, proud's the wrong word.
[00:05:42]  I shouldn't have put proud in there, but it has a long history in the United States.
[00:05:45]  And the history of lynching in the U.S. is not entirely a racist one.
[00:05:48]  I mentioned this before, but actually the term came out of like people hanging British tax collectors by their thumbs and stuff.
[00:05:56]  Yeah.
[00:05:57]  So like the first lynching victims were British people and kind of had it coming because they were being dicks, colonialist dicks.
[00:06:06]  Obviously, nobody thinks of British people when they think about lynching victims.
[00:06:10]  It's also worth noting that during the period where lynching was most common in the United States, from like the late 1800s to the mid-1900s, not every person lynched was black, although the vast majority were.
[00:06:23]  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.
[00:06:41]  I found one analysis of 4,467 lynching victims from 1883 to 1941.
[00:06:47]  4,027 victims were men, 99 were women, and 341 were of unknown, or more accurately, nobody wrote down what the gender was.
[00:06:56]  3,265 of these 4,467 victims were black.
[00:07:02]  1,082 were white, 71 were Mexican, and 38 were American Indian, while 10 were Chinese and one was Japanese.
[00:07:09]  All of these numbers are, of course, likely somewhat low because we'll never know the total number of people who were lynching victims.
[00:07:16]  Now, historians who study lynching generally divide it into three separate regimes.
[00:07:21]  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.
[00:07:29]  So like this was like how you dealt with people who were a problem.
[00:07:33]  And then there was the slavery regime, which was found in former slave states where lynching existed as a form of social control against black people.
[00:07:40]  And then a smaller regime of lynching on the Texas-Mexican border where Latinos were lynched by white Texans.
[00:07:45]  So those are kind of the three broad areas that most lynchings during the lynching period in the U.S. history kind of come down to.
[00:07:53]  Now, in all of these cases, law enforcement was about as likely to support any given lynching as it was to oppose it.
[00:08:00]  There are many cases in 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.
[00:08:07]  Sometimes this was due to the officers supporting the crowd's efforts.
[00:08:10]  A lot of times it was simple pragmatism because a ton of lynch mobs would burn down jails when the police resisted them.
[00:08:16]  So some of this was just like, ah, well, I don't want to die.
[00:08:19]  Yeah.
[00:08:19]  There's one of me and I got a real shitty six gun.
[00:08:22]  Like, okay.
[00:08:23]  Yeah.
[00:08:24]  You're like, look, man, this job ain't worth it.
[00:08:26]  This job ain't worth it.
[00:08:27]  Yeah.
[00:08:27]  There was a lot of that.
[00:08:29]  Yeah.
[00:08:30]  Yeah.
[00:08:31]  Now, this was often the case, police kind of backing away because they didn't want their jail to get burned down and to get killed themselves.
[00:08:36]  This was often the case with lynchings in Oklahoma.
[00:08:39]  Oklahomans fucking loved vigilante violence.
[00:08:43]  Still kind of do, but like, oh man.
[00:08:46]  Historians who study this are like fucking Oklahoma.
[00:08:49]  Those are like they would, yo, this fools me a whore.
[00:08:53]  Yeah.
[00:08:55]  And this was particularly the case in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
[00:08:58]  Now, the Sooner state was in general a big lynching state.
[00:09:01]  It was number 11 in the nation for lynchings.
[00:09:03]  And Oklahoma was famous for having a public that loved taking justice into its own hands.
[00:09:08]  We're going to talk about the Tulsa race riot of 1921 in a bit and the burning of Black Law Street.
[00:09:12]  Yeah.
[00:09:13]  Wall Street, not Law Street.
[00:09:15]  Yeah.
[00:09:16]  And obviously this is in the consciousness of a lot more white folks recently because the TV show Watchman featured it.
[00:09:21]  But the year before that all happened, a mob of white Tulsans rushed to the county courthouse to lynch a prisoner, a white prisoner.
[00:09:29]  The local sheriff's department did nothing and the local police were supportive.
[00:09:32]  The chief called the lynching of real benefit to Tulsa and the vicinity.
[00:09:36]  But the sheriff actually got fired for kind of, well, not fired, but like we're called, for standing down to this lynching.
[00:09:42]  And again, historians will often note that prior to the race riot or racist riot of 1921, Tulsa had relatively minimal history of mass violence from white people against black people, right?
[00:09:54]  We're not going to say it was like congenial, friendly relations between the races, but like the racist riot in 1921 was really, it was shocking to a lot of people because that hadn't happened before in Tulsa.
[00:10:06]  Yeah.
[00:10:06]  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 were relatively just like, look, you stay over there, we stay over here, we'll figure this out.
[00:10:19]  Yeah.
[00:10:19]  And yeah, one of the kind of actually one of the precipitating factors of that is that like in the weeks before the racist riot, 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 each like, and that was like, they were like, this has to stop.
[00:10:39]  Yeah.
[00:10:40]  It's like the weird part of like the Venn diagram of like racism and capitalism and just normal friendship to where you're like, I don't know.
[00:10:51]  This restaurant is just, it's good food.
[00:10:55]  So I came down here.
[00:10:57]  Yeah, they're way better at cooking than my mom.
[00:10:58]  Yeah.
[00:10:59]  Yeah.
[00:10:59]  The food's better.
[00:11:01]  Turns out, contrary to what my uncle Dave told me, that's a nice lady.
[00:11:07]  That's a nice dude that works here.
[00:11:09]  I don't know.
[00:11:10]  It's kind of cool.
[00:11:10]  It's good food.
[00:11:11]  It's good company.
[00:11:12]  I don't understand the problem.
[00:11:14]  You know, I'm starting to think racism might not be the right call.
[00:11:18]  I'm starting to think maybe we benefit from having these folks in our community.
[00:11:22]  Oh, no, no, now we're time to shoot them.
[00:11:25]  I guess so.
[00:11:26]  Yeah.
[00:11:27]  So in the years after World War II, large numbers of veterans of both races had come back to Tulsa and armed themselves in fear of escalating interracial tensions.
[00:11:36]  In Muscogee in 1916, an armed black crowd had stopped a lynching.
[00:11:40]  In May of 1921, 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.
[00:11:48]  Now, about 25% of lynchings of black men nationwide were justified because the crowd accused the black man of rape or sexual assault in some way.
[00:11:58]  Now, only about 2% of incarcerated black people, nationwide, were actually convicted of rape.
[00:12:03]  So we can assume that the vast majority of these lynchings were unjust, right?
[00:12:08]  Yeah.
[00:12:08]  Because the, yeah, anyway, what occurred in Tulsa later in May 1921 reinforces this suggestion.
[00:12:14]  On Monday, May 30th, a young black man named Dick Roland got into an elevator that also contained a young white woman.
[00:12:21]  We will never know exactly what happened.
[00:12:23]  The most common story you hear is that he likely tripped and bumped into her and she freaked out and the police were called.
[00:12:29]  There's a bunch of different stories around this.
[00:12:30]  Nobody knows what happened.
[00:12:31]  But black guy walks into an elevator with a white woman.
[00:12:35]  White woman screams.
[00:12:37]  Black guy runs away.
[00:12:38]  He gets tracked down and arrested by two officers, one of whom was black.
[00:12:42]  And these men were sheriff's deputies.
[00:12:43]  So Dick wound up in the care of the sheriff's office.
[00:12:45]  And the sheriff was a guy named Williard McCullough.
[00:12:48]  He'd gotten his job as a result of the lynching of that white guy a year earlier, which his predecessor had let happen.
[00:12:53]  And Williard didn't want to make the same mistake.
[00:12:56]  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.
[00:13:03]  The police chief, and again, there's a police chief and there's a sheriff.
[00:13:06]  The police chief, a guy named Gustafsson, warned the sheriff to take Roland out of town.
[00:13:11]  The sheriff refused, arguing that the kid was safer in jail than in an open car.
[00:13:15]  And he may have been right about that.
[00:13:17]  The police chief felt that moving him out of town would disperse the crowd, and he may have been right about that.
[00:13:22]  We don't know exactly how it started, but basically a black crowd with a lot of guns showed up next to the white crowd who had a lot of guns.
[00:13:30]  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.
[00:13:37]  Again, we don't know, but it turned into a giant fucking mob of white rioters gunning down black people, black people shooting back in self-defense.
[00:13:43]  And we'll continue to talk about how it gets worse.
[00:13:46]  This is not an episode about the burning of Black Wall Street.
[00:13:49]  We will have to cover that in more detail one of these days.
[00:13:52]  Yeah, there are a couple of points I should make.
[00:13:55]  I will say this before you get to this point because like there's an interesting thing that happened there all the way to Emmett Till and to like this particular moment is like just this idea of like weaponizing the white woman,
[00:14:12]  you know, and 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, as an excuse to carry out violence towards black men, right?
[00:14:39]  And play the whole damsel in distress thing, you know what I'm saying?
[00:14:44]  And then them being their own white women having their own versions of oppression, right?
[00:14:50]  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 Karens, you know what I'm saying?
[00:15:02]  But it's just essentially like, just you're, you're, it's almost like, yo, your oppressor has weaponized you.
[00:15:09]  And now you've become that.
[00:15:12]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:15:12]  So just the like, the awareness of just the mind scramble that, which is it's, like I said, it's your own unique thing, just this idea of like the voice of the white woman, you know, that is like, there's, there's history there.
[00:15:28]  Like Karen don't come out of nowhere.
[00:15:30]  And, but Karen don't understand that you're being leveraged, you know what I'm saying, to carry out voices of violence.
[00:15:40]  And then now it's almost like now you're participating in that same violence, you know what I'm saying?
[00:15:44]  So like, I don't know, it's just such an interesting thing, like how interlocking systems of oppression work.
[00:15:51]  You know what I mean?
[00:15:51]  And like, and how it all like keeps power in the same place.
[00:15:56]  Interlocking system.
[00:15:57]  That's a really important term.
[00:15:59]  Yeah.
[00:16:00]  Because I do think there is a tendency in a lot of groups to like, oh, no, racism is rooted in capitalism.
[00:16:05]  Racism is rooted in, you know, religion.
[00:16:08]  Racism is rooted in class.
[00:16:09]  Racism is rooted in this or that.
[00:16:10]  Racism is rooted, has a lot of roots.
[00:16:12]  It's like it's like a hedgerow.
[00:16:14]  That's why it's so hard to remove.
[00:16:17]  Like you have to dynamite like hedgerows of these gigantic, sometimes centuries old, like huge fucking plant walls that existed in, I mean, they exist in a bunch of places, specifically like in France during World War II.
[00:16:28]  They were used as like to stop tanks.
[00:16:30]  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.
[00:16:35]  You just got to blow the whole thing.
[00:16:37]  You got to blow the whole thing up.
[00:16:38]  Right.
[00:16:38]  Yeah.
[00:16:38]  Yeah.
[00:16:39]  So again, this is not an episode about the burning of Black Wall Street and Tulsa, but there are a couple of points I should make about Tulsa in this period.
[00:16:47]  It was unusual for having a large organized black community that controlled a really sizable section of town, Greenwood.
[00:16:53]  And that it, you know, Black Wall Street, as it was called, had its own banks, its own theaters, a 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.
[00:17:06]  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.
[00:17:15]  It is not the mere presence of black people that is the problem.
[00:17:18]  Rather, it is blackness with ambition, with drive, with purpose, with aspirations, and with demands for full and equal citizenship.
[00:17:28]  That's powerful, man.
[00:17:29]  Yeah.
[00:17:29]  Good book.
[00:17:30]  It's powerful.
[00:17:30]  Yeah.
[00:17:32]  The, the, the comedian clip that I forget homie's name that was going around that were where he was just like, look, man, we're asking for the bare minimum.
[00:17:42]  Like even the civil rights movement, that wasn't even equal rights.
[00:17:45]  We were just like, just, just civil.
[00:17:48]  Yeah.
[00:17:48]  You know, just basic.
[00:17:50]  I'm just saying black lives matter.
[00:17:54]  Yeah.
[00:17:54]  Like not like they're not.
[00:17:57]  I'm not saying they're important.
[00:17:58]  I'm not saying they matter more than your.
[00:18:01]  It just matter, you know?
[00:18:04]  Yeah.
[00:18:04]  So like you said, like just an and the ambition of black America sparked so much rage.
[00:18:11]  Michael Michael Chase special?
[00:18:14]  Yeah.
[00:18:16]  And that's, yeah.
[00:18:18]  So two large mobs gather at the courthouse again, one white, one black.
[00:18:22]  The white mob clearly wanted to just murder Roland, who was the kid who, you know, got in trouble.
[00:18:27]  And, you know, they were in the mood to burn down the courthouse if the cops tried to stop them.
[00:18:31]  The black mob obviously wanted to save their guy.
[00:18:34]  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 led, and so poorly equipped that they had to borrow cars from their civilian friends to get to crime scenes.
[00:18:47]  They were hitching rides to come, like, not a great police force.
[00:18:51]  So funny.
[00:18:54]  When this all erupts into violence, the overall response of Tulsa's police to the massacre followed, like kind of perfectly encapsulates the different ways U.S. cops responded to lynching overall.
[00:19:03]  Sheriff McCullough seems to have been probably kind of your best case scenario for a white cop in this period.
[00:19:09]  He had black deputies.
[00:19:10]  He seems to have listened to their advice.
[00:19:12]  And he basically spent the riot barricaded in the jail defending Roland, you know, his black prisoner.
[00:19:17]  Wow.
[00:19:18]  So hard to, I'm not going to call him a great dude or like particularly woke or anything, but like does broadly what you'd consider to be the right thing here.
[00:19:26]  Meanwhile, the police chief, Gustavsson, was pretty close to the worst case scenario.
[00:19:31]  Before the riot even started, he looked out at a huge crowd of armed and angry white people and a much smaller crowd of armed black people.
[00:19:37]  And he called the National Guard to ask for their help to, quote, clear the streets of Negroes.
[00:19:42]  So police chief, not the same as the sheriff here.
[00:19:46]  No.
[00:19:48]  Now, one of the first things that happened after the riot was that large numbers of angry white dudes gathered outside of the National Guard armory to demand guns.
[00:19:56]  The National Guard was like, that's not how this works.
[00:19:59]  No, you can't get we do have some standards.
[00:20:04]  We don't just hand out guns to crowds.
[00:20:07]  Dude, why can't somebody be that guy?
[00:20:10]  Like, why can't we interview that guy when they got to the door and him being like, nah, no?
[00:20:16]  No, I'm not going to give.
[00:20:16]  What are you talking about?
[00:20:17]  What are you talking about?
[00:20:19]  Yeah.

