Behind the Bastards - Part Two: The Worst Police Union In History Aired: 2020-12-03 Duration: 01:11:29 === Trust Your Girlfriends (01:31) === [00:00:00] This is an iHeart podcast. [00:00:02] Guaranteed human. [00:00:04] When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands. [00:00:13] I vowed I will be his last target. [00:00:15] He is not going to get away with this. [00:00:17] He's going to get what he deserves. [00:00:19] We always say that. [00:00:21] Trust your girlfriends. [00:00:24] Listen to the girlfriends. [00:00:25] Trust me, babe. [00:00:26] On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. [00:00:31] I got you. [00:00:36] On the Ceno Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversation about recovery, resilience, and redemption. [00:00:42] On a recent episode, I sit down with actor, cultural icon Danny Trail talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances. [00:00:49] The entire season two is now available to bench, featuring powerful conversations with guests like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville, and more. [00:00:56] I'm an alcoholic. [00:00:57] Without this probe, I'm going to die. [00:01:00] Listen to Ceno's show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. [00:01:06] 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. [00:01:14] Math and Magic takes you behind the scenes of the biggest businesses and industries while sharing insights from the smartest minds in marketing. [00:01:21] Coming up this season on Math and Magic, CEO of Liquid Death, Mike Cesario. [00:01:26] People think that creative ideas are like these light bulb moments that happen when you're in the shower. === The Sanford Inquest Debate (16:23) === [00:01:31] Where it's really like a stone sculpture. [00:01:34] You're constantly just chipping away and refining. [00:01:36] Take to interactive CEO Strauss Selnick and our own chief business officer, Lisa Coffey. [00:01:41] Listen to Math and Magic on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. [00:01:47] On paper, the three hosts of the Nick Dick and Poll Show are geniuses. [00:01:51] We can explain how AI works, data centers, but there are certain things that we don't necessarily understand. [00:01:59] Better version of play stupid games, win stupid prizes. [00:02:02] Yes. [00:02:02] Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time. [00:02:05] I actually, I thought it was. [00:02:06] I got that wrong. [00:02:07] But hey, no one's perfect. [00:02:08] We're pretty close, though. [00:02:09] Listen to the Nick Dick and Paul Show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. [00:02:19] We're back and we're suing the cops. [00:02:24] Tuck and I just had a conversation in between episodes about the fact that both of us and everyone we know is suing the Portland police in some way. [00:02:33] It's fun. [00:02:35] Yeah, and how it's just so much a part of life that I just forget about it. [00:02:38] And every once in a while, I remember that I am suing the city of Portland. [00:02:43] Yeah. [00:02:44] Good times. [00:02:46] I don't love lawsuits, but they happen. [00:02:50] Yeah. [00:02:50] So, Tuck, how are you? [00:02:53] Has life changed radically for you in the last five minutes? [00:02:56] Yeah, I got a kombucha now. [00:02:57] So everything's looking up. [00:03:00] What flavors are? [00:03:01] That is a huge improvement. [00:03:03] What flavor? [00:03:04] Grapefruit. [00:03:05] Ooh, nice. [00:03:06] This is exciting. [00:03:07] I just want to know the information. [00:03:10] You know, I haven't opened it yet, but I'll tell you. [00:03:13] I have some future. [00:03:14] I'm sure it's great. [00:03:16] What are you drinking? [00:03:18] I have a Diet Orange Crush. [00:03:20] And actually, pretty recently, I waterboarded a friend of mine with Diet Orange Crush as an experiment. [00:03:26] And it turns out it's terrible. [00:03:28] I am horrible. [00:03:29] I'm shocked that if you combine, yeah, if you combine Diet Orange Crush and waterboarding, it's bad. [00:03:36] I know. [00:03:37] Well, I can update this kombucha. [00:03:39] It is good. [00:03:40] Fantastic news. [00:03:41] What are you drinking, Sophie? [00:03:43] It's a Brambleberry hibiscus tea. [00:03:46] Oh, wow. [00:03:47] Cold. [00:03:48] Everyone's fancy today. [00:03:49] That's a very, well, I don't know if Orange Crush is very fancy. [00:03:52] Okay, there's several words involved in describing it. [00:03:54] It's not like water, you know? [00:03:56] It's like diet, orange, crush, bramble, berry, ice, tea. [00:03:59] A lot of consonants. [00:04:01] Now that you guys are just hooked on this conversation. [00:04:05] This is the whole podcast. [00:04:07] I've decided that it's going to be too bleak to keep going with this conversation. [00:04:11] And so I'm going to talk about beverages for an hour. [00:04:13] Welcome to Behind the Beverages, the podcast where we talk about things that you drink. [00:04:20] No, this is a podcast about bad people. [00:04:24] The worst people. [00:04:25] And today we're talking again about the Portland Police Association and kind of just about the Portland police, which is shockingly one of the most influential police departments and unions in the entire country. [00:04:36] Maybe the most. [00:04:37] You could make a case, although the NYPD is the NYPD. [00:04:42] So after single-handedly doing more damage to Portland's economy than the decades of protests that would follow, the Portland Police Association was in a pretty good position as 1970 dawned. [00:04:54] Their first big test of the modern era came in May of that year when students and faculty at Portland State University went on strike to protest the Kent State shootings and the Vietnam War. [00:05:04] After four days, the protesters struck an agreement with the city to end the strike. [00:05:09] So that's good, right? [00:05:10] Protesters go on strike in solidarity over a shooting in another state. [00:05:13] The city's like, we get what you're doing. [00:05:14] Let's negotiate a way to bring this to an end. [00:05:17] And they negotiate a way to bring this to an end. [00:05:19] Sounds ideal and very democratic. [00:05:22] But before the protesters could start to disassemble the structures they'd set up for the occupation, the Portland police riot control team showed up to take down a hospital tent. [00:05:30] Protesters felt betrayed by this since they had already worked out a plan to end the strike with the city. [00:05:34] They walled off the tent with their bodies. [00:05:36] This pissed off the riot cops, who are more or less the same as the riot cops we have today. [00:05:41] The riot squad tear gassed the students and professors and then charged into the gas cloud to beat them with batons. [00:05:48] Yep. [00:05:48] Sounds right. [00:05:50] Sounds right, too. [00:05:52] Yeah. [00:05:53] One officer noted that the violence was not pretty, but the streets were cleared, which again would have happened if the cops hadn't shown up. [00:06:01] Right. [00:06:03] An activist who was present, Lester Lamb, recalled his friend's head being split open like a pumpkin by a riot cop's baton. [00:06:10] 31 people went to the hospital for injuries sustained from police violence. [00:06:15] The whole mess set off an avalanche of condemnation from local media, which had either ignored or been critical of the protests before the cops beat everybody up. [00:06:22] After what became called the park block riots, the PPB faced some of the first mass criticism for violence to protesters in its history. [00:06:30] This was largely due to the fact that its victims had been mostly white. [00:06:34] Go figure. [00:06:36] The bad PR was enough that the Portland Police Bureau made a public statement where they agreed to never use force against nonviolent protesters again. [00:06:44] Oh, cool. [00:06:45] Yeah, they made a promise. [00:06:46] Well, that is so nice how that paved the way for them just being so chill and cool today. [00:06:51] Yeah, that's why, for example, when people sat in an intersection last May, they did not beat them in the face with sticks. [00:06:59] No. [00:07:00] That would go against their votes. [00:07:00] That would be their promise. [00:07:02] That would go against their promise. [00:07:05] The controversy over the park block riots faded soon enough, and the Portland Police Association succeeded in winning another contract in 1972 and yet more money. [00:07:15] They withdrew from the international police union they'd helped to start in March of that year after deciding that it lacked focus and direction. [00:07:21] The Portland Police Association was now an independent union because they also pulled out of AFSME with no ties to any national organization. [00:07:29] It remains that way to this day. [00:07:32] Loyal to no one but itself. [00:07:35] Pretty good. [00:07:36] Yeah, they don't want any influences that might give them like a conscience or something. [00:07:39] No, you know, they got to stay pure to their ideology. [00:07:42] Not even influences that would lead them to support other cops who weren't Portland cops. [00:07:46] Right. [00:07:47] Yeah, it's pretty good. [00:07:51] So the PPA had ensured that its officers were highly paid and basically unaccountable. [00:07:55] Now that the precedent had been set that Portland cops could go on strike if they were angry and crater the local economy, there was very little that the city government could hold over them. [00:08:04] As you might expect, this emboldened the worst officers in the department to carry out acts of horrifying racial violence. [00:08:09] On March 14th, 1975, Portland police officer Kenneth Sanford shot 17-year-old Ricky Johnson in the back, killing him. [00:08:17] Johnson was the fourth person of color shot and killed by Portland police in five months, and his death ignited a citywide outrage. [00:08:24] The details of the killing were just sketchy enough that even the city's white majority couldn't all sit by and pretend it hadn't happened. [00:08:30] In essence, two kids with an empty broken gun had been ordering Chinese food and then robbing cab drivers who dropped it off. [00:08:37] One of those drivers called the cops and they set up a