Oakland Police Department Released from Federal Oversight After 23 Years

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Darwin BondGraham (0:08)

Oh, not really.

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Darwin BondGraham (0:16)

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Alexis Madrigal (0:37)

Welcome to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. If we take a step back from all the details of the Oakland Police Department that we're going to discuss today, our show is really about a bigger question. Is it possible to change the culture of a police department? Assuming it is, what are the mechanisms that can be used to make policing more fair, more effective, and less prone to abuses?

While we're going to be talking about the OPD, as the whole Black Lives Matter movement revealed, these issues have cropped up in police departments around our region, the state and the country time and again. Alright, let's dig in. We're joined first this morning by Darwin BondGraham, news editor at Oakland Side, co-author of the book The Riders Come Out at Night, Brutality, Corruption and Cover-up in Oakland. Welcome, Darwin.

Darwin BondGraham (1:26)

Hey, good morning.

Alexis Madrigal (1:27)

We're also joined by John Burris, civil rights attorney who negotiated the settlement with Oakland on behalf of over 100 plaintiffs who had sued in the wake of the Rider scandal. Thanks for joining us, John.

SPEAKER_2 (1:38)

Good morning.

Alexis Madrigal (1:40)

So Darwin, for listeners who don't know or don't remember the story, who were the riders? What were they doing in West Oakland? How did it reflect what was happening at the Oakland Police Department at the time?

Darwin BondGraham (1:51)

Yeah, it's the year 2000, summer. A fresh class of OPD Academy graduates have hit the streets as police officer trainees. They're out there with their field training officers and one of them, Keith Batt.

He's working West Oakland with a squad of police, and he witnesses over the course of a week a number of incidents which really get at his conscience. He sees people being beaten. He sees a man kidnapped and taken under a freeway bridge, beaten up really badly. He sees drugs being planted on people. He sees police lying on police reports.

In other words, he sees crimes being committed and he sees constitutional violations of people's constitutional rights. So he blows the whistle that summer. That is what set in motion the reforms because after he blew the whistle, there's an internal affairs investigation. There's then criminal prosecutions of four officers who he worked directly with and witnessed these things of. Then you have John Burris, the civil rights attorney who we'll hear from in a minute, and Jim Chan and the other civil rights attorney. They come in and say, we've been seeing this pattern. This is not new and this is not just these officers. We've been seeing the systemic pattern for years in OPD and so they file a civil rights lawsuit. That's what leads to the reform agreement.

Alexis Madrigal (3:26)

John Burris, so how did you get involved? Was it just, as Darwin was saying, that you had just had people come to you time and again and decided, you know what, let's try and get at the systemic components of this?

John Burris (3:40)

Well, I had been involved in suing OPD for a long time before this event took place, and I had finished a book tour in 1999, where at the conclusion of that book, I had some recommendations that I would like to implement if I had a chance to do a pattern and practice case.

In early 2000, before it became public known, I had been receiving these calls from potential clients who were claiming that they were being beaten up by this group of guys, officers called The Riders. And I was sort of gathering this information.

And so when the matter broke in the news, I had already started the process, but I had committed myself to filing a lawsuit and a pattern and practice lawsuit early, even before I was fully aware of the extent of The Riders. I was doing it and would do it based upon the people that come to see me at the time before. Once the case broke, then I had a flood of cases. And I contacted Jim Chan and turned out he had a flood of cases. And so that sort of led us to come together in a collaborative way, say, let's just go do this. This is the one opportunity we may never happen again, or we can make a big difference. I will tell you though, at the very outset, I actually contacted the Department of Justice at the time. It was the Clinton Administration was just about to leave and tried to induce them to work with us in this regard. They were not interested. So I waited a few months until the Bush administration came in, the first, second Bush, and they were not interested either. So from then on, it was really just Jim and I saying, this is what we're going to do. It was a wonderful experience because generally, I had been suing people individually and not having done a pattern practice, although we had tried in other cases. This was really the first time that I saw that it was a clear pattern here, that we could really make a big difference. And I was determined that we would not only represent the hundreds of people we had, but also to rewrite the policies of the department and kind of take control of this department. And that was really my objective very early in 2000 And so we had to work through it. Fortunately, we had some individual people that assisted from us and helping. But we really were determined to take control of the department in a pattern practice case and revamp what we consider to be bad policing. That was a cultural problem at the very core of everything. And so that was a big thing that we were interested in, is the culture of the department, how are we going to change this and impact the direction of the department in the future. For me, the huge issue was the racial profiling question. That was a race-based notion of what was taking place. I had been representing a number of African-Americans around this issue before. I had tried to do a pattern practice about 1998 or so, 1999 through the Festival of Late case, where I represented 20-something people.