=== Tulsa Race Riot Aftermath (10:27) ===

[00:20:20]  So this crowd, which included a number of uniformed police officers, went over to a local sporting goods store.
[00:20:27]  This particular store sold ammunition to the police department.
[00:20:30]  So the cops in the crowd knew that it was a good place to go to get guns and ammo.
[00:20:34]  They broke in and looted it so that they could go murder black people.
[00:20:37]  As the looting and killing worsened, the police chief called in his entire department and began commissioning special deputies, some 400 random white dudes who were given guns and legal authority by the police to go commit acts of horrific violence.
[00:20:50]  By dawn the next day, the black community of Tulsa had pulled back to defend Greenwood, their neighborhood.
[00:20:55]  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 1,500, invaded Black Wall Street from two directions.
[00:21:06]  They took unarmed black people into protective custody.
[00:21:09]  They killed anyone who resisted.
[00:21:11]  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.
[00:21:19]  And now this uprising was being squashed.
[00:21:22]  The last resistance in Greenwood happened at the newly built Mount Zion Baptist Church.
[00:21:27]  When the armed black men barricaded inside refused to leave, the police and the guardsmen burned it down.
[00:21:33]  The Tulsa Police Department also enlisted the help of six JN4 biplane aircraft.
[00:21:38]  They claimed these were for reconnaissance purposes, but there is evidence that the planes were used to firebomb and strafe civilians in Greenwood.
[00:21:45]  And yeah, I'm going to quote now from Tulsa World and a write-up of the riot.
[00:21:50]  Quote, Tulsa police also seem to have been involved in the mayhem.
[00:21:54]  More than one witness identified officers, usually out of uniform, among the arsonists.
[00:21:58]  V.B. Bostic, a black deputy sheriff, was rousted from his home by a white traffic officer named Pittman, who then joined in setting fire to Bostic's house.
[00:22:06]  I.J. Buck, a white Greenwood property owner, said a policeman turned him aside when Buck tried to save one of his buildings.
[00:22:12]  He said, You ain't got no business building buildings for Negroes, Buck testified in court.
[00:22:16]  Some 300 black men, women, and children were murdered during the Tulsa racist riot.
[00:22:21]  We will never know.
[00:22:22]  They are currently in the process of excavating what they think might be a mass grave in Tulsa.
[00:22:26]  Yeah.
[00:22:27]  But we'll never know how many people died, probably.
[00:22:30]  Yeah.
[00:22:31]  Hopefully, we'll get a better count soon, but yeah.
[00:22:34]  Like, just try to get your brain around the humanity of the moment.
[00:22:42]  Like, you're just, you run a barbershop.
[00:22:45]  You at church and a U.S. military plane own country.
[00:22:53]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:22:53]  Like, a civilian plane that the police were had commandeered.
[00:22:58]  Yeah.
[00:22:59]  Okay.
[00:22:59]  Yeah.
[00:23:00]  Civilian plane that the police commandeered.
[00:23:02]  Like, is this just a like, you just bombed my church?
[00:23:08]  Yeah.
[00:23:08]  Like, just try to like get your brain around that, you know?
[00:23:12]  Yeah.
[00:23:12]  Yep.
[00:23:13]  Yep.
[00:23:14]  Um, yeah, it's pretty.
[00:23:18]  Yeah, like, this is pretty bad.
[00:23:20]  Yeah.
[00:23:21]  And I wonder how many listeners of all races have never heard this.
[00:23:29]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:23:30]  Yeah.
[00:23:30]  Like, that's the part that blow my mind.
[00:23:31]  It's black people that don't know this, you know?
[00:23:33]  Yeah.
[00:23:34]  It's pretty fucking wild.
[00:23:36]  And, you know, there are two cases that I'm aware of of air power bombing, like of people on American soil being bombed by armed airplanes prior to December 7th, 1941, the attack on Pearl Harbor.
[00:23:50]  And it is the attack on Black Wall Street and the attack on the white.
[00:23:55]  Well, no, actually not just white, largely white, but definitely mixed race union miners in Blair Mountain during the union uprising there.
[00:24:05]  They were also bombed and had gas bombs dropped on them too.
[00:24:09]  So those are the two cases before fucking Pearl Harbor that air power was used to kill Americans.
[00:24:16]  Yeah.
[00:24:16]  By Americans.
[00:24:17]  Yeah.
[00:24:18]  Yeah.
[00:24:19]  By Americans, sure.
[00:24:20]  Yeah.
[00:24:21]  So yeah, in the months that followed the racist riot in Tulsa, Tulsa became the nexus of KKK organizing in the state.
[00:24:28]  There's a debate about how much role they played in actually the racist riot.
[00:24:32]  It was probably not super huge, but the Klan, Tulsa becomes like the fucking headquarters of the Oklahoma Ku Klux Klan in the wake of the racist riot.
[00:24:41]  And before much longer, Tulsa got a new Klan-backed sheriff, a Klan-backed police chief, as did many cities in Oklahoma, clan members of the city council.
[00:24:49]  And of course, the Klan brought with it violence, not just against black people, but against Catholic and Jewish Oklahomans.
[00:24:55]  The governor of Oklahoma eventually had to bring the National Guard in again to deal with the Ku Klux Klan.
[00:25:01]  So yeah.
[00:25:03]  Yeah, that's Tulsa.
[00:25:06]  And again, like, again, it goes to like the like, God, the Klan's all over the place.
[00:25:10]  Like, why, all of a sudden, why are we mad at Catholic and Jews?
[00:25:15]  Like, when did they become a part of the conversation?
[00:25:18]  Like, that even just even you hearing, even hearing you say, it makes sense to me that the Klan is like, yo, it's cracking over here.
[00:25:25]  We're going to go over here and get it cracking.
[00:25:27]  Let's take over this city.
[00:25:29]  And while we're at it, you know, fuck the Catholics.
[00:25:31]  Fuck the Catholics.
[00:25:32]  Yeah.
[00:25:33]  What the hell that got to do with anything, you know?
[00:25:36]  Yep.
[00:25:36]  Yeah.
[00:25:37]  Yep.
[00:25:38]  So lynching, and again, I think really one of the ways to look at the racist riot in Tulshi is as a mass, a mass lynching.
[00:25:46]  Yeah.
[00:25:47]  They lynched the entirety of Black Wall Street because they were angry.
[00:25:51]  You know, that young woman screaming was the excuse, but it was anger over black success and organization.
[00:25:57]  And there's stories of like black or white people looting Greenwood after they 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 N-words have nicer things than a lot of white people.
[00:26:14]  Like that that was a big part of why they did this.
[00:26:17]  Yeah.
[00:26:18]  Yep.
[00:26:19]  So it's like, we want segregation.
[00:26:21]  Okay, cool.
[00:26:23]  We don't want you to use our money.
[00:26:25]  Okay, cool.
[00:26:26]  Damn, y'all segregated and using your own money.
[00:26:30]  Guess we'll kill you.
[00:26:31]  I guess I hate that.
[00:26:32]  Like, man, what do you want?
[00:26:35]  I think it's pretty clear what they want.
[00:26:36]  I think it's clear what we want.
[00:26:38]  Yeah, it's pretty clear.
[00:26:39]  Yeah.
[00:26:39]  Lynching's peak was probably in the 1890s, but it continued to be a massive problem.
[00:26:44]  I mean, throughout the 1900s, the 1920s were a pretty bad time for lynching.
[00:26:49]  Most historians will tell you that lynching is best seen as a sort of non-state auxiliary to Jim Crow, the civilian side of the enforcement of white supremacist laws.
[00:27:00]  When the law fell short in the eyes of racists, it was time for a massive mob spectacle.
[00:27:05]  Lynching generally was not just about murder.
[00:27:08]  Victims were usually tortured to extract confessions, and the crowd generally took souvenirs and posed with the body of the murdered black person.
[00:27:14]  These were often family gatherings that were announced on the radio.
[00:27:18]  Now, I'm going to quote.
[00:27:19]  Picnics.
[00:27:20]  Yeah, picnics.
[00:27:21]  Very common.
[00:27:21]  Yeah.
[00:27:22]  Yeah.
[00:27:22]  Go ahead and finish in your brain.
[00:27:24]  I'm not going to say it.
[00:27:25]  Just finish what you think picnic with the end of that, what that's probably your short for.
[00:27:31]  Yeah.
[00:27:31]  Okay.
[00:27:32]  Go on.
[00:27:33]  I'm going to 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.
[00:27:40]  And he writes, quote, during the 1910s and to a greater degree from 1920 onward, the white elite of the South voiced growing criticism of the practice of lynching.
[00:27:48]  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.
[00:28:03]  This led in 1930 to the establishment of the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, ASWPL or As Whipple.
[00:28:12]  Under the leadership of Jesse Daniel Ames, these white women activists work primarily in church circles.
[00:28:17]  In 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.
[00:28:31]  So that's good.
[00:28:32]  Yeah.
[00:28:34]  Good work.
[00:28:34]  Good allyship or whatever you want to call it.
[00:28:37]  1920 was actually the first year in which more lynchings were averted by law enforcement than carried out.
[00:28:43]  Between 1932 and 1942, 290 lynchings were stopped by police.
[00:28:48]  The activism of groups like Asswipple helped reduce lynching through the 1920s.
[00:28:54]  And while it saw an upswing during the Great Depression, the number of lynchings dropped precipitously by the end of the 1930s.
[00:29:00]  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.
[00:29:07]  An example of both the police kind of modernizing and reforming and of southern cops rising to the occasion to protect black people from violence.
[00:29:14]  This is wildly inaccurate.
[00:29:16]  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.
[00:29:29]  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.
[00:29:37]  Law enforcement did sometimes use violence and even call out militias to disperse lynch mobs, but the anger that had spawned those mobs still had to be sated, and police sated it by making damn certain that black suspects got what those mobs thought they deserved-a swift and violent death.
[00:29:55]  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 20th century continually rose, while the number of lynchings steadily declined during the same period.
[00:30:09]  Likewise, the findings of the political scientist James W. Clark show a clear correlation in the 1920s and 30s between the declining lynching violence and the growing number of convicted African-American offenders who were executed by state authorities.
[00:30:22]  The available statistical data on the number of executions carried out in the United States between 1930 and 1970 also suggests the dwindling number of lynchings was tied to the growing use of the death penalty.
[00:30:33]  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 20th century.