sting operation. [00:08:40] Now, despite the fact that everything in the PPB's bylaw said that this kind of operation should only be conducted by multiple officers, they sent one guy in. [00:08:48] They dressed him up as a cab driver and he had a gun hidden in an empty to-go box of food. [00:08:53] When he showed up at the house, the kids pulled a gun on him, so he pulled his own gun. [00:08:57] What happened next is debated. [00:08:59] The cop claimed that Ricky knelt down and prepared to fire, so he shot the boy dead. [00:09:04] Ricky's friend claimed that both boys ran like hell and dropped the gun immediately, and then the officer shot Ricky in the back. [00:09:10] The physical evidence supported the second version of events. [00:09:13] Investigators found the broken gun 10 feet away from Ricky's body, and Ricky had been shot in the back of the head, which probably wouldn't have happened if he'd been facing the officer. [00:09:23] Just physics and such. [00:09:25] Many white Portlanders were able to see that. [00:09:27] While armed robbery is, you know, not good, shooting a fleeing robber in the back of the head is worse. [00:09:31] The rage was augmented by the fact that the PPB had murdered, again, three other black men over the course of the last several months. [00:09:38] All of the cases had been sketchy in some way. [00:09:40] Kenneth Allen, age 27, was murdered in a prostitution sting. [00:09:44] His death was ruled a justifiable homicide because he had a gun. [00:09:47] But the gun was never found and introduced into evidence. [00:09:50] The cops just said that he had one, and also he was shot multiple times in the back. [00:09:54] Um, hmm. [00:09:57] Yeah, it's just fucking me up a little bit how I guess this isn't PPA because it's right across the river or PPB, but like such a similar thing is happening like right now across the river in Vancouver. [00:10:07] And cool, just how it goes forever. [00:10:09] Just how it goes forever. [00:10:11] This is the song that never ends. [00:10:14] Charles Minifree was killed after a 20-mile car chase, which started when Canby, Oregon cops, pulled him over without probable cause. [00:10:21] Eyewitnesses report that Minifey had his hands in the air and was standing outside his car when he was shot to death. [00:10:27] None of the witnesses to his death or the witnesses to any of the other deaths of black men killed by Portland police during this period were called to testify in court. [00:10:35] And again, all of these men were black men who lived in Albina. [00:10:39] None of their deaths provoked any outcry until Officer Sanford shot Ricky Johnson in the back of the head. [00:10:44] Everyone living in the year of the George Floyd uprising knows how this works. [00:10:47] It's kind of impossible to predict when the violent death of a person of color at the hands of cops will provoke outrage in enough white people that the police actually have to address it. [00:10:56] But it did here. [00:10:57] And I should note here that in 1972, there were also plenty of back the blue types who defended the PPB from all of its murdering. [00:11:04] I'm going to quote from Catherine Nelson again here. [00:11:06] One citizen even sent Officer Sanford, who shot the 17-year-old, a $20 check for his vacation fund and offered to provide him with a babysitter. [00:11:14] The donor, Esther Nichols, stated that the community cannot say or accept that black is bad, so it has to be the police that are wrong. [00:11:24] What? [00:11:25] Yeah, I'll read that again. [00:11:27] Esther Nichols, who gave money to the cop that killed that guy, stated that the community cannot say or accept that black is bad, so it has to be the police that are wrong. [00:11:37] Cool, Esther. [00:11:38] Fuck you, chill. [00:11:40] You seem rad, Esther. [00:11:41] Fuck off, Esther. [00:11:44] Thanks for being really openly racist as opposed to just claiming you support cops. [00:11:49] That's at least honest. [00:11:52] She's like the progenitor of all the Cop GoFundMes now, but it's just one person named Aster. [00:11:57] Yeah. [00:11:58] You seem cool. [00:11:59] Yeah. [00:12:00] Johnson's death revealed that a large portion of Portland's white residents held racist views and respected the decision of the police to use extreme violence against black citizens. [00:12:09] Meanwhile, Johnson's death inspired black Portlanders to create the Black Justice Committee. [00:12:13] The BJC teamed up with several existing advocacy organizations to push the city to order an inquest into Johnson's death. [00:12:20] A public inquest is essentially a trial that occurs after a suspicious death, and it was hoped that this would make it clear that criminal behavior had been, you know, evident on behalf of the officer involved. [00:12:30] The Portland Black Student Union was another group that pushed for the same cause. [00:12:34] Now, an awful lot of Portlanders were willing to support a public inquest. [00:12:37] This was a very popular cause. [00:12:39] It was, after all, a pretty basic thing to do and not exactly a revolutionary demand. [00:12:43] Like, we should investigate the suspicious killing, is you can get most people on board that thing. [00:12:49] There were, however, some bootlickers who thought this went too far. [00:12:52] Opponents of the inquest wrote into local papers complaining that Johnson's death was being turned into a race issue. [00:12:58] Watford Reed of Portland wrote a letter to the police chief in which he complained that a public inquest would prove black people are privileged in Portland. [00:13:09] Pardon we investigate when they're murdered, they're privileged. [00:13:16] Oh, God, it's fucking jellical cat shit where everyone's just like, actually, the most privileged thing would just need to descend to the heavens right now. [00:13:28] It would be fun if his argument was like, well, no, this planet is terrible, and being exactly sent out of life is a privilege. [00:13:37] Mayor Neil Goldschmidt, who was basically the same as every other mayor Portland has ever had, knew that outrage over the Johnson shooting was too popular for him to come out against the inquest, but he was also terrified of the PPA, who were clearly more powerful than the city government. [00:13:51] So Goldschmidt tried to thread the needle by supporting the inquest in order to appease the liberals and stating publicly that he expected Officer Sanford to be totally vindicated. [00:14:00] He actually announced that he thought the inquest would be a good opportunity for black Portlanders to learn why it was totally okay to shoot a 17-year-old in the back of the head. [00:14:09] Great mayor. [00:14:12] Solid mayoring. [00:14:14] He does sound a bit like our current mayor. [00:14:16] Yeah, I was going to say, what I love about Portland is all the good mayors. [00:14:20] All the great mayors that we have here. [00:14:22] So the PPA's president at this point was a total dickbag named Stan Peters, which is a dickbag name. [00:14:29] Like it's a name of a jerk. [00:14:32] So he was, Peters was enraged by even the mild support the mayor gave to the idea of an inquest. [00:14:38] He was just like, this is like the fact that you would even question one of my cops shooting somebody is offensive to me. [00:14:44] The police chief was a little bit more reasonable and decided the benefits of having an inquest outweighed the risks. [00:14:50] In the end, the inquest happened, and it revealed some pretty damning stuff about the conduct of Portland police officers. [00:14:55] From Catherine Nelson, witnesses who testified included Melva Thrower, a neighbor on North Gandenbean. [00:15:02] She testified that the officers used profanity and handled Zachary roughly upon his arrest. [00:15:06] That was the other kid who was with the kid who got shot to death. [00:15:09] She stated that they threw Zachary on top of the police car before tossing him into the back seat. [00:15:13] When Zachary asked about Johnson, they said, that bitch is dead, and asked, where does that motherfucker live? [00:15:19] Instead of focusing on the treatment of Zachary, Moore questioned the officers about Thrower's testimony and asked if they used profanity. [00:15:25] The officers admitted that profanity was used, but they couldn't remember what profanities. [00:15:29] Another officer claimed that he heard loud language, but could not determine that they were profanities. [00:15:34] After the assistant district attorney questioned Stanford, the six-person jury voted as to whether Sanford should be held accountable. [00:15:39] The vote returned five to one that Sanford's actions were justifiable. [00:15:43] The only black jury member casted the sole vote against Sanford's innocence. [00:15:49] So lots going on there. [00:15:51] One is that after hearing that they had referred to, they had like said that bitch is dead and asked where he lived and all that sort of stuff and had abused an arrested person, the district attorney's concern was that they'd used profanity, which is familiar with the. [00:16:07] That's the real problem here. [00:16:08] The real issue. [00:16:09] Cops are cursing. [00:16:10] You can murder people, but you can't call them a bitch afterwards. [00:16:14] That's offensive. [00:16:16] That's going to make people angry. [00:16:19] Yeah. [00:16:21] And yeah, also that obviously all of the white people on the jury voted that the cop was right to shoot that kid and the only black jury member was the only vote against his innocence. [00:16:30] I will state here that the story did not end happily for Officer Sanford. [00:16:34] Despite being described as a model officer prior to the shooting, Sanford received increasing complaints about his performance after the inquest. [00:16:40] He was suspended from duty in 1975 for accepting a gift from a citizen and in 1977 for the use of illegal drugs while off duty. [00:16:48] Later that year, he was put on permanent disability for PTSD. [00:16:51] And this next bit is interesting. [00:16:53] Not that I expect people to have sympathy for this guy, but that it makes the point that the Portland Police Union is actually bad for officers in some ways too. [00:17:01] The PPB's culture of resistance, supported