Earlier: Christopher Dorner, The Rampart Scandal, And The Real Problem With The LAPD
Screenwriters tend to be more realistic than op-ed writers, which is one reason they are paid better. For example, in the late 1990s, various Los Angeles Police Department officers in the Ramparts Division were accused of police brutality against criminals. The Los Angeles Times portrayed this as White Racism, but most of the Ramparts cops weren’t white, as the two Academy Award-winning movies that touched upon the Ramparts scandal, Training Day and Crash, made clear.
When I called the black lawyer, who had worked for Johnnie Cochran, who had defended Puerto Rican ringleader Rafael Perez in the Ramparts scandal, he was fascinated by the idea that perhaps a movie with Denzel Washington playing his client was about to appear. He asked me the key question: Did Denzel’s character speak Spanish? Yes, I replied. OK, he answered, only 4 of the 900 black LAPD officers speak Spanish, so yeah, Denzel was clearly playing Perez.
A few years later, there was a nearly identical scandal in Oakland, CA involving four cops, three of them nonwhite. Likewise, that fact has disappeared into the mists of time.
From the New York Times book review:
What Oakland, Calif., Tells Us About Why Police Reform Is So Hard
“The Riders Come Out at Night,” by Ali Winston and Darwin BondGraham, is a case study of corruption and reform within a single police department—with implications for all of us.
By Maurice Chammah
Jan. 10, 2023THE RIDERS COME OUT AT NIGHT: Brutality, Corruption, and Cover-Up in Oakland, by Ali Winston and Darwin BondGraham
It’s been more than two years since protesters filled the streets of America’s cities, since we all saw the video of a police officer’s knee on George Floyd’s neck. And yet killings at the hands of law enforcement, by various metrics, continue at a steady pace.
On the other hand, killings by criminals are up 30%.
Set aside for a moment the debates about crime rates
I.e., ignore Steve Sailer’s research.
and the calls to abolish the police (or, at the other extreme, to place officers beyond criticism). Ask instead what it would take to hold police accountable for abuses, in a minimally satisfying way, and what role civilians can or should play. How many protesters went on to join a citizen oversight board? How many knocked on doors for district attorney or sheriff candidates who promised change?
And how long until we witness the next George Floyd, and another cycle of outrage, reform and backsliding?
It’s hard not to ask such cynical questions after reading “The Riders Come Out at Night: Brutality, Corruption, and Cover-Up in Oakland,” an exhaustive case study of policing in the Bay Area city by the reporters Ali Winston and Darwin BondGraham. “More has been done to try to reform the Oakland Police Department than any other police force in the United States,” they write, arguing that the racially mixed city of less than half a million holds “parallels for other communities that have struggled to reign in the coercive arm of the state.”
The main parallel seems to be: True reform is nearly impossible. By zooming in geographically, but also stretching out their timeline—the town had a racist mayor who unleashed police officers against Chinese immigrants back in 1879—the authors conjure a sense of chronic tragedy. …
The book’s title calls to mind the night riders associated with the Ku Klux Klan, but it’s also a metaphor that feels fresher than the one about apples: “Night” represents the moments when the public lets up on scrutinizing the police. Yet the “Riders” of the title were also a group of real cops. In 2000, a rookie officer in Oakland named Keith Batt found himself in training under Clarence Mabanag, who collected misconduct complaints “like baseball cards” and worked with a coterie of sadistic officers.
What kind of name is Mabanag anyway?
Oaklanders accused the Riders of an astonishing range of violent acts, as well as of falsifying reports, planting evidence and using racial slurs. When Winston and BondGraham suspect we may still reserve a shred of sympathy for these men—who were, after all, facing daily danger in high-crime areas—we get a detailed account of them shooting dogs. And bragging about it.
Their fellow officers mostly failed to speak up—to do so was to risk being labeled a snitch and becoming a target for retaliation. But a month after joining the force, Keith Batt did speak up. (He also quit his job.) Thanks in part to his testimony, some of the Riders were brought to trial on criminal charges. But defense lawyers portrayed them as merely following orders “to be aggressive.” None were convicted. One fled the United States and was reportedly last seen in Cancún, Mexico.
… Winston and BondGraham spend more time on history than most, drawing a line from Oakland authorities’ racism toward Asian immigrants in the 1800s to their Ku Klux Klan ties in the 1920s and onward to high-profile police killings in the rest of the century.
“When reforms do happen, they are rarely incorporated into an agency’s culture, which is often driven by a reactionary ethos passed down through generations of rank-and-file cops,” they write. …
But if you look closely at the the photos accompanying the book review, you’ll notice something never mentioned in the text. The whistleblower in the Riders case, Keith Batt, was white, while 3 out of the 4 Riders were not white.
Two Oakland, Calif., police officers and a lawyer for one of the men at a 2002 trial at which the officers, members of a group known as the Riders, were charged with criminal abuses. The officers are wearing suits and one is looking over his shoulder toward the camera with a pensive expression.
Do these two Oakland rogue cops on the left in this picture look white?
The guy looking at the camera, Clarence Mabanag, looks Filipino to me, and the disgraced cop to his left, Jude Siapano, could be too, or maybe Latino. The ringleader, Francisco “Frank” Vazquez, who fled to Cancun, was presumably Latino. The one white cop charged, Keith Hornung, was the only one acquitted on all charges. And he had a black wife.
It’s not hard to notice that photos of the Oakland Riders cops show they weren’t very white if your brain isn’t predisposed that whites aren’t the root of all evil. But in recent decades, almost nobody allows themselves to notice that.