=== Money Moves and Leisure (07:18) ===

[00:30:48]  See, that is dizzying.
[00:30:50]  Yeah, I hope y'all caught it.
[00:30:52]  It's so dizzying.
[00:30:53]  It's like, because to try to sort that out is to go, you're off Keltzer because, like you said, you think, oh, it's cool, man.
[00:31:03]  Maybe they're, maybe these people are evolving.
[00:31:06]  And they're like, no, this is, I'm, they're just, you just want control of your county.
[00:31:12]  And you just like, so the point is.
[00:31:14]  On a recent episode of the podcast Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Bajinista Aleche to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
[00:31:25]  What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
[00:31:31]  We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never, ever taught.
[00:31:41]  Financial education is not always about like, I'm going to get rich.
[00:31:45]  That's great.
[00:31:46]  It's about creating an atmosphere for you to be able to take care of yourself and leave a strong financial legacy for your family.
[00:31:56]  If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
[00:32:02]  Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:32:12]  Hey, Ernst, what's up?
[00:32:13]  Look, money is something we all deal with, but financial literacy is what helps turn income into real wealth.
[00:32:19]  On each episode of the podcast, Earn Your Leisure, we break down the conversations you need to understand money, investing, and entrepreneurship.
[00:32:27]  From stocks and real estate to credit, business, and generational wealth, we translate complex financial topics into real conversations everyone can understand.
[00:32:36]  Because the truth is, most people were never taught how money really works.
[00:32:40]  But once you understand the system, you can start to build within it.
[00:32:44]  That means ownership, smarter investing, and creating opportunities, not just for yourself, but for the next generation.
[00:32:51]  If you want to learn how to build wealth, understand the markets, and think like an owner, Earn Your Leisure is the podcast for you.
[00:32:57]  Listen to Earn Your Leisure on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:33:06]  Hello, gorgeous.
[00:33:07]  It's Lala Kent, host of Untraditional Le La.
[00:33:09]  My days of filling up cups of sur may be over, but I'm still loving life in the valley.
[00:33:14]  Life on the other side of the hill is giving grown-up vibes.
[00:33:17]  But over here on my podcast, Untraditional Ila, I'm still that Lala you either love or love to hate.
[00:33:23]  I've been full-on oversharing with fans, family, and former frenemies like Tom Schwartz.
[00:33:28]  I had a little bone to pick with Schwartzy when he came on the pod.
[00:33:31]  You don't feel bad that you told me I was a bootleg housewife?
[00:33:33]  I must flipped a pizza in your lap.
[00:33:35]  Oh, God, I literally forgot about that until just now.
[00:33:39]  Sorry, I don't want to blame all of that.
[00:33:41]  I got to blame that one on the alcohol.
[00:33:43]  This is about laughing and learning when life just keeps on laughing because I make mistakes so that you guys don't have to.
[00:33:49]  We're growing, we're thriving, and yes, sometimes we're barely surviving, but we do it all with love.
[00:33:55]  It's unruly, it's unafraid, it's untraditionally Lala.
[00:33:59]  Listen to Untraditionally Lala on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:34:05]  I'm Iris Palmer, and my new podcast is called Against All Odds.
[00:34:08]  And that's exactly what the show is about, doing whatever it takes to beat the odds.
[00:34:12]  Get ready to hear from some of your favorite entrepreneurs and entertainers as they share stories about defying expectations, overcoming barriers, and breaking generational patterns.
[00:34:22]  I'm talking to people like award-winning actress, producer, and director, Fiva Longoria.
[00:34:27]  I think I had like $200 in my savings account.
[00:34:31]  And my mom goes, what are you going to do?
[00:34:32]  And I was like, oh, I'll figure it out.
[00:34:34]  We had a one-bedroom apartment for like $400 a month and we all could not afford.
[00:34:37]  Like, I was like, how am I going to make $100 a month?
[00:34:41]  I'm opening up like I've never before.
[00:34:43]  For those of you who think you know me from what you've seen on social media, get ready to see a whole new side of me.
[00:34:48]  Listen to Against All Odds with Iris Palmer as part of the Michael Tura podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:34:59]  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.
[00:35:06]  So, but they're like, but I feel you.
[00:35:10]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:35:10]  Like, low-key, I feel you.
[00:35:12]  Yeah.
[00:35:13]  I'm just saying, you don't get to tell me what to do.
[00:35:16]  So when, so from the black perspective, do I, can I make any distinction between that mob and this jail?
[00:35:25]  No, because I still end up dead.
[00:35:27]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:35:29]  So, and then when we say, and then, like you said, all the signs we saw about the other ones, that mass incarceration and the death penalty and the law enforcement, it's just it's same-es-this is what we're trying to say.
[00:35:41]  And here it is, right in your history, it's same-es-this why we don't make no distinction.
[00:35:47]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:35:48]  This is why we keep saying the orchard's bad.
[00:35:52]  The orchard's bad.
[00:35:53]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:35:54]  Get the word of the piss apples.
[00:35:56]  Yes, they're piss apples.
[00:35:57]  You don't keep throwing away individual piss apples, hoping and then trying to point at one that ain't got piss.
[00:36:03]  And I'm going, what?
[00:36:04]  It's the yeah.
[00:36:07]  Yeah.
[00:36:10]  Oh.
[00:36:13]  You know what's not an apple filled with urine?
[00:36:19]  First of all, I've never heard of the term piss apple, but that's great.
[00:36:23]  Anyway, but I hope these products and services are not.
[00:36:26]  They are not.
[00:36:27]  They are not.
[00:36:28]  That's our one line for advertisers.
[00:36:30]  No apples filled with urine.
[00:36:36]  This is Roxanne Gay, host of the Roxanne Gay Agenda, the bad feminist podcast of your dreams.
[00:36:42]  Now, what is the Roxanne Gay Agenda, you might ask?
[00:36:45]  Well, it's a podcast where I'm going to speak my mind about what's on my mind, and that could be anything.
[00:36:53]  Every week, I will be in conversation with an interesting person who has something to say.
[00:36:58]  We're going to talk about feminism, race, writing in books, and art, food, pop culture, and yes, politics.
[00:37:05]  I start each show with a recommendation.
[00:37:08]  Really, I'm just going to share with you a movie or a book or maybe some music or a comedy set.
[00:37:14]  Something that I really want you to be aware of and maybe engage with as well.
[00:37:19]  Listen to the Luminary Original podcast, The Roxanne Gay Agenda, the Bad Feminist Podcast of Your Dreams, every Tuesday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:37:35]  I'm Tanya Sam, host of the Money Moves Podcast powered by Greenwood.
[00:37:39]  This daily podcast will help give you the keys to the kingdom of financial stability, wealth, and abundance.
[00:37:44]  With celebrity guests like Rick Ross, Amanda Seals, Angela Yee, Roland Martin, JB Smooth, and Terrell Owens, tune in to learn how to turn liabilities into assets and make your money move.
[00:37:57]  Subscribe to the Money Moves podcast powered by Greenwood on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:38:03]  And make sure you leave a review.
[00:38:05]  Hi, I'm Robert Lamb.