by the PPA, negated Sanford's professional and moral accountability. [00:17:07] PPA president Stan Peters claimed Sanford would receive psychological help after Johnson's death, yet there is no evidence that he did. [00:17:14] To so easily brush aside Johnson's death as justifiable emphasized not only the inadequate services Portland police officers received from the Bureau, but also the unspoken norm that black lives did not matter. [00:17:25] This obviously and ultimately disrespected the sacredness of black lives throughout Portland and questioned the worth of black people. [00:17:31] Kind of like it's bad for everyone for white supremacy to be enshrined by institutions. [00:17:38] Arguably, but does that stop it? [00:17:40] Sure does seem. [00:17:43] No, not at all. [00:17:44] Maybe this is bad for everyone. [00:17:45] Should we stop it in the next 50 years? [00:17:46] No. [00:17:47] No. [00:17:47] Absolutely not. [00:17:48] Let's keep having the same fight. [00:17:51] Why not? [00:17:52] We don't have anything else to do in society. [00:17:54] Everything else is good. === Portland Narcotics Chaos (04:58) === [00:17:55] Yeah, everything else is smooth and just chugging right along. [00:18:00] Like that train the police used to shoot longshoremen from. [00:18:06] So the rest of the early 70s continued the by now well-worn pattern of Portland police, only suffering consequences when they offended the white majority with their actions. [00:18:14] In 1975, the Bureau was rocked by a series of scandals in the narcotics division, most of which revolved around the fact that the entire narcotics division was addicted to illegal drugs. [00:18:23] One PPB detective testified that narcotics officers frequently did huge amounts of cocaine before going out on drug raids. [00:18:32] I mean, I'm going to be honest. [00:18:34] I've seen them riding along on their riot vans and thought it would be fun to do a fuckload of blow and then like hang off the side of a Ford F-350 rolling around the streets. [00:18:43] That does seem rad. [00:18:46] It's just like how not subtle it is. [00:18:48] That just like makes my brain explode where it's like, let us do drugs before busting people for drugs for drugs. [00:18:56] Because that way we'll have more drugs. [00:18:58] Yeah, exactly. [00:18:59] Which is actually all of our drugs getting ready to choose the action. [00:19:03] Oh, my God. [00:19:04] It's a perfect cycle. [00:19:05] There is at least one clear case of the PPB murdering and then faking the suicide of a drug dealer in order to get his heroin. [00:19:13] Good. [00:19:14] Good guys. [00:19:15] Portland narcotics cops. [00:19:17] And in fact, when that dead kid's mom pressed for an investigation into his death, she received a phone call from a white dude who was probably a Portland narcotics officer. [00:19:26] He told her to back off on the investigation unless she wanted more family members dead. [00:19:31] Oh! [00:19:33] Yeah. [00:19:35] That's good. [00:19:37] Good policing. [00:19:38] Good, that's fine police work. [00:19:40] So the Detective DuPay, who is the, I guess, the best Portland cop we're going to talk about in this, he's the one who reported that Portland narcotics officers were doing a shitload of blow before going out on drug raids. [00:19:51] He investigated the murder of this drug dealer and he submitted a report to the police chief with his findings, which were pretty damning to the Portland Police Bureau. [00:19:59] Years later, when he attempted to get a copy of the report, I think to give to a reporter, but I'm not sure, a clerk told him that it had been shredded as soon as he filed it. [00:20:06] Like almost immediately. [00:20:10] It's good stuff. [00:20:12] Good stuff. [00:20:13] If you're wondering, why didn't anyone do anything about these drug-addled out-of-control cops? [00:20:18] The answer is PPA president Stan Peters, one of the worst people to ever live in the city of Portland. [00:20:23] He was a potent negotiator, though. [00:20:25] And when the city negotiators angered him during a contract dispute, like this is the story that everyone tells about Stan Peters. [00:20:30] He was negotiating with the city for more money. [00:20:33] And when they wouldn't play ball with him, he drew his gun and slammed it on the table and told them, these are my ground rules. [00:20:39] Oh my God. [00:20:46] Sorry, I just sat here. [00:20:48] They can see I just sat here with my mouth open for like 30 straight seconds. [00:20:52] They just, they just keep outdoing themselves. [00:20:55] It's like the tyranny of themselves. [00:20:57] And they keep doing shit that is, again, literal criminal stuff. [00:21:01] Right. [00:21:01] Like the cops are just a criminal. [00:21:03] Yeah. [00:21:03] Sorry. [00:21:04] Okay. [00:21:04] It's a thing. [00:21:04] No, it's just that thing where like, I feel like we get desensitized to it. [00:21:07] Like I get desensitized to anything that they do because I'm just like, yeah, of course they're doing that. [00:21:10] And then, you know, you know, with the protests that we were at, like someone outside would be like, wait, they're, you know, snatching people up in armreck vans. [00:21:17] And I'm like, oh, is that not normal? [00:21:19] And they're like, that's not. [00:21:19] They're not supposed to do that. [00:21:20] And I'm like, oh, interesting. [00:21:22] So like when they do that, I'm just like, oh, yeah, I guess technically you're not supposed to do that. [00:21:27] It just seems like something they would do. [00:21:29] There's a there's a local cop that we all know, Brett Taylor, who is most famous in the city of Portland for kind of randomly stabbing car tires during riots for no real purpose that I can see most of the time. [00:21:41] I originally knew him as cop who won't stop pointing his gun at people's heads. [00:21:46] That's what I was calling him. [00:21:47] It was a long moniker, but he just when everyone else would like point it at the ground, he would just be still have it at your head. [00:21:51] But yeah, then he switched to just like really just hating car tires. [00:21:56] Yeah, he's, yeah, he, he really fucking loves to stab car tires. [00:22:00] Does he have to? [00:22:00] See the joy in his body language. [00:22:02] Yeah. [00:22:04] He, among other things, we had like a recent like city like in testimony or whatever on police violence. [00:22:12] And somebody came on who he had shot in the groin. [00:22:15] And Brett had to testify that he had never knowingly targeted the groin area. [00:22:19] And in another point, he was talking about having addressed protesters and like he was stopped by the moderate and they said, by addressed, you mean you threw grenades at them? [00:22:26] And he said, yes. [00:22:31] Fucking love the Portland police. [00:22:34] They were cool then. [00:22:35] They're cool now. [00:22:36] Start a conversation with a grenade. [00:22:40] Oh, I love dialogue. [00:22:42] So Stan, the guy who negotiates with a handgun, wound up having an influence that extended far, far beyond the bounds of the Rose City from Pickett's Pistols and Politics. === Chamber Ducks Murder (04:33) === [00:22:53] Shortly after Peters became the union president, he introduced a concept that was relatively new to police officers, political involvement. [00:23:01] Peter's predecessor, David Callison, had dabbled lightly, even inviting controversy by offering a PPA endorsement in a few local races. [00:23:08] But Peters' scope was broader than that. [00:23:10] He wanted the union to be a political force to be reckoned with. [00:23:13] He was tired of the city and state officials writing roughshod over police with seemingly little interest in its rank and file concerns or causes. [00:23:20] He wanted the police to be listened to. [00:23:22] Better yet, he wanted politicians to quake in their boots if the police were not happy. [00:23:28] Uh-huh. [00:23:29] Yep. [00:23:29] And so he pulled his handgun out. [00:23:32] Yeah, I mean, yes, he did do that. [00:23:34] He's also the start in a lot of ways of police nationwide getting directly involved in political races and having police unions directly endorse candidates and taking partisan stances. [00:23:44] We can also thank the PPA for a lot of that. [00:23:47] Yeah. [00:23:48] No, I yeah. [00:23:51] And that showed up last month, this month. [00:23:55] Gosh. [00:23:56] Every month is 100 years long. [00:23:58] Yeah, I mean, it showed up earlier this month. [00:24:00] Yeah, every month of this year has lasted longer than all of the history we're covering in this podcast. [00:24:06] Yeah. [00:24:06] This is true. [00:24:08] But you know what doesn't take long, Tuck? [00:24:10] Goods and services. [00:24:12] Yeah, it doesn't take long to develop an appreciation for the fine products and services that support this podcast. [00:24:17] Can't wait. [00:24:21] What's up, everyone? [00:24:22] I'm Ago Modem. [00:24:23] My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network. [00:24:30] It's Will Farrell. [00:24:34] My dad gave me the best advice ever. [00:24:37] I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot. [00:24:42] I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings. [00:24:45] I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent. [00:24:49] He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet. [00:24:54] Yeah. [00:24:54] He goes, but there's so much luck involved. [00:24:57] And he's like, just give it a shot. [00:24:58] He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. [00:25:07] If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. [00:25:09] It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there. [00:25:17] Yeah, it would not be. [00:25:18] Right, it wouldn't be that. [00:25:20] There's a lot of luck. [00:25:21] Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. [00:25:31] 10-10 shots fired. [00:25:33] City Hall building. [00:25:34] A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene. [00:25:38] From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall. [00:25:44] How could this have happened in City Hall? [00:25:46] Somebody tell me that. [00:25:47] Jeffrey Hood did. [00:25:49] July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest. [00:25:55] Both