San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
The case against cops policing themselves
With “The Riders Come Out at Night,” Bay Area reporters Ali Winston and Darwin BondGraham have proved it is possible to offer a definitive account of a systemically corrupt police department. It took over two decades of tireless work and countless court battles for access to documents.
Surveying more than 50 years of misconduct and subsequent efforts at reform within the Oakland Police Department, the Polk Award-winning investigative duo’s new book details the rise of the Black Panthers and incidents like the 2009 killing of Oscar Grant as it traces an agency so resistant to change — intractably devoted to brutality and protecting their own — that it ultimately backed itself into (briefly) becoming a poster child for police reform.
Along the way, countless passages in the book fill in blanks from past headlinemaking cases, including the cruelty of OPD’s “Riders” squad, which terrorized the local community with sadistic glee in the early 2000s. Featuring a cast of characters like Clarence “Chuck” Mabanag, who the authors note enjoyed collecting misconduct complaints “like baseball cards,” the Riders scandal would set in motion the longest court oversight to reform a police department in U.S. history.
Both devastating and illuminating, “The Riders Come Out at Night”’ also serves as a vibrant, clear-eyed history of Oakland politics. In this ever-churning saga, chapters on California Gov. Jerry Brown and Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren offer valuable context in understanding how OPD came to amass and wield such vast powers — while also profiling the bold few who have dared to oppose them. Chief among the latter are Oakland civil rights attorneys Jim Chanin and John Burris, whose dogged efforts to pursue reforms for OPD led to the department being placed under court oversight in 2003, a situation still in place 20 years later.
For this reason, Winston and BondGraham argue, the Oakland Police Department can be viewed as “the edge case” in American law enforcement. It’s a compelling thesis fleshed out over 400 pages with meticulous research, scores of fresh interviews and a refusal to move on from an issue that has now outlasted four mayors, two judges, two monitoring teams and a half-dozen police chiefs.
It’s an effort worthy of immense recognition — let the Pulitzer Prize buzz commence — but glittering hardware is not the authors’ ultimate goal. Instead, as the authors note in their conclusion, they want to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that police agencies are simply incapable of policing themselves.
“Law enforcement is the repressive, coercive power of the state embodied in an armed officer,” they write, stressing the importance of outside parties in holding the police accountable. “Whenever the public, press, and watchdogs let up and allow the police to ‘police themselves,’ the violent, racist, and reactionary law enforcement culture that developed behind the thin blue line reemerges.”
It’s a harrowing coda to a text heavy with the weight of innocent lives lost. But be it the bleak revelation that between 2001 and 2008, nearly 60% of all OPD narcotics warrants relying on an informant contained false information, or an explosive 2016 scandal that revealed numerous officers had sexually assaulted the same underage girl, Winston and BondGraham have delivered an air-tight argument against the “few bad apples” theory. They chronicle, in excruciating detail, just how extraordinary the injustice must become before the arc finally begins to bend the other way.