=== Police Torture Confessions (15:15) ===

[00:38:06]  And I'm Joe McCormick, and we're the hosts of the science podcast, Stuff to Blow Your Mind, where every week we get to explore some of the weirdest questions in the universe.
[00:38:15]  Like, if sci-fi teleportation was possible, how would it square with the multitudes of organisms that inhabit our human bodies?
[00:38:22]  Can we find evidence of emotions in animals like bees, ants, and crayfish?
[00:38:27]  How would an interplanetary civilization function?
[00:38:31]  Does free will exist?
[00:38:32]  Stuff to Blow Your Mind examines neurological quandaries, cosmic mysteries, evolutionary marvels, and the wonders of techno-history.
[00:38:40]  Basically, this show is the altar where we worship the weirdness of reality.
[00:38:45]  If anybody ever told you you ask the weirdest questions, it is time to come join us in the place where you belong, the stuff to blow your mind podcast.
[00:38:54]  New episodes publish every Tuesday and Thursday with bonus episodes on Saturdays.
[00:38:58]  Listen to Stuff to Blow Your Mind on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:39:08]  We're back.
[00:39:10]  All right.
[00:39:13]  Cool.
[00:39:16]  All right.
[00:39:16]  So, when you really look at it through a gimlet eye, the inevitable conclusion one comes to in all of this is, you know, While police often enabled violence, you know, of the Klan in the late 1800s and the early 1900s and with the race riots in 1919, you know, Tulsa in 1921, while police often enabled such things on an individual level, collectively they were more than anything else powerless to stop this violence.
[00:39:42]  Although you could argue they didn't try all that hard, but they weren't really set up to stop that violence either.
[00:39:47]  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.
[00:39:56]  Often white sheriffs and police chiefs were absolutely fine with killing black people.
[00:40:00]  What bugged them was the disorder because these are power people.
[00:40:04]  In 1933, a sociologist with the just tremendously unfortunate name of Arthur Raper, which oh my that's a rough one to draw out of the name basket.
[00:40:19]  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.
[00:40:29]  Southern politicians came to rely on the death penalty as an easy way to appease the mob and avoid uncivilized violence.
[00:40:36]  Local journalists supported the state and its massively increased rate of executions, seeing them as a victory for law and order.
[00:40:43]  Yo, when I was so when I used to teach high school, I taught high school for a couple years.
[00:40:47]  I had ninth graders.
[00:40:48]  And one time we went on this field trip to Lacma, to the museum of, you know, the museum on La Brea.
[00:40:58]  And so it's four teachers to 150 14 year olds, right?
[00:41:04]  So I had me and another teacher had control of half of them.
[00:41:09]  So I got 75 freshmen, right?
[00:41:12]  We're walking by the park and there's a dude selling like inflatable toys.
[00:41:19]  So like hammers and dolls and such like this.
[00:41:25]  And at this point, it's 75 of y'all and two of us.
[00:41:29]  They're gonna, the kids are gonna beat each other with it.
[00:41:32]  There's no, you're not gonna stop these freshmen from hurting each other with these inflatable hammers.
[00:41:38]  So my thought was, okay, if they're gonna do it, they're gonna do it.
[00:41:45]  You're freshman and I'm not gonna stop you.
[00:41:47]  And low-key, it seems kind of fun.
[00:41:49]  I'm not gonna lie to you, seems kind of fun.
[00:41:51]  So what I did was I broke them up into their homerooms, right?
[00:41:55]  And made them be feuding clans.
[00:41:58]  So I made them send gladiators from their homeroom to the middle for the purpose of I was the greatest teacher ever, for the purpose of being able to make sure that no one gets actually injured, right?
[00:42:10]  So because the point is the same thing that this sheriff is saying, I just need to maintain order, right?
[00:42:17]  Of course I don't want you to beat each other.
[00:42:19]  And, well, I just don't want to lose control is really the point.
[00:42:25]  The point is, I don't want to lose control because your mama is going to kill me if I lose one of y'all.
[00:42:29]  Yeah.
[00:42:29]  Right.
[00:42:30]  And I'm probably going to lose my job.
[00:42:31]  So I don't want to lose control, but y'all going to beat each other.
[00:42:35]  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 gladiators.
[00:42:46]  One of the funnest days.
[00:42:47]  I really got reprimanded by the vice principal, but then the principal was like, you're brilliant.
[00:42:56]  Yeah.
[00:42:57]  It's like that, again, still pretty 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 river later and put it back or we could beat a bunch of our citizens for throwing a statue in the river.
[00:43:12]  And that seemed like the wrong call.
[00:43:14]  You know?
[00:43:14]  Yeah.
[00:43:14]  Like, yeah.
[00:43:18]  Yeah.
[00:43:18]  This also dovetails into, I won't go onto a long rant about my ideas for school reform, but why all children should be forced to carry clawhammers at all times in public schools and private schools for that matter.
[00:43:29]  And all teachers do.
[00:43:30]  Everybody should have a real big hammer.
[00:43:32]  That's very important to me for a variety of reasons.
[00:43:34]  Wow.
[00:43:35]  Yeah.
[00:43:36]  I'm very pro-hammer.
[00:43:38]  Man.
[00:43:38]  I don't get into that.
[00:43:40]  I just found the first thing we disagree on.
[00:43:45]  There'd be a lot less statues.
[00:43:47]  All kinds of statues, but a lot less of them.
[00:43:50]  It'd be a great lesson on like pulleys and physics, though.
[00:43:52]  I'll tell you that.
[00:43:54]  We were like, all right, guys, this is the freshman second semester project has come up with the best pulley system to tear down a Confederate statue.
[00:44:03]  Yeah.
[00:44:03]  The person that could do it where the smallest little person in my room is able to pull down this whole statue, that person get to A.
[00:44:10]  Yeah, you have the little kids pulled on the statue, and then you're like, and this is why aliens didn't build the pyramids.
[00:44:22]  Yes.
[00:44:23]  You figured this out, and so did the Egyptians.
[00:44:25]  Yeah.
[00:44:26]  So did the Egyptians.
[00:44:27]  All right.
[00:44:28]  We got to get back to the subject.
[00:44:30]  So in 1933, yeah, Arthur Raper published a study.
[00:44:34]  Again, like, yeah, basically that Southern politicians came to rely on the death penalty as a way to appease the mob and avoid uncivilized violence.
[00:44:40]  Now, you can't easily get a swift conviction if you have a real trial, obviously.
[00:44:46]  Remember, the data we have suggests that the vast majority of black people targeted by lynch mobs were innocent of any serious crime.
[00:44:52]  If this shit went to court, even a crooked court, it would take time.
[00:44:56]  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.
[00:45:05]  And they might be off.
[00:45:06]  Yeah, they might be off.
[00:45:07]  And it's way easier if you go into court with a confession because then you're arguing like, well, he confessed.
[00:45:14]  So police in this time focused on securing confessions because a suspect who confesses isn't really a suspect anymore.
[00:45:22]  During the early 1900s, the NAACP documented 51 cases of forced confessions in southern states.
[00:45:28]  These were a tiny fraction of the total number of cases, which numbered in the hundreds of the thousands.
[00:45:32]  The NAACP's resources were limited, and they were picking out specific cases that they were challenging in court.
[00:45:37]  So these were a percent of what was going on.
[00:45:41]  In three-fourths of the cases they documented, the black defendants alleged that they had been tortured into confessing by the police.
[00:45:47]  The vast majority of these cases were either alleged murders or rapes.
[00:45:51]  The color of the third degree goes into significant detail about a number of cases that illustrate this transition.
[00:45:57]  One I want to highlight to you all is the case of the murder of Raymond Stewart in 1934.
[00:46:02]  Stewart was a prominent white farmer and landowner, and he was found dead in his home in Kemper County, Mississippi.
[00:46:07]  There were signs of a struggle.
[00:46:08]  Almost as soon as the news got out, 200 people gathered in front of his home to look for the officers.
[00:46:13]  Three young black men were eventually arrested.
[00:46:15]  A lynch mob formed to go and murder them, which prompted the local sheriff to call in extra deputies and fortify the jail with machine guns and tear gas grenades.
[00:46:23]  The National Guard was almost called in and a state of emergency was declared.
[00:46:27]  In order to preempt white mob violence, the sheriff's department immediately set to torturing the absolute shit out of these three kids.
[00:46:34]  Confessions were quickly obtained.
[00:46:35]  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.
[00:46:41]  Niermeyer writes, quote, Brown, who is 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.
[00:46:52]  He told me to come on out here, that he had heard I told I killed Mr. Raymond.
[00:46:56]  I come out of the jailhouse and I said, I declare I didn't kill Mr. Raymond.
[00:47:00]  He said, come on in here and pull your clothes off.
[00:47:03]  I'm going to get you.
[00:47:04]  I said to the last that I didn't kill him.
[00:47:06]  There was two more fellows about like that there and they was whipping me.
[00:47:08]  They had me behind across chairs kind of like that.
[00:47:11]  I said I didn't kill him.
[00:47:12]  They said to put him on again and they hit me so hard I had to say, yes, sir.
[00:47:16]  Mr. Cliff Dial said, give the strap to me.
[00:47:18]  I will get it.
[00:47:19]  He took it and he had two buckles on the end.
[00:47:21]  They stripped me naked and bit me over a chair and I just had to say it.
[00:47:24]  I couldn't help it.
[00:47:26]  As the court transcript shows, Brown supported his testimony by pointing to the injuries from the blows to his body.
[00:47:31]  Question: They whipped you hard there?
[00:47:33]  Answer, yes, sir.
[00:47:34]  I will show you.
[00:47:35]  There are places all the way up.
[00:47:36]  Question: Did you bleed any?
[00:47:38]  Answer, did I bleed?
[00:47:40]  I sure did.
[00:47:40]  Brown testified that after Dial had forced him to confess, he threatened him with additional beatings if he recanted his statement.
[00:47:47]  Furthermore, he emphatically maintained that he did not kill Raymond Stewart.
[00:47:50]  If I die right now, I am going to say it.
[00:47:52]  I ain't never harmed Mr. Raymond in my life.
[00:47:55]  If they want, they can kill me because I said that.
[00:47:57]  But I ain't never harmed Mr. Raymond.
[00:48:00]  Afterward, Henry Shields was called next to the witness stand.
[00:48:04]  He was another one of the boys arrested.
[00:48:05]  He testified that after his arrest, he had been whipped by Deputy Sheriff Cliff Dial in the Meridian jail.
[00:48:10]  Shields said that due to the relentless whipping, he eventually gave a false confession and declared that he had a hand in Stewart's murder.
[00:48:16]  Mr. Cliff Dial and them came back that evening and whipped me.
[00:48:19]  First, I tried to tell the truth, but he wouldn't let me.
[00:48:21]  He said, No, you ain't told the truth.
[00:48:23]  And I tried to stick to it.
[00:48:24]  He whipped me so hard, I had to tell him something.
[00:48:27]  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.
[00:48:34]  He stated that shortly after word of Stewart's murder started making the rounds, he was seized by a mob of roughly 20 people, several of whom were employees of the sheriff, including the previously mentioned Cliff Dial.
[00:48:43]  He said that the men had tied him to a tree and whipped him.
[00:48:45]  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.
[00:48:54]  Wow.
[00:48:55]  Yeah.
[00:48:55]  It's pretty bad.
[00:48:56]  It's real, real fucking.
[00:48:58]  Especially like, you know, from a practical standpoint, like, hey, you know, you know, rocket scientist sheriff, you know, if you beat me, there's evidence.
[00:49:11]  Yeah.
[00:49:11]  So I can go, yeah, this right here, that's, that's his buckle.
[00:49:15]  That's where that came from.
[00:49:16]  It's rocket science.
[00:49:18]  And then secondly, I think, remember that the To Catch a Murderer, the little series on Netflix?
[00:49:23]  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.
[00:49:35]  Yeah.
[00:49:35]  So we could leave.
[00:49:36]  We'll talk about that in a bit because that there's, yeah, that ties into this, actually, rather directly.
[00:49:43]  Yeah.
[00:49:44]  Yeah.
[00:49:44]  Well, like this, so yeah, all that to say, like, this isn't, this is a normal practice.
[00:49:52]  Yeah.
[00:49:54]  Yeah.
[00:49:55]  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 owned guns.
[00:50:08]  Yeah.
[00:50:09]  Like, yes, it's emotional abuse.
[00:50:12]  Yeah.
[00:50:12]  So it's worth noting that further on in their testimony, these boys made statements to the effect that a great deal of the local white population knew they were being tortured at the jail.
[00:50:22]  Now, they'd 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.
[00:50:30]  This was common behavior for police around the country.
[00:50:32]  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.
[00:50:41]  Under questioning, Officer Dial did eventually admit to having beaten the boys.
[00:50:45]  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.
[00:50:52]  A lot worse.
[00:50:52]  In that statement.
[00:50:54]  Yeah.
[00:50:57]  And again, it's really important.
[00:50:58]  Clearly, black people can handle a lot.
[00:51:00]  That's exactly what I'm getting into.
[00:51:02]  This is part of a very long-standing trend in not just law enforcement, but white racism.
[00:51:06]  The idea that black people feel less pain than white people.
[00:51:08]  It's for one thing documented that black men and women are prescribed lower doses of painkillers by doctors for the exact same ailments as white people are prescribed higher doses.
[00:51:18]  And this is like black doctors do this.
[00:51:20]  This is a largely unconscious thing.
[00:51:23]  It's so deeply woven into the fabric of our society, the idea that black people feel pain somehow less than white people.
[00:51:31]  Yep.
[00:51:32]  Yeah, I don't even know.
[00:51:34]  Pithy comment there.
[00:51:35]  Yeah.
[00:51:35]  Yeah.
[00:51:35]  It might have something to do with police officers, for example, putting a knee on one of their necks for eight minutes and 46 seconds.
[00:51:42]  Because you assume we're fine.
[00:51:44]  Yeah.
[00:51:45]  Yeah.
[00:51:45]  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.
[00:51:51]  It was the only way they would learn.
[00:51:52]  You know, they don't feel pain the same way.
[00:51:53]  This is what you have to do.
[00:51:54]  You can draw a direct line from that to Officer Dial's abuse to the fact that, for example, today, black and Hispanic people are 50% likelier in the United States to experience non-lethal use of force from police.
[00:52:06]  Yeah.
[00:52:06]  Yep.
[00:52:08]  All tied together by a string of the people.
[00:52:10]  Samesies.
[00:52:11]  Yeah.
[00:52:11]  Samesies.
[00:52:12]  Yes.
[00:52:13]  Yeah.
[00:52:13]  Dial and his fellow officers insisted that despite the force used, all three black boys made free and open confessions to the murder.
[00:52:21]  And this convinced the all-white jury.
[00:52:23]  Part of why it convinced the all-white jury is that a reverend who had been in the jail at the time testified that they had given free confessions.
[00:52:30]  By the way, that reverend repeatedly referred to all of the boys as darkies.
[00:52:34]  Yeah.
[00:52:34]  Yeah.
[00:52:36]  Real unbiased religious official there.
[00:52:39]  Yeah.
[00:52:39]  Yeah.
[00:52:40]  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, in a lot of parts of the North on a regular basis.
[00:52:51]  Most police officers, particularly in the South, had similar, participated in similar things.
[00:52:58]  This was the norm.
[00:53:01]  This was a common occurrence.
[00:53:07]  Yeah.
[00:53:08]  If they didn't participate like Officer Dial, they were aware of other officers doing it.
[00:53:13]  That's probably more common than doing it, just because most people aren't comfortable with carrying out random physical violence, even most police officers.

=== Norms of Southern Brutality (06:49) ===

[00:53:22]  But they let it happen and broadly supported it.
[00:53:26]  Yeah, the fear that's already striking somebody that's like, obviously the person you're talking to is a sociopath.
[00:53:31]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:53:32]  So like the fear of being like, well, I'm not going to get in his way because he's going to turn it on me.
[00:53:37]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:53:37]  This guy's crazy.
[00:53:38]  Look at him.
[00:53:39]  Yeah.
[00:53:39]  This is full crazy.
[00:53:40]  I mean, yeah.
[00:53:41]  And of course, he's not crazy.
[00:53:42]  Officer Dial, I have no doubt, was completely in possession of his right mind, white mind, and not in any way mentally ill.
[00:53:51]  He was enforcing white supremacy through violence in a way that was both effective and rational.
[00:53:56]  Yeah.
[00:53:57]  So the white jury, after a day and a half of proceedings, voted to convict all three boys of murder and have them executed.
[00:54:02]  And thankfully, this was a case where the NAACP managed to get involved in time.
[00:54:07]  They appealed and the lives of all three young men were saved.
[00:54:10]  So as happy an ending as the story of torture can have.
[00:54:15]  There's a trial like right before Brown versus Board of Education that 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.
[00:54:35]  But it wasn't until after this case, because our documents only recognize two races.
[00:54:42]  So, so if this is a Latino dude and that's, that's what the case was.
[00:54:47]  It was a Latino dude who got in a bar fight with a Latino dude, right?
[00:54:52]  But according to the eyes of the Constitution, Latinos are white until this case, right?
[00:54:56]  So if you got an all-white jury, they're like, but they still looking at a Mexican dude and he's like, dude, like, these are not my peers.
[00:55:06]  And then they're going, what are you talking about?
[00:55:08]  You guys are both white people.
[00:55:10]  It's like, well, no, you can't, you can't play it both ways, man.
[00:55:15]  Like, you know what I'm saying?
[00:55:17]  So, so what's interesting about this case, like you said, is like, there's clear evidence.
[00:55:23]  There's obvious evidence.
[00:55:26]  The dude that did it said he did it.
[00:55:29]  And then the jury acquitted him.
[00:55:31]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:55:32]  Yeah.
[00:55:36]  And the case that I just related to you is only exceptional because some version of justice was eventually done thanks to the hard work of the NAACP.
[00:55:45]  Unknowable numbers of black men and boys were tortured and executed without the NAACP ever coming to their aid.
[00:55:51]  Just because, you know, that's not a criticism of the NAACP.
[00:55:54]  The resources were limited.
[00:55:56]  Playing whack-a-mole, man.
[00:55:58]  It can't be everywhere, you know?
[00:55:59]  Yeah.
[00:56:00]  And the FBI did not start to really look into the problem of torture and forced confessions by U.S. law enforcement until 1942.
[00:56:06]  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 U.S. government.
[00:56:12]  But as Niedermeyer notes, their efforts were limited in scope and saw very limited success and absolutely did not stop the problem or really arrest it in any major way.
[00:56:22]  Some of this has to do with the history of police torture.
[00:56:25]  And this is where we get into stuff that's both white and black history.
[00:56:29]  Yes.
[00:56:30]  In a way, or a history of at least police abuse of both white and black people.
[00:56:34]  For all of the 1800s in the first half of the 20th century, it was not illegal for the police in the United States to torture people.
[00:56:41]  Charges could be brought against the cops if they committed assault or battery in breach of their regulations, but that was as hard to prove as you might suspect.
[00:56:48]  Some states had laws to prohibit the use of violence to force confessions, but that was not an across-the-board sort of thing.
[00:56:53]  Nieder Meyer 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.
[00:57:07]  While the white press in the South generally avoided using the term torture in its reporting on cases of police violence during interrogations, the term was purposefully used by the black press to expose and denounce the violent abuse of African-American suspects, often in a bid to gain public support for the fledgling civil rights struggle.
[00:57:21]  A more common and prevalent term was the third degree, which was adopted as police jargon in the late 19th century and entered the general American vocabulary in the early 20th century.
[00:57:31]  And I'm going to guess most people know this term, right?
[00:57:34]  That's, yeah.
[00:57:36]  I was going to say from the TV, from the gum shoes.
[00:57:39]  Yeah, for the third degree.
[00:57:40]  And what that means is I'm going to torture the shit out of somebody.
[00:57:43]  That's what he's saying.
[00:57:44]  Yeah.
[00:57:45]  Yeah.
[00:57:46]  It's bad.
[00:57:50]  Yeah.
[00:57:50]  So, yeah, and it is like, it is a term that was used to justify police, to dress up police torture, something else.
[00:57:57]  Torture sounds like a crime.
[00:57:58]  Giving them the third degree is something that like a hard-bitten but good-hearted dragnet type cop has to do.
[00:58:05]  He doesn't like it, but I got to keep my city safe, you know?
[00:58:09]  Yeah.
[00:58:09]  The term really took off in the 1930s, right alongside a massive increase in police use of torture.
[00:58:15]  In 1931, President Herbert Hoover established the National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement, better known as the Wickersham Commission.
[00:58:23]  It reported that the third degree was used throughout the country, most often in big cities like New York, Chicago, Detroit, and Los Angeles.
[00:58:31]  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.
[00:58:40]  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.
[00:58:47]  Police, for their part, denied that the third degree existed and warned that any additional legal restrictions on cops would cause crime to rise.
[00:58:57]  That's day one.
[00:58:57]  Yeah.
[00:58:58]  That's day one.
[00:58:59]  Yeah.
[00:59:00]  They have one tool and they use it real well, you know?
[00:59:04]  Yeah.
[00:59:05]  Well, you know, you know, if you do this, then you know, you're going to, who you're going to call, it's going to be more crime.
[00:59:10]  And as you hear prop say that, imagining it's coming from the voice of a police officer actively pulling a man's fingernails off.
[00:59:16]  Yes.
[00:59:17]  Yes.
[00:59:18]  So 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.
[00:59:29]  And modern scholarship suggests that it just caused cops to get cagier and a little bit more clever with how they tortured people.
[00:59:36]  One way to do this was to transition to methods of torture that left no physical marks on the victims.
[00:59:40]  In 1930, a New York legal aid organization listed 298 cases of suspects who were brutalized by police during interrogations.
[00:59:48]  Most of the torture victims were uneducated whites under the age of 30.
[00:59:52]  A large number of those white boys were immigrants.
[00:59:55]  While black people were a minority of torture victims in the North, they were a disproportionate percentage of the victims.
[01:00:02]  36% of New York Police Department torture victims were black men, and black people made up only 5% of New York's population.
[01:00:10]  So that's...