men are carrying concealed weapons. [00:25:58] And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead. [00:26:07] Everybody in the chamber's ducks. [00:26:10] A shocking public murder. [00:26:11] I screamed, get down, get down. [00:26:13] Those are shots. [00:26:14] Those are shots. [00:26:14] Get down. [00:26:15] A charismatic politician. [00:26:16] You know, he just bent the rules all the time. [00:26:19] I still have a weapon. [00:26:21] And I could shoot you. [00:26:24] And an outsider with a secret. [00:26:26] He alleged he was a victim of flat down. [00:26:29] That may or may not have been political. [00:26:31] That may have been about sex. [00:26:33] Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app. [00:26:36] Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts. [00:26:46] There's two golden rules that any man should live by. [00:26:50] Rule one, never mess with a country girl. [00:26:53] You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes. [00:26:56] And rule two, never mess with her friends either. [00:26:59] We always say, trust your girlfriends. [00:27:03] I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends. [00:27:07] Oh my God, this is the same man. [00:27:09] A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist. [00:27:14] I felt like I got hit by a truck. [00:27:16] I thought, how could this happen to me? [00:27:17] The cops didn't seem to care. [00:27:20] So they take matters into their own hands. [00:27:22] I said, oh, hell no. [00:27:24] I vowed I will be his last target. === Fake Drug Unit Scandal (15:26) === [00:27:26] He's going to get what he deserves. [00:27:31] Listen to the girlfriends. [00:27:33] Trust me, babe. [00:27:34] On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. [00:27:43] Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back. [00:27:49] I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting. [00:27:54] Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians. [00:27:59] Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name. [00:28:09] And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more. [00:28:14] Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin. [00:28:17] You related to the Phantom at that point. [00:28:20] Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that. [00:28:22] That's so funny. [00:28:23] Shari stay with me each night, each morning. [00:28:32] Say you love me. [00:28:35] You know I. [00:28:36] So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. [00:28:46] We are back. [00:28:48] Okay, so the PPA had made history by becoming the first successful police union, and it made history again here by setting a precedent that police unions would involve themselves directly in local and eventually national races. [00:28:59] Stan was clear that his motivation for doing this was to make local elected leaders afraid of him. [00:29:04] This, he knew, was the only way that the Bureau could protect itself from the dangers of democracy. [00:29:08] Portland police police were going to keep shooting people and engaging in rampant corruption. [00:29:19] That was going to continue to piss Portlanders off. [00:29:22] If they wanted to avoid real consequences for this behavior, the PPA would have to insert themselves into politics. [00:29:28] So they started donating to city council candidates, paying to run ads attacking leaders who threatened to force any kind of accountability on them. [00:29:34] Other police unions around the country paid attention and, true to form, followed suit. [00:29:38] In 1979, one of those coke-addled narcotics cops we've been talking about, Officer David Crowther, was shot dead during a drug raid on a motorcycle gang. [00:29:46] Since he was, I mean, I don't know specifically that he was a cokehead, but other Portland cops say the narcotics cops were all cokeheads. [00:29:53] So one assumes. [00:29:56] I am sorry if I unfairly slandered him as a cokehead just because he was in a unit of cokeheads. [00:30:04] And there's nothing wrong with being a cokehead as long as you aren't also carrying out drug raids, you know? [00:30:08] Right. [00:30:08] Yeah. [00:30:09] No shame on cocaine. [00:30:12] Weren't you wistfully tweeting about cocaine like yesterday? [00:30:17] Yeah, it was mostly a joke. [00:30:18] It's been a long time and happened in countries where it's legal. [00:30:22] Let's just say that. [00:30:24] Yeah. [00:30:25] So yeah, since he was, you know, possibly a cokehead cop who may very well have helped murder people, because again, his unit definitely murdered at least one person and staged it as a suicide. [00:30:35] I'm not going to say it was a tremendous tragedy that David Crowther got shot busting another gang. [00:30:41] But the hilariously pro-PPA book, Pistols, Pickets, and Politics notes: the violent death of a fellow officer was a terrible blow to the members of the Portland Police Bureau and devastating to the drug unit. [00:30:52] But it was not the end of the nightmare. [00:30:54] And what that book calls a nightmare was the fact that internal affairs had opened an investigation into the murders, drug dealing, and drug abuse by numerous members of the narcotics division. [00:31:03] What a nightmare. [00:31:05] Being held accountable for our actions. [00:31:07] That's for other people. [00:31:09] Yeah. [00:31:10] I too have nightmares that I will get in trouble for doing a shitload of drugs and murdering people. [00:31:19] Yeah, one of the most damning complaints against the drug unit was that they had planted drugs on suspects in order to charge innocent people with felony crimes they had not committed. [00:31:28] But that's not the nightmare. [00:31:29] The nightmare is not getting caught. [00:31:31] The nightmare is them getting caught, yes. [00:31:33] Now, I should note that police planting fake drugs or drugs that they stole from other people and then planting them on people who didn't have those drugs. [00:31:41] This happens constantly all around the country. [00:31:43] Google the Dallas fake drug scandal if you want another example of huge numbers of officers being involved in the planting of fake drugs on people. [00:31:50] Anyway, law and order is important. [00:31:52] So the internal affairs investigation was completed in the summer of 1980, and it led to the resignations of two officers who'd been assigned to the narcotics unit. [00:32:04] One of those officers was later arrested on charges of illegally obtaining narcotics from a drug dealer with the intent to deal. [00:32:10] He was convicted and the PPA did not sue to get this cop back his job. [00:32:14] So that's, we found a line. [00:32:20] The investigation revealed at least 59 cases where people had been convicted due to falsified evidence from Portland cops and 35 more cases that were in the process of being like argued out based on the same bogus evidence. [00:32:33] And all of these cases, nearly 100, were overturned. [00:32:36] Even Officer Crowther's killer was released from prison after it was proven that the cops who testified at his trial had lied on the stand. [00:32:43] Okay, that's very funny, actually. [00:32:44] That's extremely funny because he's absolutely a murderer and they just couldn't stop themselves from lying. [00:32:54] Scott, make sure you know he's an extra murderer. [00:32:56] Yeah. [00:32:57] I won't say you're shooting yourself in the foot, but maybe you're shooting your friend in the back. [00:33:03] Yeah. [00:33:04] So by the time 1981 rolled around, the Portland police were not doing particularly well in the winning hearts and minds department. [00:33:12] And things got worse for them on March 12th. [00:33:14] The burger barn was at the time one of very few black-owned businesses in Portland. [00:33:18] It was, of course, in Albina. [00:33:20] The cops claimed that the burger barn was a major gathering place for criminal activity. [00:33:24] Gangsters and drug dealers and pimps would all meet there all the time. [00:33:27] And I have no idea if this was true. [00:33:29] Considering the fact that the PPB's whole drug unit was a bunch of cokehead murderers who planted fake drugs on people, I'm going to take what they say with a grain of salt here. [00:33:37] Like the PPA book, like, just sort of goes like, well, criminals were gathering here and cops were just so angry that all these people they couldn't catch were always gathering at this restaurant. [00:33:46] And that's where they did what they did. [00:33:48] But it's like, they also lied all the time. [00:33:50] So. [00:33:51] Right. [00:33:51] Yeah. [00:33:53] Yeah. [00:33:53] So as the story goes, two Portland police officers got fed up with all of the bad men hanging out at this restaurant and they decided to get revenge with what the PPA's biographer describes as a prank. [00:34:04] This prank involved gathering up four dead possums and dumping them at the doorway of the burger barn. [00:34:10] Now, if you aren't aware, the word possum has been a derogatory slur for black people since the early 1800s. [00:34:15] It has the same etymology as the use of like the term raccoon as in the same sense. [00:34:20] Like they come from the same origin point. [00:34:23] This was not a prank. [00:34:24] By dumping dead possums at the door of a black-owned business, these cops were making what amounted to a death threat, right? [00:34:30] Like that's what that means. [00:34:32] Now, I wouldn't call it a prank. [00:34:34] The officers took no steps to be stealthy about what they were doing. [00:34:37] And according to the Powell family who owned the restaurant, this was just the latest in a long line of harassing actions from the Portland police. [00:34:44] They believed this harassment was designed to scare away their customers and destroy the business. [00:34:48] You should probably also keep in mind that while the Portland police claimed this restaurant was a famous haunt of drug dealers and pimps, for literal decades, prostitution and drug dealing in Albino had been carried out under the approval and sometimes the direction of the Portland police. [00:35:02] Yeah. [00:35:03] So an investigation was launched and the officers responsible admitted what they'd done immediately. [00:35:08] They were not publicly identified because there was a clause in the PPA contract that said officers who were disciplined should not be disciplined publicly. [00:35:15] In other words, the PPA contract guaranteed that officers who harmed people would not be publicly named or punished, which some might suggest means they probably wouldn't be punished at all. [00:35:24] This is now the standard nationwide. [00:35:27] So it's frustrating and consistent. [00:35:32] It's not great. [00:35:34] Reminds me of now when, just for people who aren't aware, maybe everyone already is, they actually, yeah, covered all the name badges and numbers on the Portland police. [00:35:44] And so there is actually no way to hold them accountable. [00:35:47] And the only thing you can do is like submit a description to PPP, and they're like, oh, yeah, we'll look into it privately. [00:35:54] You know, it's like you're not allowed to like name the person who shot you in the head because that would be going too far, according to the PPA, apparently. [00:36:04] That would be. [00:36:05] But whenever they arrest people, they will tweet out the name of the identifying information. [00:36:10] Yeah. [00:36:10] Yeah. [00:36:10] All those people are getting doxed. [00:36:12] It's fair. [00:36:13] Fair is what it is. [00:36:16] Fair. [00:36:16] It's cool, good, just. [00:36:21] Now, in this case, there was enough public outrage that the PPA couldn't just sweep things under the rugs and do an internal investigation. [00:36:29] The officers responsible, Craig Ward and Jim Galloway, voluntarily appeared at a press conference before black community leaders. [00:36:35] They identified themselves and apologized. [00:36:38] And I'm going to quote here from Pickett's Pistols and Politics. [00:36:40] Ward and Galloway claimed they had acted out of frustration, not racial hatred, when they made their late-night deposit of the possums at the restaurant's door. [00:36:47] But the black community, already incensed over incidents of alleged discrimination by police, labeled the possum dumping as more evidence of racism and deliberate targeting of blacks by police. [00:36:56] Just a month and a half earlier, Black United Front co-chairman Ron Herndon and neighborhood activist Vessia Loving had called on the United Nations to investigate human rights violations in Oregon because of the high percentage of blacks that they said had been killed by police over the previous 10 years. [00:37:12] Yeah, I didn't realize that people had called on the UN to investigate Oregon police for racism. [00:37:19] Probably not the last time, but yeah, that's wild. [00:37:23] Yeah, we could use another UN investigation, although that would probably just increase the conspiracy theories that Antifa is part of a UN scheme to take over the United States. [00:37:33] Is that actually it already? [00:37:35] Absolutely. [00:37:35] I miss that one with the UN. [00:37:37] There's too many. [00:37:38] Antifa's doing too much at once. [00:37:40] It's hard to keep track. [00:37:42] I wasn't going to throw out criticisms here, but I do think they're going a little bit broad. [00:37:48] They're trying to provide respirators. [00:37:49] They're making soup for my family and they're taking over the UN. [00:37:55] So the Black United Front is one of the advocacy groups that I don't think they'd formed over the outrage in Ricky Johnson's death, but they had really like come together in a big way after that because a number of groups that formed after Johnson's death had been merged into the United Front. [00:38:08] They gave a press conference themselves where they pointed out that the possum incident was part of a pattern of police harassment of black Portlanders. [00:38:14] The PPA's paid biographer writes begrudgingly, the people of Portland seem to agree. [00:38:19] For the most part, public sympathy lay with the Powell family in the black community, not with the police. [00:38:24] Yes, I'm so proud of everybody. [00:38:28] They figured it out. [00:38:29] Yeah. [00:38:30] 200 protesters picketed City Hall, and lo and behold, this forced the police chief and commissioner to fire officers Ward and Galloway. [00:38:37] Great! [00:38:38] Surely that's the end of the story. [00:38:42] And no one ever did anything racist again. [00:38:44] No, no, they immediately did something racist because Stan Peters was still the head of the Portland Police Association, and he was pissed as hell. [00:38:51] Quote, it appeared that no one was willing to stand up for Ward and Galloway. [00:38:55] No one but Stan Peters. [00:38:57] As president of the Portland Police Association, it was his duty to protect the rights of members. [00:39:02] Once the executive board determined that Ward and Galloway had not committed a crime and that they had a legitimate grievance due to their summary dismissal from their jobs, the union, led by Peters, rose up to defend them. [00:39:13] That's good. [00:39:14] It's so cool that they just like, I want to make sure that you have your legal right to be racist. [00:39:20] Yeah, the PPA was saying that as long as Portland cops didn't break the law, it was okay for them to racially harass citizens. [00:39:27] Right. [00:39:28] Like, that's the argument Peters is making. [00:39:30] Peters was a rampaging racist and sexist, by the way. [00:39:34] Yeah. [00:39:34] Oh, yeah. [00:39:35] I could tell from your intro. [00:39:36] Is he? [00:39:37] Yeah, it's like that. [00:39:38] Oh, God. [00:39:38] Is he this dude with the terrible mustache, Robert? [00:39:41] Yes. [00:39:42] Yeah. [00:39:42] You know, he has a mustache by the name Stan Peters and the fact that he was a cop, like, he has to have had a mustache. [00:39:48] The universe would have shattered into a thousand pieces if he had been a clean-shaven man. [00:39:52] He's like, this is a terrible face. [00:39:54] I'm guessing this is the right guy. [00:39:56] Yeah. [00:39:57] No, he's, he's, he looks exactly, if you just picture an old-timey cop in your head, it's Stan Peters, like 70s cop. [00:40:04] Yeah. [00:40:05] I just, it just reminds me so much of like, not Stan Peters and his face. [00:40:09] I don't know about that, but it just reminds me so much about like people who somehow conflate the Second Amendment with like the right to say whatever the fuck you want and still keep your job. [00:40:19] It's like that thing. [00:40:20] It's like, oh, because you legally can threaten people's lives by leaving dead possums outside of their job, you also should be able to keep your job and still do that because those two things are the same. [00:40:30] Also, I would guess that if protesters made an explicit death threat towards officers in a similar way to the officers had threatened to kill members of the Powell family, they would probably be arrested. [00:40:42] Hmm. [00:40:43] I don't know. [00:40:44] Some people made some death threats against me, and all I get to do is say, hope they don't kill me. [00:40:50] Well, yeah, but you know, you're not a cop, Tuck. [00:40:52] No, I know. [00:40:54] Made a mistake. [00:40:55] Just kidding. [00:40:56] Should have been a cop, then your life would matter. [00:40:59] Wow. [00:41:00] I just opened the photo and it is truly everything I imagined and more. [00:41:05] Yeah. [00:41:05] He does have a hair. [00:41:07] I kind of imagine him being bald. [00:41:08] He does have some top hair. [00:41:10] Wow, this mustache. [00:41:11] Yeah. [00:41:12] I know. [00:41:13] It is a cop stash. [00:41:14] It is a powerful cop stash. [00:41:16] He's like leaning against a desk. [00:41:19] It fucking rules. [00:41:20] Don't mean to stereotype, but he is cop ugly. [00:41:22] Yeah. [00:41:23] No, he looks, he looks like a cop. [00:41:25] If you saw him on the street and you were a director and you were trying to cast a cop, you'd be like, hey, like, let me get your digits. [00:41:32] This does look more like the still from a Hollywood film about an old-timey cop than it does an actual old-timey cop. [00:41:38] Yeah, he looks like the guy who like yells at Dirty Harry for shooting too many people. [00:41:42] But in reality, Stan Peters never yelled at anyone for shooting too many people. [00:41:46] He was like, you didn't shoot enough people this month. [00:41:49] Why are there so many alive people in this town? [00:41:55] Yeah. [00:41:56] So yeah, Stan Peters makes the union rise up to defend these officers who were fired for making racist threats. [00:42:03] And this was actually pretty groundbreaking. [00:42:06] Thanks to the PPA, it was common for unions around the country to weigh in on disciplinary matters when cops did bad stuff. [00:42:13] And officers could appeal punishments for bad behaviors. [00:42:15] But once a cop was fired, they tended to stay fired. [00:42:19] Stan Peters set out to change that. [00:42:21] First, he demanded the case go to binding arbitration, which the contract allowed him to do. [00:42:26] Then he organized a petition drive to fire the police commissioner. [00:42:29] He sent ballots to the PPA members to get a vote of no confidence in both the chief and the police commissioner. [00:42:35] And last but not least, he announced a protest march to compete with the Black United Front's march. [00:42:40] This one would consist of off-duty cops, their family members, and local supporters. [00:42:45] So this is back the blue versus Black Lives Matter thing. [00:42:48] Okay. [00:42:49] What year is this? [00:42:50] This is 1981. [00:42:52] Okay. === Stan Peters Arbitration Fight (13:53) === [00:42:53] Yep. [00:42:53] Cool. [00:42:54] The PPA's march gathered a staggering 850 people, waving signs that said, reinstate the blue too, justice, not politics. [00:43:03] And may the force be with you, Craig and Jim. [00:43:06] Star Wars, pretty new at the time. [00:43:09] Fucking nerds. [00:43:14] Many police elements, including sharpshooters, protected the march, which is interesting because it was a private organization doing a march being protected by public funds in a way that I'll guarantee you the Black United Front protesters weren't protected. [00:43:27] Sure didn't. [00:43:28] Not a thing that ever happened again, say repeatedly. [00:43:32] So some brave counter-protesters