=== Invisible Marks of Pain (04:04) ===

[01:00:11]  Follow me now.
[01:00:12]  That's pretty bad.
[01:00:14]  Follow me now.
[01:00:15]  Yeah.
[01:00:16]  Yeah, that ain't good.
[01:00:18]  Dog.
[01:00:19]  When you think of like, so when I think of like just statistics of like, yeah, okay, something like, some like three times, three times.
[01:00:32]  On a recent episode of the podcast, Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Budgeta Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
[01:00:42]  What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
[01:00:48]  We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never, ever taught.
[01:00:58]  Financial education is not always about like, I'm going to get rich.
[01:01:02]  That's great.
[01:01:03]  It's about creating an atmosphere for you to be able to take care of yourself and leave a strong financial legacy for your family.
[01:01:13]  If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
[01:01:19]  Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iTeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[01:01:30]  Hey, Ernest, what's up?
[01:01:30]  Look, money is something we all deal with, but financial literacy is what helps turn income into real wealth.
[01:01:36]  On each episode of the podcast, Earn Your Leisure, we break down the conversations you need to understand money, investing, and entrepreneurship.
[01:01:44]  From stocks and real estate to credit, business, and generational wealth, we translate complex financial topics into real conversations everyone can understand.
[01:01:53]  Because the truth is, most people were never taught how money really works.
[01:01:57]  But once you understand the system, you can start to build within it.
[01:02:01]  That means ownership, smarter investing, and creating opportunities not just for yourself, but for the next generation.
[01:02:08]  If you want to learn how to build wealth, understand the markets, and think like an owner, Earn Your Leisure is the podcast for you.
[01:02:14]  Listen to Earn Your Leisure on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[01:02:22]  I'm Iris Palmer, and my new podcast is called Against All Odds.
[01:02:25]  And that's exactly what the show is about.
[01:02:27]  Doing whatever it takes to beat the odds.
[01:02:29]  Get ready to hear from some of your favorite entrepreneurs and entertainers as they share stories about defying expectations, overcoming barriers, and breaking generational patterns.
[01:02:39]  I'm talking to people like award-winning actress, producer, and director, Fiva Longoria.
[01:02:44]  I think I had like $200 in my savings account, and my mom goes, what are you going to do?
[01:02:49]  And I was like, oh, I'll figure it out.
[01:02:51]  We had a one-bedroom apartment for like $400 a month, and we all could not afford.
[01:02:54]  Like, I was like, how am I going to make $100 a month?
[01:02:58]  I'm opening up like I've never before.
[01:03:00]  For those of you who think you know me from what you've seen on social media, get ready to see a whole new side of me.
[01:03:05]  Listen to Against All Odds with Iris Palmer as part of the My Cultura Podcast Network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[01:03:17]  Hello, gorgeous.
[01:03:18]  It's Lala Kent, host of Untraditional Le La.
[01:03:21]  My days of filling up cups at sir may be over, but I'm still loving life in the valley.
[01:03:25]  Life on the other side of the hill is giving grown-up vibes, but over here on my podcast, Untraditional Ila, I'm still that Lala you either love or love to hate.
[01:03:34]  I've been full-on oversharing with fans, family, and former frenemies like Tom Schwartz.
[01:03:39]  I had a little bone to pick with Schwartzy when he came on the pod.
[01:03:42]  You don't feel bad that you told me I was a bootleg housewife?
[01:03:45]  I almost flipped a pizza in your lap.
[01:03:47]  Oh, God, I literally forgot about that until just now.
[01:03:50]  Sorry, I don't want to, I don't want to blame all of that.
[01:03:53]  I got to blame that one on the alcohol.
[01:03:55]  This is about laughing and learning when life just keeps on lifing.
[01:03:58]  Because I make mistakes so that you guys don't have to.
[01:04:01]  We're growing, we're thriving, and yes, sometimes we're barely surviving, but we do it all with love.
[01:04:07]  It's unruly, it's unafraid, it's untraditional Ilala.
[01:04:10]  Listen to Untraditional Le La on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

=== Nobody Is Safe From Fascism (03:51) ===

[01:04:16]  Times more likely if you're a black minor boy to be tried as an adult and then and given the harshest, like the harshest possible sentence.
[01:04:31]  It's like I used to wonder, like, okay, when?
[01:04:37]  Like, when did, how did y'all pull this off?
[01:04:40]  Like, how, like, I just, I couldn't, I couldn't do the math.
[01:04:44]  Like, okay, so, like, why, why, why try us as adults?
[01:04:49]  Like, I'm, I don't, I don't understand why you think and why us more than anyone else.
[01:04:56]  And then you hear stories like this to where you're like, well, yeah, well, I mean, they, you know, they routinely just, you know, we could take a lot of pain.
[01:05:04]  And then they, you know, it's, well, I mean, they've been torturing us for a while, you know?
[01:05:08]  So like, and now, you know, you go, you get to a time where, you know, post-civil rights, where, like you say, like, you can't, you can't just leave physical marks and like, can't actually torture fools.
[01:05:22]  We just got to figure out other ways to do it.
[01:05:23]  You know, we just got to.
[01:05:24]  It's so cunning about it.
[01:05:25]  Yeah.
[01:05:25]  Yeah.
[01:05:25]  He's got to, so you're continuing the pro.
[01:05:27]  So it's like them getting cunning.
[01:05:30]  That's what I'm trying to get to.
[01:05:32]  Them being cunning is the tradition.
[01:05:35]  Yeah.
[01:05:36]  Yes.
[01:05:37]  Yes.
[01:05:37]  And them saying also this thing that you have extensive documentation of happening never happens and you're a liar.
[01:05:43]  Yes.
[01:05:44]  Believe us, we're the cops.
[01:05:46]  Yes.
[01:05:47]  And it gets, it gets, it gets worse.
[01:05:49]  I'm going to quote again from Niedermeyer.
[01:05:51]  The report by the Wickersham Commission highlighted numerous cases from southern states in which police officers and sheriffs used batons, fists, and whips to extort confessions from black suspects.
[01:06:00]  The report also documented the use of the so-called water cure on black suspects, a forerunner to waterboarding that U.S. soldiers used during the Philippine-American War, 1899 to 1902.
[01:06:11]  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.
[01:06:20]  Furthermore, the report mentioned torture methods on African Americans that included the use of electricity.
[01:06:25]  One of these involved an improvised electric chair, which was used until 1929 by the sheriff's office in Helena, Arkansas to extract confessions.
[01:06:32]  The report also pointed to individual cases of police torture of people of Mexican origin and white suspects.
[01:06:38]  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.
[01:06:45]  Moreover, they showed that police torture of African Americans in the South was already commonplace before 1930.
[01:06:50]  Diverse historical studies confirmed that this practice can be traced to the days of slavery.
[01:06:56]  It never ended.
[01:06:57]  They just got cunning.
[01:06:59]  Yes.
[01:07:00]  Yeah.
[01:07:00]  There it is.
[01:07:01]  Yes.
[01:07:02]  And I love like, I love how you're bringing out the idea that like we're not, we're not historical revisionists in the sense to say that this is a uniquely black experience.
[01:07:14]  No.
[01:07:14]  That's not to say that blacks have had a unique experience in this.
[01:07:18]  Yeah.
[01:07:19]  This is not a unique experience.
[01:07:20]  No, this is a this is a continual abuse of power and a protection of wealth, resources, and supremacy.
[01:07:28]  Yeah.
[01:07:29]  And nobody is safe.
[01:07:31]  Nobody is safe.
[01:07:32]  That's part of the, that's part of the thing people have started to realize a lot of like liberals who would have been broadly pro-police have started to realize since getting tear gassed and shot with rubber bullets by the cops.
[01:07:44]  It's like, nobody's safe.
[01:07:46]  If you give them the right to violently oppress one group of people, they will start fucking with you.
[01:07:53]  Yes.
[01:07:54]  It's the whole, it's the whole first they came for the communists.
[01:07:57]  And I was not a communist.
[01:07:58]  So I didn't like, that's how it works.
[01:08:00]  It's fascism.
[01:08:04]  Robert, you know what isn't hopefully fascism?
[01:08:07]  Oh, God, that was.

=== The Third Degree Technique (02:34) ===

[01:08:08]  The products and services that support this podcast?
[01:08:11]  Yeah.
[01:08:12]  Yep.
[01:08:13]  Not fascism.
[01:08:14]  All legally antifa.
[01:08:17]  Hopefully.
[01:08:18]  Let's go.
[01:08:19]  Yeah.
[01:08:23]  I call the union hall.
[01:08:25]  I say it's a matter of life and death.
[01:08:27]  I think these peeps are planning to kill Dr. King.
[01:08:30]  On April 4th, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King was shot and killed in Memphis.
[01:08:35]  A petty criminal named James Earl Ray was arrested.
[01:08:38]  He pled guilty to the crime and spent the rest of his life in prison.
[01:08:42]  Case closed, right?
[01:08:45]  James Hill Ray was a pawn for the official story.
[01:08:50]  The authorities would parade, oh, we found a gun that James O'Ray bought in Birmingham that killed Dr. King.
[01:08:57]  Except, it wasn't the gun that killed Dr. King.
[01:09:00]  One of the problems that came out when I got the Ray case was that some of the evidence, as far as I was concerned, did not match the circumstances.
[01:09:11]  This is the MLK tapes.
[01:09:13]  The first episodes are available now.
[01:09:15]  Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:09:24]  The Gangster Chronicles podcast is a weekly conversation that revolves around the underworld.
[01:09:28]  From criminals and entertainers to victims of crime and law enforcement.
[01:09:32]  We cover all facets of the game.
[01:09:34]  Gangster Chronicles podcast doesn't glorify or promote illicit activities.
[01:09:38]  We just discuss the ramifications and repercussions of these activities because after all, if you play gangster games, you are ultimately rewarded with gangster prizes.
[01:09:46]  iHeartRadio is number one for podcasts, but don't take our word for it.
[01:09:50]  Find the Gangster Chronicles podcast in the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcast.
[01:09:58]  I'm Eve Rodsky, author of the New York Times bestseller, Fair Play and Find Your Unicorn Space, activist on the gender division of labor, attorney, and family mediator.
[01:10:07]  And I'm Dr. Adidin Arukar, a Harvard physician and medical correspondent with an expertise in the science of stress, resilience, mental health, and burnout.
[01:10:16]  We're so excited to share our podcast, Time Out, a production of iHeart podcasts and Hello Sunshine.
[01:10:22]  We're uncovering why society makes it so hard for women to treat their time with the value it deserves.
[01:10:28]  So take this time out with us.
[01:10:30]  Listen to Time Out, a fair play podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:10:42]  We're back.