did show up with pigs' heads on spikes, which infuriated Stan Peters. [00:43:38] And kudos to those folks. [00:43:41] But on the whole, the march was a massive success for the PPA. [00:43:44] All the pressure exercised by Peters eventually did its job. [00:43:47] The arbitrator decided that termination of both officers had been too harsh a penalty. [00:43:52] Both men were reinstated to their jobs. [00:43:54] This would turn out to be quite possibly the most influential thing the Portland police ever did. [00:43:58] From Pickett's Pistols and Politics, the city of Portland versus Ward and Galloway case is still the leading police discipline case in the United States. [00:44:07] And in labor law circles, it is the arbitration decision referred to most often. [00:44:12] Its legal nomenclature is simply city of Portland. [00:44:17] So, you know, we started this by saying that 25% of all fired cops and some cities, more like 70%, get reinstated by union appeals. [00:44:24] Yeah. [00:44:24] The legal underpinning of that is city of Portland. [00:44:27] That is the name of the case that is most often referred to when police firings are appealed. [00:44:36] What a cool city that I live in. [00:44:41] What a great legacy to be here. [00:44:43] We have a lot of roses, too. [00:44:48] You know what, Robert? [00:44:49] It's okay because as we were discussing right before this, there is a current lawsuit that I'm not allowed to talk about called Woodstock versus City of Portland. [00:44:55] And we're just going to slide that one in. [00:44:56] And that's going to be the one everyone references now. [00:45:00] Make the city. [00:45:01] Yeah. [00:45:02] Fingers crossed. [00:45:03] Doc, fingers crossed. [00:45:06] So I found an interesting interview with labor historian Norman Diamond on the website Street Roots. [00:45:11] He was actually on the Portland Labor Board when all this was going on. [00:45:15] So he's very familiar with how the PPA works because again, like the PPA was part of the labor board at this point. [00:45:20] And he pointed out that initially the PPA's goal was, quote, if any of our members commits an act subject to discipline, we want them to have union representation. [00:45:27] That's reasonable. [00:45:28] Their claim was cops have to have the same rights as anybody else in society. [00:45:32] And I do agree with that. [00:45:34] But he says, with successive contracts, they extended those rights beyond anything the rest of us have. [00:45:39] Now, in the event of a shooting, you can't question a police officer until two days have passed. [00:45:44] Their superiors can't. [00:45:45] The district attorney's office can't. [00:45:47] And that's part of the labor contract. [00:45:49] So they have a chance to meet with other officers involved in the shooting to get their stories straight and go over everything with their lawyers. [00:45:55] And then after two days, they can bring back what becomes the official version. [00:45:59] I'm sorry. [00:46:00] What the fuck? [00:46:01] Yeah. [00:46:01] So they can collude. [00:46:03] They're like, yeah, it's really just like, your union means that, or your union says you get to have this specified collusion time. [00:46:11] And now that's very common around the entire country because of the Portland police. [00:46:15] I can't even like fully process that because it's just so obviously corrupt. [00:46:23] Right. [00:46:24] I mean, that's what we're saying this whole time, right? [00:46:25] It's like every single thing in Jew. [00:46:26] It's like, you're not being subtle about it. [00:46:28] You're just like, oh, here's like me being just like literally doing criminal things behind the cops. [00:46:34] And so I just get to do it. [00:46:36] Yeah. [00:46:37] You know, when the, when the, this year's like big protests started up after George Floyd's murder, I was kind of, there was, there was an element of me that was like, you know, Portland's not a big city. [00:46:47] And our police department is not a big police department. [00:46:50] And it's not a nationally, it wasn't at least now. [00:46:53] It's more famous. [00:46:54] It was not a nationally famous police department. [00:46:56] And it seems strange to me that this city would become the nexus of so much resistance to the police. [00:47:04] And it makes more sense now because the Portland police are the center nationwide of a lot of our problems with police violence and brutality. [00:47:13] Like I wish it worked in reverse where like, oh, Portland started all of it. [00:47:18] And so if something happened to Portland police, like every other police station, like by something happened, I mean like contractually, like legally, like something got taken away. [00:47:27] And it's like, oh, that actually just ripples out to everywhere, but I have a feeling it doesn't work in reverse. [00:47:31] No, it would not. [00:47:32] It's going to require an agonizing and probably decades-long process of, yeah, good times. [00:47:40] In 1985, Portland police responded to a shoplifting incident at a 7-Eleven. [00:47:44] They noticed a fight happening in the store's parking lot, and the PPA's biographer describes it tellingly as between two white men and a tall black man. [00:47:52] It's interesting to me that they didn't feel the need to describe any of the physical attributes of the white men. [00:47:57] Um, nope, gotta know he's tall. [00:48:00] So, the cops decided that this tall black man must be responsible for whatever was happening, and they put him in a sleeper hold, which killed him. [00:48:07] It turned out that the victim, Lloyd Stevenson, was a former Marine and a father of five, as well as a security guard at Fred Meyer. [00:48:14] More outrage swept through the city. [00:48:16] The city government acted quickly, banning the police from using chokeholds. [00:48:20] Seems kind of familiar. [00:48:22] I think we've heard this story before. [00:48:24] Of course, the police complained. [00:48:25] Portland police were trained to use force in gradually escalating levels from one to six. [00:48:29] Level one is the presence of a cop, level two is voice commands, level three is physical restraint, level four is the carotid artery hold that killed Lloyd, and level five is the use of a nightstick or mace, and six is, of course, deadly force. [00:48:45] But of course, really so was four because the carotid hold killed people. [00:48:49] Yeah. [00:48:50] Now, the Portland police complained that taking their chokehold away would escalate things dangerously, leaving them with less non-lethal options to respond to crime with. [00:48:58] Because most cops didn't like to carry nightsticks because they were heavy and thought carrying mace was a hassle. [00:49:02] So, just all they would have is a gun. [00:49:04] Oh, my God. [00:49:05] Like, this will give us, basically, this will say that our, this will make our only option be shooting people. [00:49:12] Um, now, yeah. [00:49:13] If you don't let us kill them this way, we'll have to kill them this other way because we can't carry mace around. [00:49:18] Because we can't let it's too heavy, mace. [00:49:23] Two Portland cops, Monty and Wickersham, were particularly angry at being banned from choking people. [00:49:29] And the PPA biography notes that they were in the process of being trained to give chokeholds at the time. [00:49:34] So, it kind of leaves you with the impression that like they were so excited to choke people and then they got their power. [00:49:38] Like, I don't get to choke anybody now. [00:49:41] I'm new to being a cop. [00:49:42] Come on. [00:49:43] Do you say their names are Monty and Wickershams? [00:49:45] Monty and Wickersham. [00:49:47] Yeah, they sound British as hell. [00:49:48] They do. [00:49:51] A couple of bobbies in the old PPA. [00:49:54] They like, they traveled here because they're like, I hear you get to choke people more in the Portland Police Bureau. [00:50:00] Yeah. [00:50:01] It's funny. [00:50:02] When I was a little conservative, well, I guess more conservative than I am now, I remember a video circulating around that was like a bunch of British cops, like a circle of them all around one man with a machete. [00:50:13] And they had like chairs, I think, and were like, like basically like all in a huge circle trying to like calm this, like stop this guy from swinging a knife and eventually de-escalated him and nobody died. [00:50:24] And it was like portrayed as like, look how silly it is because English cops don't have guns. [00:50:28] This is what it takes to deal with a man with a machete. [00:50:30] And it's like, well, but they didn't kill anybody. [00:50:33] Right. [00:50:33] It wasn't. [00:50:34] Everyone walked away alive. [00:50:35] Isn't this a good story? [00:50:36] Yeah. [00:50:37] We're going to arm everyone with chairs now. [00:50:38] They're going to be heavy, but no one's going to die. [00:50:41] Yeah. [00:50:42] So I'm going to quote here from the PPA's biography. [00:50:46] Monty and Wickersham reacted to the situation with the typical black humor of police officers. [00:50:51] They had t-shirts printed with the slogan, don't choke them, smoke them. [00:50:56] No. [00:50:57] Yeah. [00:50:58] Sorry. [00:51:00] Yeah. [00:51:02] That's just the typical black humor of police officers. [00:51:06] Making a t-shirt about an innocent man you choke to death. [00:51:09] Good times. [00:51:11] Uh. [00:51:14] I mean, as somebody who's wearing a novelty police violence t-shirt right now, I guess I can't talk, but it's a little different. [00:51:21] Someone in the city of Portland has found a don't choke'em smoke'em t-shirt at like a fucking vintage store like and didn't know what it was for. [00:51:29] Oh yeah. [00:51:31] The biography goes on to state the message they wished to convey was clear. [00:51:34] If the karate hold was no longer available to police, why not just shoot? [00:51:39] Why not? [00:51:40] Why not? [00:51:40] What else are we going to do? [00:51:41] Law enforcement? [00:51:43] They had to shoot people? [00:51:46] Yeah. [00:51:47] They started selling the t-shirts in the Justice Center's break room on the exact same day of Lloyd Stevenson's funeral. [00:51:54] Classy. [00:51:56] Classy. [00:51:56] They were fired and the case went into arbitration. [00:51:59] The union argued that the officers' apparent insensitivity had been unintentional because the officers hadn't known that Stevenson's funeral was taking place the same day. [00:52:08] The firings were overturned and the officers reinstated. [00:52:16] You know, I am loving this city of Portland citing more and more every time the cop gets their job back. [00:52:23] Yeah, it's great. [00:52:26] You know what's better than people mocking a murder victim and then getting back pay? [00:52:35] I would say honestly most things, but possibly products and services. [00:52:38] Yeah, very certainly products and services. [00:52:44] What's up, everyone? [00:52:45] I'm Ego Modem. [00:52:46] My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell. [00:52:55] Woo, My dad gave me the best advice ever. [00:53:00] I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot. [00:53:05] I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings. [00:53:08] I'm working my way up through it. [00:53:09] I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent. [00:53:12] He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet. [00:53:17] Yeah. [00:53:17] He goes, but there's so much luck involved. [00:53:20] And he's like, just give it a shot. [00:53:21] He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. [00:53:30] If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. [00:53:32] It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there. [00:53:40] Yeah, it would not be. [00:53:42] Right, it wouldn't be that. [00:53:43] There's a lot of luck. [00:53:44] Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. [00:53:54] 10-10 shots fired, City Hall building. [00:53:57] A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene. [00:54:01] From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach. [00:54:06] Murder at City Hall. [00:54:08] How could this have happened in City Hall? [00:54:09] Somebody tell me that. [00:54:10] Jeffrey, what did it? [00:54:12] July 2003. [00:54:14] Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest. [00:54:18] Both men are carrying concealed weapons. [00:54:21] And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead. [00:54:30] Everybody in the chambers ducks. [00:54:33] A shocking public murder. [00:54:34] I scream, get down, get down. [00:54:36] Those are shots. [00:54:37] Those are shots. [00:54:38] Get down. [00:54:38] A charismatic politician. [00:54:40] You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man. [00:54:42] I still have a weapon. [00:54:44] And I could shoot you. [00:54:47] And an outsider with a secret. [00:54:49] He alleged he was a victim of flat down. [00:54:52] That may or may not have been political. [00:54:54] That may have been about sex. [00:54:56] Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app. [00:55:00] Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts. [00:55:09] There's two golden rules that any man should live by. [00:55:13] Rule one, never mess with a country girl. [00:55:16] You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes. [00:55:19] And rule two, never mess with her friends either. [00:55:22] We always say that. [00:55:24] Trust your girlfriends. [00:55:26] I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends. [00:55:30] Oh my God, this is the same man. [00:55:32] A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist. [00:55:37] I felt like I got hit by a truck. [00:55:39] I thought, how could this happen to me? [00:55:40] The cops didn't seem to care. [00:55:43] So they take matters into their own hands. [00:55:46] I said, oh, hell no. [00:55:47] I vowed I will be his last target. [00:55:50] He's going to get what he deserves. [00:55:54] Listen to the girlfriends. [00:55:56] Trust me, babe. [00:55:57] On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. [00:56:07] I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future. [00:56:12] This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. [00:56:19] I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world. [00:56:26] From power to parenthood. [00:56:28] Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI. [00:56:31] This is such a powerful and such a new thing. [00:56:33] From addiction to acceleration. [00:56:36] The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution. [00:56:40] You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others. === Red Squad Soccer Secrets (12:03) === [00:56:47] And it's a multiplayer game. [00:56:49] What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility? [00:56:56] Find out on Mostly Human. [00:56:57] My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI. [00:57:00] Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. [00:57:12] We are back. [00:57:13] Okay, so there have been a lot of horrible crimes committed by the Portland police and defended by the PPA. [00:57:18] We've gone through a number of them. [00:57:20] We only have so much time in our lives and in this episode, so in the sake of brevity, I'm going to outline just one more. [00:57:26] And this time, the victim is not a black man. [00:57:28] It's a 12-year-old boy. [00:57:30] Oh, good. [00:57:33] In 1992, a home invader broke into the house where Nathan Thomas, the aforementioned 12-year-old child, and his parents lived. [00:57:40] The police arrived while the invader was in the house, and the man grabbed Nathan as a hostage and held a knife to his throat. [00:57:46] The home invader was 20 years old, drunk, and reportedly suicidal. [00:57:50] Now, this is obviously a nightmare situation. [00:57:52] And like, right, my criticisms of the police aside, there's not going to be a perfect way to handle this. [00:57:58] There's a good chance that he would have died no matter what had happened. [00:58:01] This is a bad situation. [00:58:03] That said, the tactic the cops chose to deal with this hostage situation was, shall I say, less than delicate. [00:58:10] Instead of doing any of the kind of things you might expect police to do during a hostage situation that threatens the life of a 12-year-old, five different Portland officers opened fire from outside of the house with their handguns, pumping dozens of rounds into the house. [00:58:23] The hostage taker was shot 14 times. [00:58:26] Nathan was also shot and he died in the hospital. [00:58:30] Just five guys start shooting into the building. [00:58:33] What's even the point at that point? [00:58:35] Like, ostensibly, you're there to help. [00:58:38] You're not, but like, ostensibly, they're there to help the kid. [00:58:40] Yep. [00:58:41] But they're not. [00:58:41] So why are they there? [00:58:44] And it's also like, whatever. [00:58:46] I will say it can be justified to use a firearm in that situation, but you don't use a pistol. [00:58:52] Right? [00:58:53] You don't try, you don't try from outside of a house to... [00:58:56] I shoot a lot of handguns, right? [00:58:58] They're very inaccurate compared to a rifle. [00:59:00] Like they are only good at short distances and they are not for precision work. [00:59:04] That's not what a handgun's for. [00:59:07] You would have a sniper come in and try to shoot the guy threatening a 12-year-old with a, that's a reasonable time to use a sniper. [00:59:13] They just had five guys start shooting handguns into the building. [00:59:16] Right. [00:59:18] It's so fucked up. [00:59:19] The president of the PPA at the time was a guy named Morse, and he showed up on the scene with a PPA lawyer as soon as he heard that his cops had gunned down a small child. [00:59:27] Now, I want to read you this next paragraph from Pickett's Pistols and Politics because it has to be one of the most sociopathic things I have ever read in my entire life. [00:59:36] As the father of three young sons, Morse's heart went out to the family of Nathan Thomas. [00:59:40] The boy's accidental death was devastating, but Morse, a Marine Corps veteran and a longtime police officer, was a man who had been thoroughly trained to maintain his focus and perform his duty, no matter how much he heard inside. [00:59:50] As he dialed the telephone number and contacted one sleepy lawyer after another, his focus was on the five police officers who needed his help. [01:00:00] Cool stuff. [01:00:01] Good guys. [01:00:05] So I just even just calling it like an accidental death. [01:00:08] And it's like, I'm not convinced it was an accident. [01:00:11] I don't think you can just have five people shooting handguns into a house and be like, that, oh, oops. [01:00:16] Oops. [01:00:16] Someone died. [01:00:17] If five people shoot handguns into a house filled with people, what you're saying, because I love nonverbal communication and the nonverbal communication that you're giving off when you and four other men fire handguns into a house is, I don't really care who I hit inside that house. [01:00:32] Exactly. [01:00:34] Exactly. [01:00:36] So obviously, none of these guys were fired or seriously disciplined for wildly. [01:00:46] Now, don't worry, though, Tuck. [01:00:47] The PPA's biographer wants us all to know that the police cared about what had happened and they wanted to make it right. [01:00:55] Uh-huh. [01:00:55] Quote: The association's concern for youngsters was demonstrated in a gesture of grief and sympathy after the death of Nathan Thomas. [01:01:03] A few weeks after the boy's death, the union contributed $250 to the American Cancer Society. [01:01:08] Nathan had received treatment for Hodgkin's disease and was in remission at the time of his death. [01:01:12] And $250 to the Nathan Thomas Soccer Scholarship Fund. [01:01:16] Nathan was the member of a soccer team. [01:01:18] So that's good. [01:01:21] Yeah. [01:01:21] I always say, if you just kill a 12-year-old kid for no reason, just donate $250 to a soccer team and it's all fine. [01:01:30] That's yeah. [01:01:31] Now, they, I will say, they, the family of Nathan also reached out to the police later because they were working to raise money to build a soccer field in Nathan's memory at Laurelhurst Park, which is near where he lived. [01:01:44] And the PPA did contribute $5,000 to the soccer field. [01:01:48] So that's more money. [01:01:50] Yeah, they