=== Lynching Souvenirs and Details (15:38) ===

[01:10:43]  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, particularly not just white people, but white-moneyed people 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.
[01:11:13]  Anyway, there's a lot that goes into this.
[01:11:15]  Historian William Brundage, cited by Niedermeyer, sees white supremacy as continually contested terrain.
[01:11:21]  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.
[01:11:30]  This has been obvious to serious researchers for a very long time.
[01:11:34]  Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrtle wrote in a 1944 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.
[01:11:52]  It is demanded that even minor transgressions of caste etiquette should be punished, and the policeman is delegated to carry out this function.
[01:12:01]  1944.
[01:12:03]  Gunner saw it.
[01:12:05]  Yeah.
[01:12:06]  Don't say you weren't warned.
[01:12:08]  Yeah.
[01:12:08]  Yeah.
[01:12:09]  People tried.
[01:12:10]  Yes.
[01:12:11]  And yes, I love the idea that it's a Scandinavian country.
[01:12:15]  Yeah, the whitest dude in the world comes over here and is like, the whitest dude in the room goes, what are y'all doing?
[01:12:20]  This is a problem.
[01:12:21]  Yeah.
[01:12:24]  The federal government and federal law enforcement made attempts in the 1940s and 1950s to push back against the torture and murder of black people by police.
[01:12:31]  There were numerous investigations into different sheriffs and police departments.
[01:12:34]  Some of these investigations even led to punishments.
[01:12:37]  But as we saw in the red summer of 1919, at the end of the day, black Americans had to rely on themselves in order to fight back.
[01:12:45]  They did this in large part through the NAACP.
[01:12:48]  These cases helped to drum up both public awareness of the problem and public support for changes to the system.
[01:12:53]  You can draw a direct line between the NAACP spending decades fighting these cases and why the murder of Emmett Till caused a massive nationwide reaction, even among a lot of white people.
[01:13:03]  It's because they had laid the groundwork.
[01:13:05]  And you can make a similar case for not just the NAACP at this point, but like why specifically the murder of George Floyd finally caused what we're seeing now.
[01:13:13]  Yes, because you got to go back from like, from Rodney King all the way to Mike Brown all the way to this.
[01:13:18]  Yeah, this like, it's a continual like, oh my God, enough's enough.
[01:13:22]  Yeah, you got to really prepare the white majority to give a shit about the murder of a black person is this, I guess, negative way of looking at this.
[01:13:30]  20 years.
[01:13:31]  Then about 20 years to get a white man care.
[01:13:33]  Yeah.
[01:13:35]  So, yeah, and again, the NAACP eventually was successful through a number of cases in getting a series of Supreme Court decisions that significantly regulated and reduced the admissibility of forced confessions.
[01:13:48]  And that helped.
[01:13:50]  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.
[01:13:59]  It again just inspired the police to get subtler.
[01:14:02]  Yes.
[01:14:03]  In 1989, Gary Dotson became the first wrongfully convicted person to be proven innocent by DNA testing.
[01:14:09]  And Gary was white, if you're curious.
[01:14:11]  In the decades since, more than 200 people have been exonerated by DNA testing.
[01:14:15]  In 15 to 20% of these cases, police-induced false confessions were involved.
[01:14:21]  Overall, 12% of overturned wrongful convictions in the last 30 years have involved a false confession, which we don't call a forced confession anymore, but probably ought to.
[01:14:31]  Yes.
[01:14:32]  Yeah.
[01:14:33]  Yeah, because no one falsely confesses.
[01:14:36]  Yeah, they are forced to.
[01:14:38]  Nobody's like, ah, you know, it's like you have a fender bender in traffic, like, I confess to rape.
[01:14:43]  I'm so sorry.
[01:14:44]  That was my like.
[01:14:46]  Totally.
[01:14:47]  You're like, wait.
[01:14:48]  Yeah.
[01:14:48]  You know what?
[01:14:49]  My bad.
[01:14:49]  Did I say I did I say I killed that guy?
[01:14:52]  No, no, I mean I didn't kill that guy.
[01:14:54]  My bad.
[01:14:54]  Oh, geez.
[01:14:55]  You know, I thought, wait, was that Tuesday?
[01:14:58]  I thought you were talking about Tuesday.
[01:15:00]  Yeah, no, nobody.
[01:15:01]  No, no, I didn't say I admit to murder.
[01:15:04]  I said I liked Fox Mulder.
[01:15:05]  I've been re-watching the X-Files recently.
[01:15:08]  This is my bad.
[01:15:08]  You know what I'm saying?
[01:15:09]  Like, it's just, I fumbled my words.
[01:15:11]  Yeah.
[01:15:12]  The most shocking example of this might be the case of the Central Park 5, also in 1989.
[01:15:18]  In this case, a white female jogger was beaten and raped.
[01:15:21]  Five black and Hispanic children, all between 14 and 16 years old, were taken into custody.
[01:15:26]  All five confessed, and then all five recanted their confessions, claiming they had only confessed after hours of terrifying and stressful police interrogation.
[01:15:35]  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.
[01:15:42]  All five were convicted and sent to prison.
[01:15:45]  Donald Trump, then a prominent con man, repeatedly urged that the boy should be executed.
[01:15:49]  In 2002, the real rapist confessed, and DNA evidence confirmed his guilt and the innocence of all five boys.
[01:15:56]  They were released.
[01:15:57]  The case of the Central Park V sounds remarkably similar to the case of those three boys in Mississippi, doesn't it?
[01:16:04]  Yes, and it should seem very familiar with you because a certain elected official was invested in making sure that they stayed in prison.
[01:16:16]  Yes, yes.
[01:16:18]  And the case of the Central Park V, yeah, in this case, the boys, you know, in the case that we read earlier in Mississippi, those boys were straight up physically tortured.
[01:16:29]  What the Central Park V endured is much subtler, but some people might call it torture.
[01:16:34]  And this brings me to discussion of the Reed technique.
[01:16:37]  The Reed technique is an interrogation tactic invented in 1962 by a former cop and a polygraph expert.
[01:16:44]  You may recognize that 1962 is just right around the same time the Supreme Court said y'all got to stop forcing people to confess to crimes they didn't commit via torture.
[01:16:52]  John Reed, the technique's creator, had a reputation for being the kind of guy who used psychology to get confessions rather than violence.
[01:16:59]  The origin of his technique came from a 1955 case when a guy named Darrell Parker came home to find his wife raped and murdered.
[01:17:06]  Parker was interrogated and, according to the New Yorker, quote, Reed hooked Parker up to the polygraph and started asking questions.
[01:17:13]  Parker couldn't see the movement of the needles, but each time he answered a question about the murder, Reed told him that he was lying.
[01:17:18]  As the hours wore on, Reed began to introduce a story.
[01:17:22]  Contrary to appearances, he said, the Parker's marriage wasn't a happy one.
[01:17:25]  Nancy refused to give Parker the sex that he required, and she flirted with other men.
[01:17:30]  One day, in a rage, Parker took what was rightfully his.
[01:17:34]  After nine hours of interrogation, Parker broke down and confessed.
[01:17:37]  He recanted the next day, but a jury found him guilty of murder and sentenced him to life in prison.
[01:17:43]  Now, Reed was like, oh, this is the way we should always do interrogations.
[01:17:49]  Yeah, 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.
[01:17:58]  Reed opened a consulting company, which by 2013 trained more interrogators than any other company in the world, working for everything from local police to the FBI, the CIA, and the Secret Service.
[01:18:09]  The company brags that the people it trains get their suspects to confess 80% of the time.
[01:18:14]  Bro, just think about what we're telling you right now.
[01:18:18]  You have to be a absolute like Navy SEAL level mental agility and fortitude to defend yourself when you're innocent.
[01:18:34]  Yeah.
[01:18:35]  Like when I actually didn't do the thing, I have to be this skilled.
[01:18:40]  Yeah.
[01:18:40]  You said?
[01:18:41]  Which is why you wait for your lawyer.
[01:18:44]  Which is why you have a right to remain silent.
[01:18:47]  Use it.
[01:18:47]  Just shut the fuck up.
[01:18:51]  Yup.
[01:18:53]  The Reed technique was used on the Central Park 5 and numerous other people who have confessed to crimes they did not commit.
[01:18:58]  Now, the Reed company and its president will say that that is not accurate, that they were not using the Reed technique.
[01:19:04]  And it's largely because they didn't do it right.
[01:19:06]  That's what they'll claim is that like false confessions are only the result 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.
[01:19:17]  So when people who are trained in the Reed technique get confessions from innocent people, it's not because of the Reed technique.
[01:19:24]  It's because they were wrongly using the Reed technique.
[01:19:27]  Oh, that makes it cool.
[01:19:29]  Can you the pretzel you just put your body in?
[01:19:33]  Oh, wow.
[01:19:34]  Okay.
[01:19:34]  Yeah.
[01:19:35]  Wouldn't it 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.
[01:19:50]  Yeah.
[01:19:50]  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.
[01:19:59]  Clearly none of that's my, like I have nothing to do with that.
[01:20:01]  I said over the heads.
[01:20:02]  I flip fire.
[01:20:03]  Told you shoot over the head.
[01:20:05]  Yeah.
[01:20:05]  There's a safeguard to make sure no one gets hit.
[01:20:10]  Oh.
[01:20:11]  Wow.
[01:20:12]  Yeah.
[01:20:12]  So the read technique has started to fall out of favor in the last few, really in the last few years.
[01:20:17]  And 17 was when like one big agency stopped sending interrogators in to be trained in it.
[01:20:23]  And this seems to have like, you know, you mentioned earlier, I think it was to catch a predator, right?
[01:20:27]  Yeah.
[01:20:29]  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?
[01:20:37]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:20:38]  This isn't okay.
[01:20:39]  So it is still very common, still widely in use, but the tide might seem to be turning on the read technique.
[01:20:47]  We'll see.
[01:20:48]  It is not legal for police to beat the shit out of suspects to force a confession, not anymore.
[01:20:53]  And I guess you could see even the Reed technique as an improvement over literal physical torture.
[01:20:58]  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 as the only way out.
[01:21:10]  I can't say if the read technique is responsible for most false confessions in the modern United States, but I can tell you the police department that is responsible for more false confessions than any other.
[01:21:20]  You want to guess?
[01:21:22]  LAPD.
[01:21:23]  No, Chicago.
[01:21:25]  It was going to be one of the two, right?
[01:21:26]  Yeah.
[01:21:26]  Dang.
[01:21:27]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:21:29]  Now more than 30% of all exonerations that involve false confessions were people who confessed in Illinois state.
[01:21:38]  And most of those were people who confessed to the Chicago PD.
[01:21:41]  And the question to why is this happening has a lot to do with a dude named John Burge.
[01:21:48]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:21:49]  So, yeah, like A little side note, especially about what you're talking about, like how some of these confessions happen and how slick they are.
[01:21:58]  Because like, say, for example, you hear on the news that somebody died on 4th Street, right?
[01:22:09]  So then when you get picked up and then cops go, hey, did you hear about the shooting on 4th Street?
[01:22:15]  And you're like, yeah.
[01:22:17]  And then he goes, yeah, that the lady was coming out of the house.
[01:22:21]  And you're like, yeah, I heard that.
[01:22:23]  First of all, the story wasn't that there was a shooting.
[01:22:26]  The story was somebody died.
[01:22:28]  So when he said, did you hear about the shooting?
[01:22:31]  What he's doing is making sure you just confessed to information.
[01:22:35]  They say he had information about the crime.
[01:22:37]  And because you, it's like, I didn't say shooting.
[01:22:40]  You said shooting.
[01:22:40]  Well, no, I just asked if you heard about it.
[01:22:42]  You said you heard about it.
[01:22:43]  I didn't tell you.
[01:22:44]  The story isn't that there's a shooting.
[01:22:46]  So like how slick that type of like practice is.
[01:22:51]  And you listen, I'm telling you this stuff out of experience.
[01:22:55]  You know what I'm saying?
[01:22:56]  Like somebody saying, hey, you hear the liquor store got robbed down.
[01:22:59]  Hey, you heard about that liquor store rob?
[01:23:01]  Like I had to learn to be like, nah.
[01:23:04]  I ain't heard shit.
[01:23:05]  I don't heard nothing.
[01:23:07]  I mean, I don't know.
[01:23:08]  You know what I'm saying?
[01:23:09]  What do you mean you don't know?
[01:23:10]  You're not here square.
[01:23:11]  You're not part of, you're not part of the streets.
[01:23:13]  You know, I've seen you with your friends and I'm like, sir, I don't live here.
[01:23:16]  You know, just like you have to like, yeah.
[01:23:20]  Anyway, all that to say, the stuff is like as like heinous as we're telling you.
[01:23:25]  It's so subtle and it's so slick.
[01:23:28]  You know what I'm saying?
[01:23:29]  Like everybody swears.
[01:23:31]  Well, well, if I was in the situation, I'm like, nah, you, you would do exactly what everyone else does in the situation.
[01:23:37]  Yeah.
[01:23:37]  Yeah.
[01:23:38]  Which is why you don't talk and you wait for your fucking lawyer.
[01:23:41]  Yes.
[01:23:42]  Yeah.
[01:23:43]  John Burge.
[01:23:44]  John motherfucking Burge.
[01:23:45]  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.
[01:23:53]  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.
[01:24:01]  After the war, he returned to Chicago and became a cop.
[01:24:04]  In 1972, he was promoted to detective.
[01:24:06]  One year later, in 1973, he tortured his first victim.
[01:24:10]  According to the Marshall Project, quote, his officers had arrested a man named Anthony Holmes on suspicion of murder and wanted him to identify an accomplice.
[01:24:18]  When Holmes refused, the officers left him handcuffed in an Area 2 investigation room and went to find Burge.
[01:24:24]  A few minutes later, Burge strolled into the interrogation room with a mysterious box in a brown paper bag.
[01:24:29]  The box had a hand crank on one end and two wires with alligator clamps coming out the other end.
[01:24:35]  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.
[01:24:43]  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.
[01:24:50]  Then he started turning the crank.
[01:24:52]  He was electrocuting him.
[01:24:54]  Sheesh.
[01:24:56]  Over the next few, yeah.
[01:24:58]  Yeah.
[01:24:59]  Yeah.
[01:25:00]  Over the next few years, Burge continued to be his department's go-to torture man.
[01:25:04]  Department rumors stated that he had learned the techniques he employed during his time in Vietnam on the bodies of North Vietnamese POWs.
[01:25:12]  We call this Foucault's boomerang, the tactics used in colonial wars overseas coming back to the United States.
[01:25:17]  Burge denies that he tortured anyone in Vietnam.
[01:25:20]  He also denied torturing people here.
[01:25:21]  So maybe I don't take that super seriously.
[01:25:24]  Yeah.
[01:25:25]  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.
[01:25:33]  I've talked to one of Burge's victims, and that's what Burge did to him is he electrocuted his testicles with his inward box.
[01:25:40]  Yeah, 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.
[01:25:48]  It's very common in lynching.
[01:25:50]  Very common in lynching, that they would be severed and even taken as like souvenirs.
[01:25:54]  Yeah, and it's one of those like my eternal question putting how much detail do I go into?
[01:25:59]  We could have done six episodes on lynching, and it deserves six episodes, but I'm trying to give a broader.
[01:26:04]  No, I appreciated like that not being mentioned.
[01:26:07]  Yeah, you know what I'm saying?
[01:26:08]  Yeah, yeah, it's a thing.
[01:26:09]  Yeah, because of his high case clearance rate, because he gets boy, John's real good at getting criminals to confess.
[01:26:15]  He's solving all these murders.
[01:26:16]  Because of his high case clearance rate, John was promoted to sergeant and then to lieutenant and eventually to commander.