love to sponsor soccer. [01:01:53] Yeah, they're big soccer fans. [01:01:55] Do you think we can get them to defund PPB if we tell them that we just need to raise more money for soccer? [01:02:03] A lot of soccer fields. [01:02:04] That might do the trick, Tuck. [01:02:07] Not that I would want to defund PPB. [01:02:09] I'm an objective journalist. [01:02:11] Objective journalist. [01:02:12] No skin in this game. [01:02:13] Anyway, go ahead. [01:02:14] Yeah, as a journalist, opinions are obviously forbidden. [01:02:18] Now, there are a number of important things I didn't cover in this series, like how PPA president Stan Peters hated the idea of woman cops and non-white cops and deliberately made the union unwelcoming to them. [01:02:28] Cool. [01:02:28] I felt like focusing on the travails of police officers, even like Ike. [01:02:32] Obviously, it's weird because I don't think we should have cops. [01:02:36] If we're going to have them, yeah, everyone should have the equal opportunity to be a cop, I guess. [01:02:42] But I didn't want to focus on that in this episode as opposed to all of the horrible things that the police did. [01:02:48] Yeah, but Stan Peters, super racist, and there was a whole fight within the union to make it less racist. [01:02:54] That's a thing that happened. [01:02:55] So, you know, in the sake of fairness, I wanted to note that. [01:03:00] Yeah, I do want to close, though, by talking some more about the PPB's infamous Red Squad. [01:03:06] In 1974, the mayor of Portland assured the city's liberal population that the Red Squad had been disbanded. [01:03:13] This was a lie. [01:03:14] And they later learned that year that it had just been renamed the Intelligence Division and was actively keeping tabs on suspicious characters at the Oregon ACLU. [01:03:23] Got to keep an eye on them, ACLU folks. [01:03:27] In November 1986, local press published rumors that the Red Squad had been secretly re-established as a new entity under the name Criminal Intelligence Division, presumably as part of a renewed Red Scare of the Reagan years. [01:03:39] The police denied this, admitting that the Criminal Intelligence Division existed, but claiming that it does not monitor peaceful or public activities and does not target groups or individuals. [01:03:50] But that's true, right? [01:03:51] Mm-hmm. [01:03:52] I'm going to quote next from a write-up by Michael Monk. [01:03:55] In 1992, Officer Seward, officially detailed to spy on radicals and subversives, attended and submitted a confidential report on a meeting by a coalition of peace, labor, and environmental groups to discuss a civilian police review board. [01:04:08] One of the victims of that surveillance sued Portland for violation of his civil rights four years later and won a $2,000 award in court. [01:04:15] Although the court decision was not reported by the Oregonian, it led to public hearings on the Red Squad in 1996 by the Metropolitan Commission on Human Rights. [01:04:22] Although denied press coverage even by the Willamette Week, the commission grilled Red Squad commander Lieutenant Larry Findling and Sergeant Norman Sharp. [01:04:30] They admitted they used paid agents, volunteer informers, and other techniques to monitor dissenters and agreed that even the reasonable suspicion of something as trivial as trespass triggers their response. [01:04:41] The MCHR proposed a series of controls on the Red Squad to Mayor Katz. [01:04:45] Not only did the mayor reject the proposals, she dismantled the MCHR. [01:04:50] Yeah, Portland's got a long tradition of good mayors. [01:04:54] Nothing but quality in Portland mayors. [01:04:58] I was trying to make a joke earlier about Vericatz being good, and I'm so glad it didn't work out. [01:05:06] Nope. [01:05:07] Turns out leaders are bad. [01:05:10] So the Red Squad spent the end of the 1990s violating the civil rights of dissidents. [01:05:15] In October of 1999, it sent an undercover agent to spy on protesters opposing Bill Clinton's air war on Iraq. [01:05:22] In 2000, on May Day, the Red Squad's black van videotaped the faces of demonstrators who hadn't actually broken any laws, which is again a crime. [01:05:32] Right. [01:05:33] That's criming. [01:05:34] The Red Squad's behavior was egregious enough that they pissed off Circuit Court Judge Michael Marcus, who ordered the Oregon police to stop tracking citizens who aren't breaking the law. [01:05:43] Two years later, information surfaced that they were still doing that. [01:05:46] It is currently against Oregon law for them to surveil lawful demonstrators, but we can only assume the Red Squad is still doing what it always did, whatever name it operates under now. [01:05:55] Anyway, that's the story of the Portland Police and the Portland Police Association. [01:05:59] Yay! [01:06:01] I will rest easy knowing that I'm definitely not being surveilled by the Red Squad because it doesn't exist anymore. [01:06:08] And they're stopped it. [01:06:10] They're just chill and cool now. [01:06:13] Which are good. [01:06:15] Thanks, Robert. [01:06:16] I appreciate knowing this context that not only are things bad now, but they always have been bad, and there was plenty of time to fix it. [01:06:25] And we just didn't. [01:06:27] Yeah, but you know, this inspires me to kick the can right down the road to the next generation of people. [01:06:37] Can't even go to the burger barn. [01:06:39] That story made me just want to go to the burger barn and support the burger barn. [01:06:43] It doesn't even exist anymore. [01:06:45] Yeah. [01:06:46] That's the real tragedy. [01:06:47] Tragedy. [01:06:49] Trategy. [01:06:51] Tradition. [01:06:52] I don't know. [01:06:52] My brain stopped when you said Willamette Week. [01:06:54] I was like, what? [01:06:54] And I'm just going to go. [01:06:56] Yeah, I think that was a either they changed their name or that was the name they used to operate under. [01:07:01] I don't know. [01:07:02] No, it is Willamette. [01:07:03] It's Willamette Week, but it. [01:07:04] Oh, it is. [01:07:04] I thought it was weekly. [01:07:06] No, it's Willamette Week, but it was like Willamette Week versus Willamette Week. [01:07:10] It's like a very non-Portland pronunciation. [01:07:12] And I'm like, Robert, where are you from? [01:07:14] I'm from here. [01:07:15] Get out of here. [01:07:16] Yeah, no. [01:07:18] Like the Portland police, I'm not a Portland police. [01:07:20] I don't live here. [01:07:21] That is. [01:07:22] I mean, I do live here. [01:07:23] Cave note yet. [01:07:24] But that came up in my head when we were talking about the police the whole time. [01:07:28] It's like, at what point did they stop living in Portland? [01:07:30] Do you know? [01:07:31] Yeah, and I don't have good information on that. [01:07:34] Yeah, I figured. [01:07:34] But yeah, it is, people should know that about 82% of Portland police live outside the city, many of them in another state, Washington. [01:07:43] It's cool stuff. [01:07:44] It's cool and good. [01:07:46] Yeah, cool and good. [01:07:47] So, Tuck, you got anything to plug? [01:07:51] Yep. [01:07:53] Still, much like in the last episode, I still make a podcast about gender. [01:07:58] The new season is dropping right around when this episode drops. [01:08:01] And we have programs to provide money for housing, medication, food, really basic things for trans people, particularly black, indigenous, trans people, and trans people of color. [01:08:14] So if anyone wants to contribute to any of that, they can go to patreon.com/slash gender. [01:08:21] That's patreon.com/slash gender. [01:08:23] Awesome. [01:08:24] Patreon.com/slash gender. [01:08:26] And also, we have, if you're, if you listen to this and we're like, boy, Portland is, and its problem with cops is more interesting than I thought it was. [01:08:34] We have a podcast about that called Uprising. [01:08:37] And it's about everything that happened in Portland this summer. [01:08:40] Please check that out. [01:08:42] Again, Uprising. [01:08:44] It's a podcast that's more things about Portland that will frustrate you. === Never Enough Audio (02:39) === [01:08:50] There's never enough. [01:08:52] Yeah, never enough. [01:08:53] A lot of great audio of things exploding, though. [01:08:56] So if you were like, my headphones haven't triggered me yet. [01:08:59] That's what I was going to say. [01:09:00] I was like, oh, that sounds cool to listen to. [01:09:02] No, I have PTSD. [01:09:05] Trigger warning, the podcast. [01:09:10] Podcast. [01:09:14] When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands. [01:09:22] I vowed I will be his last target. [01:09:24] He is not going to get away with this. [01:09:26] He's going to get what he deserves. [01:09:28] We always say, trust your girlfriends. [01:09:33] Listen to the girlfriends. [01:09:34] Trust me, babe. [01:09:35] On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. [01:09:45] On the Ceno Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversation about recovery, resilience, and redemption. [01:09:51] On a recent episode, I sit down with actor cultural icon Danny Trail to talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances. [01:09:58] The entire season two is now available at the bench, featuring powerful conversations with guests like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville, and more. [01:10:05] I'll an alcohol. [01:10:08] Oh my God. [01:10:09] Listen to Ceno's show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. [01:10:15] On paper, the three hosts of the Nick Dick and Pole Show are geniuses. [01:10:20] We can explain how AI works, data centers, but there are certain things that we don't necessarily understand. [01:10:27] Better version of play stupid games, win stupid prizes. [01:10:30] Yes. [01:10:31] Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time. [01:10:34] I actually, I thought it was. [01:10:35] I got that wrong. [01:10:36] But hey, no one's perfect. [01:10:37] We're pretty close, though. [01:10:38] Listen to the Nick Dick and Poll Show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. [01:10:45] 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. 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