=== Policing Community Trust (15:08) ===

[01:26:22]  John Burge's behavior was not hidden from other men in the Chicago police.
[01:26:26]  He kept his inward box out on open display at a table in the police station.
[01:26:31]  He trained dozens of other Chicago officers in his techniques, which expanded over the years to include electric cattle prods, simulate, and simulated executions.
[01:26:40]  Burge's officers often beat subjects with telephone books, flashlights, batons, and bats.
[01:26:45]  They burned men with hot radiators and cigarettes.
[01:26:47]  They put plastic bags over the heads of others and suffocated them.
[01:26:51]  This went on for a very, very long time.
[01:26:54]  The end began in 1982 when two police officers were murdered and Burge and his team tortured the shit out of a pair of black brothers until they confessed.
[01:27:04]  The injuries one of them suffered were significant enough that a medical official reported on them.
[01:27:09]  And that was the first crack in the Burge system.
[01:27:12]  Allegations of torture by Burge and his men, though, didn't break through the blue wall of silence until a 1989 civil lawsuit by the People's Law Office.
[01:27:21]  One of the attorneys behind this case, who later represented many Burge victims, was Flint Taylor.
[01:27:25]  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 30 police detectives and supervisors, and, most notably, Richard M. Daley, the city's former longtime mayor and a previous state's attorney.
[01:27:43]  The whole story came out in bits and pieces through a mix of victims coming forward and anonymous sources within the department.
[01:27:49]  One of these anonymous sources was a cop who left, again, anonymous voice messages for Flint Taylor.
[01:27:54]  Taylor and his fellows nicknamed this guy Deep Badge.
[01:27:58]  So part of the lesson here is that after 17 years of torture that was enthusiastically supported at every level of the Chicago PD, a couple of good cops did finally work up the courage to leave anonymous voicemails after a lawyer had figured out the basics of the case and publicized them.
[01:28:12]  That's what good cops get you.
[01:28:14]  Yeah.
[01:28:15]  There's like three of them.
[01:28:16]  And then.
[01:28:17]  And it takes him 17 years to do anything.
[01:28:19]  Yeah.
[01:28:22]  Burge was eventually accused of torturing more than 100 people, virtually all of whom were black between 1972 and 1991.
[01:28:30]  That's recent.
[01:28:32]  Yeah.
[01:28:33]  At this point, we know that there's probably over 200 victims.
[01:28:37]  We will never know the true number of Burge victims.
[01:28:39]  Because again, a lot of these guys were executed.
[01:28:40]  A lot of them died in prison.
[01:28:42]  In 1993, the Chicago Police Board voted to fire John Burge.
[01:28:46]  This interrupted plans the local fraternal order of police had made that same year to honor Burge and four other officers with a parade float.
[01:28:52]  All of the other four officers were also accused of torturing people.
[01:28:56]  By the time he was fired, Burge had risen to the rank of commander.
[01:29:00]  He was not charged criminally until 2008 and not sent to prison until 2011.
[01:29:05]  He got out of prison in 2014.
[01:29:08]  Chicago has paid out millions of dollars in reparations to victims, but an unknown number of Burge's victims still remain in prison.
[01:29:14]  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.
[01:29:22]  Burge died in 2018, four years after he was released from prison.
[01:29:26]  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.
[01:29:37]  Dean Angelo, former head of the Chicago Fraternal 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.
[01:29:46]  He insisted that Burge put a lot of bad guys in prison.
[01:29:51]  2018, the cops who believe this are still on the force.
[01:29:55]  Just guys.
[01:29:58]  They're most of the force.
[01:30:01]  Yes.
[01:30:02]  Guys.
[01:30:03]  Yeah.
[01:30:07]  You're asking us to respect you.
[01:30:10]  And it's like, I would love to.
[01:30:13]  I would love to respect you.
[01:30:14]  Yeah.
[01:30:15]  Just do respectable things.
[01:30:18]  Yeah.
[01:30:18]  Yeah.
[01:30:19]  You know who I respect?
[01:30:20]  My neighbor across the street who has never tortured several hundred.
[01:30:25]  I respect that guy.
[01:30:26]  I respect him.
[01:30:27]  Yeah.
[01:30:28]  He's earned my respect by virtue of being a human being who doesn't commit random acts of violence.
[01:30:33]  In order to defend those that do.
[01:30:35]  Yeah.
[01:30:35]  Yeah.
[01:30:36]  It's not hard to earn respect.
[01:30:37]  You just have to not, yeah.
[01:30:41]  Yeah.
[01:30:41]  Yeah.
[01:30:42]  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.
[01:30:50]  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.
[01:30:56]  He had done bad things and John probably figured, we've got a crime.
[01:31:00]  This guy's a scumbag.
[01:31:02]  Fuck it.
[01:31:02]  He's got to be guilty.
[01:31:04]  And oddly enough, that thinking, the thinking that John Burge probably used to justify his crimes, the thinking that the Chicago Police Department and the Fraternal Order of Police in Chicago certainly uses to justify Burge's crimes even today, that thinking, these guys were guilty, that thinking puts them all right in line with the law-abiding interrogators who use the read technique.
[01:31:24]  Richard Leo, a law professor from the University of San Francisco, spent nine months sitting in on almost 200 interrogations in Oakland during the mid-1990s.
[01:31:32]  He learned that most officers who were, 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.
[01:31:39]  That aspect is having an initial interview with the suspect.
[01:31:42]  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.
[01:31:49]  I'm going to quote from the New Yorker again.
[01:31:51]  The read interrogation technique is predicated upon an accurate determination during behavioral analysis of whether the suspect is lying.
[01:31:59]  Here too, social scientists find reason for concern.
[01:32:01]  Three decades of research have shown that nonverbal signals so prized by the read trainers bear no relation to deception.
[01:32:07]  In fact, people have little more than coin-flipping odds of guessing if someone is telling the truth.
[01:32:12]  And numerous surveys have shown that police do know better.
[01:32:16]  Aldert Vrije, a professor of psychology at the University of Portsmouth in England, found that law enforcement experience does not necessarily improve the ability to detect lies.
[01:32:24]  Among police officers, those who said they paid close attention to nonverbal cues did the worst.
[01:32:29]  Similarly, an experiment by Kaysen 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.
[01:32:39]  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.
[01:32:47]  Cops will always tell you they know how to spot a liar.
[01:32:50]  They are lying.
[01:32:51]  Wow.
[01:32:52]  Yeah, you can't really.
[01:32:55]  There's no way to know.
[01:32:56]  Yeah, there's no way to know.
[01:32:59]  And I feel like in all my police interactions, and I'm saying this as someone with like, I don't think I have a criminal record, maybe, you know what I'm saying?
[01:33:10]  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 a guy's playing a nice guy, 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.
[01:33:32]  You know, I feel like i've had all of those.
[01:33:34]  You know what i'm saying um, but in the ones, invariably you know you're being sized up.
[01:33:41]  Yeah, you know, and it's like so, even them like this.
[01:33:46]  It's just sometimes i'm like, why are we playing this game right now?
[01:33:50]  Like this is you're, you're horrible actors.
[01:33:54]  I know what you're doing, you know what i'm saying like, and and then when you, when I hear you say, like they were supposed to train, train to do an initial interview, and I know this dude's trying to build rapport with me, you know what i'm saying um, and and i'm like, I know this is okay, I know, I know what you're doing.
[01:34:13]  Like, I know what you're doing.
[01:34:15]  Okay, what time of day was it?
[01:34:17]  All right word.
[01:34:18]  How tall was the guy?
[01:34:20]  Okay cool, uh.
[01:34:21]  So i'm just like, just get to it man, just get to it.
[01:34:24]  Let me tell you.
[01:34:25]  You want to know where I was?
[01:34:26]  You want to know where I live?
[01:34:27]  Okay, here's where I live.
[01:34:28]  Here's what I was doing at this time.
[01:34:30]  Tell me what time it was I fit.
[01:34:31]  What description?
[01:34:32]  Can we just get to that, rather than all this rigamaro?
[01:34:35]  Yeah, i'm ranting.
[01:34:37]  Yeah, so I talked earlier about how police torture to force confessions didn't stop.
[01:34:41]  It just got subtler under pressure, and the same is true with the impact of racism and law enforcement.
[01:34:45]  After Jim Crow ended, the most obvious justification for bigoted policing was gone, but the bigotry remained as it, a system that was built almost completely during a period of time where either slavery, black Codes or Jim Crow Laws were the rule.
[01:34:58]  In Minneapolis, where black people make up 19 of the population, they are subjected to 58 of use of force cases by the city's police.
[01:35:08]  A main night.
[01:35:09]  A 2020 study showed that, out of 95 million traffic stops nationwide between 2011 and 2018, black people were vastly more likely to be pulled over than white people, except at night, when the gap shrinks considerably.
[01:35:21]  Black people, because again, the cops can't tell what race you are as easily.
[01:35:25]  Black people yeah, so they're not.
[01:35:27]  They're not able to judge.
[01:35:28]  This is a guilty person before the interaction.
[01:35:32]  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.
[01:35:40]  I could go on and on, but the basic point is the same.
[01:35:43]  All of these cops, from officer Dial to John Burge, to current police officers, who are today two and a half times likelier to shoot a black man than a white one all of these cops are making, at a certain level, the same decision.
[01:35:57]  They are judging black people as guilty before they know anything more than their skin color.
[01:36:02]  And this is persistent through every single level of law enforcement in our country.
[01:36:07]  Over the decades, activists and good lawyers and Supreme Court justices, and even a few decent cops here and there, have worked to make forced confessions inadmissible in court.
[01:36:15]  They have worked to report and charge police for torture.
[01:36:18]  They have worked to tear down the Jim Crow laws that provided legal justification for a lot of police aggression.
[01:36:23]  And yet the aggression is still there.
[01:36:25]  We have learned to channel it and probably to make it less fatal.
[01:36:28]  We've gotten better at punishing the most blatant expressions of it, but we have not stopped it.
[01:36:33]  And American police today are still doing the same thing they have been doing since the 1800s.
[01:36:38]  They are enforcing white supremacy through violence period, yep period.
[01:36:45]  I'll say this in like period.
[01:36:47]  Yeah, i'll say this like on a personal note.
[01:36:51]  So my little brother, you know, not by blood, but we just grew up together.
[01:36:57]  I lived in our house, whatever.
[01:36:58]  Just, you know, our families work.
[01:36:59]  My little brother is a California highway patrolman.
[01:37:03]  So confession, I got law enforcement in my family.
[01:37:07]  My brother's worked there for 10, 15 years.
[01:37:10]  He's never pulled a gun ever in his life, right?
[01:37:13]  Never has he ever pulled a weapon out.
[01:37:15]  He is one of those ones, like you said, that is like reporting dudes, that's like building community liaisons.
[01:37:22]  He does it after school.
[01:37:23]  He's in the valley.
[01:37:24]  He does after school programs, runs a basketball league.
[01:37:26]  Like the people know him.
[01:37:28]  So like, so, so there's that.
[01:37:31]  My father, you know, we talked about my father.
[01:37:33]  My father was a Black Panther.
[01:37:34]  After he left the Black Panther Party, because they killed it, right?
[01:37:37]  He moved.
[01:37:38]  Navy in the FBI.
[01:37:39]  Yeah.
[01:37:40]  Navy in the FBI.
[01:37:41]  My father was LA County probation officer.
[01:37:44]  He worked with like underage offenders, retired from there, right?
[01:37:47]  So worked in a special handling unit.
[01:37:50]  He wanted to deal with the violentist of young offenders.
[01:37:54]  30 years, 30 years, never once recommended jail time.
[01:38:02]  Never, right?
[01:38:03]  Because of what he's talking about.
[01:38:05]  The system's designed to destroy these young black and brown men.
[01:38:08]  So his answer was, let me have them.
[01:38:11]  I remember as a child, like going to quinceineras and GED, GED, like graduations and stuff like that, but all these like random kids that I didn't know, turns out they were kids on his caseload because he was shielding them from the system.
[01:38:27]  He told me stories of like looking at the judge, telling the judge full well, do not send this kid to prison.
[01:38:34]  Do not send him to prison.
[01:38:36]  The cop, doing the same thing.
[01:38:38]  The cops arrested this guy, showing them, showing them the transcript and being like, this is a false confession.
[01:38:44]  This kid is innocent.
[01:38:45]  He shouldn't be on my caseload.
[01:38:47]  And then watching that fool go to prison.
[01:38:49]  You know what I'm saying?
[01:38:50]  So when you, when you, when you, even in, bring all those things up to say this, is that even if you find good men and good women, the system is flawed.
[01:39:04]  Yeah.
[01:39:05]  And this is what we're trying to get to.
[01:39:06]  Yeah.
[01:39:07]  The structure is wrong.
[01:39:09]  Yeah.
[01:39:10]  Yes.
[01:39:10]  The, the, the statement, all cops are bastards, I think has been tradition, like historically kind of unproductive in terms of actually getting people to, to confront the real issues of, of, of law enforcement.
[01:39:23]  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 in policing and trying to do your best, you are also partaking and helping to and helping to maintain and further a system that is fundamentally abusive and enforces supremacy.
[01:39:50]  And period.
[01:39:52]  What we're not saying is that all cops should never have a job in that like there's there's homicide detectives who are good at solving murders.
[01:40:02]  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.
[01:40:07]  This is still murders.
[01:40:08]  Yeah.
[01:40:09]  Yes.
[01:40:10]  You know, there are, if you know a, a police officer who is a great person and 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 talk to cops a lot.
[01:40:25]  I've talked to a lot of cops who talk about like being forced to arrest people for simple possession of drugs, even though they personally agree with ending the drug war.
[01:40:34]  And like, that's the problem that you're forced to do it.
[01:40:38]  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.
[01:40:46]  Yes.
[01:40:47]  Yeah.
[01:40:48]  Think about when we decided that and why.
[01:40:50]  Yes.
[01:40:51]  And where it led and where it started.
[01:40:53]  Yeah.
[01:40:54]  Yes.
[01:40:54]  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.
[01:41:00]  Yes.
[01:41:01]  Even in me trying, I'm trying to do the right thing.
[01:41:05]  I'm trying to be an advocate for these young people.
[01:41:07]  Like I'm doing my best.
[01:41:08]  Like at least they got somebody on their side.
[01:41:10]  You know what I'm saying?
[01:41:12]  But you're still like, I'm still.
[01:41:14]  I'm still throwing you to the wolves.
[01:41:16]  I'm just giving you, you know, a protective jacket.
[01:41:20]  But the point is, I'm still throwing you to the wolves because the whole, like, it's what you're trying to say.
[01:41:27]  It's like the whole thing needs a grenade.

=== Ending Policing with Lightness (02:57) ===

[01:41:30]  Yeah.
[01:41:31]  Because again, like you said, I want to be able to call somebody if my house is being broken into.
[01:41:37]  Sure.
[01:41:38]  Of course I want to be able to call somebody.
[01:41:40]  But most likely who's breaking into my house is a meth head just trying to steal a PS4 because he wants a hit.
[01:41:48]  Don't kill the guy.
[01:41:49]  Like just, I just want him out my house.
[01:41:52]  And you know what?
[01:41:52]  I could probably, you know what?
[01:41:53]  I probably won't call him because I can get him out of my house because he's high.
[01:41:57]  You know what I'm saying?
[01:41:58]  Yeah.
[01:41:58]  Yeah.
[01:41:59]  It's, it's this.
[01:42:00]  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 it costs the state less money to give homeless people homes than it costs to police and incarcerate them.
[01:42:12]  It costs less money to give drug addicts drugs than to police them and to deal with the results of them stealing shit for drugs.
[01:42:20]  They found that in like Denmark, where they give heroin addicts heroin and it saves them huge amounts of money.
[01:42:26]  Toronto too.
[01:42:27]  Yeah.
[01:42:27]  They have like safe injection zones.
[01:42:29]  You don't have to police this shit.
[01:42:30]  And in fact, most things shouldn't be policed.
[01:42:32]  Maybe only violence should be policed.
[01:42:35]  Exactly.
[01:42:36]  If y'all like, I try to like, 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 Tylenol.
[01:42:51]  Like you would be like, that's ridiculous.
[01:42:52]  You finna ground her because she got a cold?
[01:42:54]  That's stupid.
[01:42:55]  Okay, that's putting an addict in prison.
[01:42:57]  You know what I'm saying?
[01:42:58]  It's like, this is really, what are you grounding?
[01:43:03]  That doesn't make sense.
[01:43:06]  We're ranting.
[01:43:07]  Yeah, we're ranting.
[01:43:08]  And it's time for some pluggables to get plugged.
[01:43:12]  Yes.
[01:43:13]  Word.
[01:43:15]  All my Instagrams and socials are prop hip hop.
[01:43:18]  Go to prophiphop.com for poetry, rap, for some podcasts, for some sustainable merch, some cups, some coffee.
[01:43:26]  If you want to support non-corporate coffee, I'm a coffeehead.
[01:43:31]  Hit me up.
[01:43:31]  Let's talk about like Jeff Tweety and Sigaros because I am the most unicorn-y black dude you'd ever meet that I can talk to you about Sigaros.
[01:43:42]  And I am, I'm going to keep reading and writing about police for another week or so.
[01:43:49]  Yeah.
[01:43:49]  And then I don't know.
[01:43:50]  We'll talk about Bill Cooper or something.
[01:43:52]  At some point.
[01:43:53]  Yeah.
[01:43:54]  Yeah.
[01:43:54]  We're going to have me on for some like for something light, like a like a dictator.
[01:43:58]  You know what I'm saying?
[01:43:58]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:43:59]  We'll talk about somebody.
[01:44:01]  Somebody fun.
[01:44:02]  You know, we'll somebody not connected to my own safety and well.
[01:44:07]  We'll do we'll talk about Chairman Mao or somebody.
[01:44:09]  Somebody who's a youth.
[01:44:11]  Yeah, everybody loves a good Chairman Mao story.
[01:44:13]  Oh my God.
[01:44:14]  Or maybe Tito.
[01:44:14]  Oh, Tito.
[01:44:15]  Yeah.
[01:44:16]  Give me some Tito.
[01:44:17]  Yeah.
[01:44:18]  Tito was cool as hell.
[01:44:19]  I mean, he was a monster, but he was a cool monster.
[01:44:21]  We're still talking about bastards, but the point is.
[01:44:23]  Yeah.
[01:44:24]  Yeah, we'll do something more lighthearted.

=== The End of Policing (03:53) ===

[01:44:27]  But you can find us online at behindthebastards.com, where there will be sources for this episode, including the really important book, The Color of the Third Degree, and the other really important book, The End of Policing, both of which are important, if not easy reading.
[01:44:43]  Well, actually, The End of Policing is very easy reading.
[01:44:45]  The color of the third degree is some rough shit.
[01:44:49]  Yeah.
[01:44:50]  And you can find me on Twitter at iWriteOK and go be a good person and disband the American system of policing.
[01:45:02]  Do both of those things.
[01:45:03]  Ideally, Amen.
[01:45:06]  Amen.
[01:45:07]  Shall we collect offering?
[01:45:11]  Behind the Police is a production of iHeartRadio.
[01:45:13]  For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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[01:45:36]  What Grows in the Forest?
[01:45:38]  Our imagination and our family bombs.
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[01:45:43]  Find a forest near you at discovertheforest.org.
[01:45:47]  Brought to you by the United States Forest Service and the Ad Council.
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[01:46:05]  We get to tell the fans all of the behind-the-scenes stories that actually happen.
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[01:46:15]  Listen to 9021OMG on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:46:21]  Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia, and I'm kicking off a brand new season of my podcast, Math and Magic, Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing.
[01:46:30]  Math and Magic takes you behind the scenes of the biggest businesses and industries while sharing insights from the smartest minds in marketing.
[01:46:37]  Coming up this season on Math and Magic, CEO of Liquid Death Mike Cesario.
[01:46:42]  People think that creative ideas are like these light bulb moments that happen when you're in the shower.
[01:46:47]  Where it's really like a stone sculpture.
[01:46:49]  You're constantly just chipping away and refining.
[01:46:52]  Take to interactive CEO Strauss Selnick and our own chief business officer, Lisa Coffey.
[01:46:56]  Listen to Math and Magic on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[01:47:02]  On paper, the three hosts of the Nick Dick and Poll Show are geniuses.
[01:47:07]  We can explain how AI works, data centers, but there are certain things that we don't necessarily understand.
[01:47:14]  Better version of play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
[01:47:17]  Yes.
[01:47:18]  Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time.
[01:47:21]  I actually, I thought it was.
[01:47:22]  I got that wrong.
[01:47:22]  But hey, no one's perfect.
[01:47:24]  We're pretty close, though.
[01:47:25]  Listen to the Nick Dick and Poll Show on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:47:32]  Saturday, May 2nd, country's biggest stars will be in Austin, Texas.
[01:47:36]  At our 2026 iHeart Country Festival presented by Capital One.
[01:47:41]  Tickets are on sale now.
[01:47:42]  Get yours before they sell out at Ticketmaster.com.
[01:47:45]  That's Ticketmaster.com.
[01:47:47]  Hey there, folks.
[01:47:48]  Amy Roebuck and TJ Holmes here.
[01:47:50]  And we know there is a lot of news coming at you these days from the war with Iran to the ongoing Epstein fallout, government shutdowns, high-profile trials, and what the hell is that Blake Lively thing about anyway?
[01:48:03]  We are on it every day, all day.
[01:48:05]  Follow us, Amy and TJ, for news updates throughout the day.
[01:48:08]  Listen to Amy and TJ on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
[01:48:17]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[01:48:20]  Guaranteed human.