08/08/12 – Ali Winston – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
Website is scotthorton.org.
You can find all my interview archives there, scotthorton.org/stress for the blog.
And I have a stacked police state section today, but this is the biggest and the worst of those.
Uh, it's by Ali Winston at color lines.com from Anaheim to Oakland police brutality, still plagues California.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm all right.
How are you doing?
I'm doing good.
Appreciate you joining us today.
No problem.
So this is really something else here.
I appreciate, uh, sort of the comprehensive take, uh, the encyclopedic list here and an explanation of so many, uh, cases of police brutality and in fact, the kind of sub police gangs, uh, you know, the gangs within the police departments, uh, that push the very worst of, uh, of how this stuff goes.
So, um, and it's really something else.
Uh, I guess let's start obviously with, uh, all the big news out of Anaheim in the past couple of weeks.
Tell us what's going on there.
So down in Anaheim, the, uh, there are large portions of the community of the Latino community and others as well, who are outraged at the killings of two young Latino men, um, and the wounding and the, uh, third officer involved shooting that happened all within about a week of one another.
The shooting that really got everyone's attention was the killing of, um, Manuel Diaz on July 21st.
So Manuel Diaz was a 25 year old from Santa Ana and police, um, claimed after the fact that Diaz was a gang member, um, which are suspected gang member, whatever that means from them.
So he was contacted by a group of officers who were assigned to gang suppression around the area where he was shot on Anna drive.
And, um, he ran from a contact with them and they chased him on foot.
They fired twice on him, hit him once in the leg and then in the back of the head.
And, um, the shooting happened in the middle of the day.
There were a lot of people out on the street and, uh, some bystanders got video of the incident and the video shows Diaz handcuffed, uh, handcuffed Diaz on the ground, um, bleeding from the back of his head.
And the officers are not aiding him at all.
They're kind of moving back, establishing a perimeter and keeping bystanders away from the site.
But that just kind of says it all right there, doesn't it?
They shoot him in the head and then they cuff him.
I will add that no weapon was found on Diaz after the fact, no weapon was found on him whatsoever.
There was no accusation that he pointed a weapon at the officers.
Um, the account that Anaheim police gave to the media afterwards indicated that the officers believed Diaz to reaching for his waistband, um, which is a tragically familiar circumstance for, uh, the death of young African American or Latino men who are shot by police that tends to be a very common, um, very common phrase.
Well, they do have hands and waistbands.
So yes, they do.
And the cop can't always have a drop gun on him, you know?
Well, I mean, there's no, there's no indication here that there was a drop weapon involved.
Um, two months, two nights later though, when, um, what was his name?
When, uh, another young man was shot when Joel Acevedo was shot after a, um, pursuit, after a vehicle pursuit, Anaheim police basically claimed that Acevedo was in a stolen car that cops pursued him, um, in a vehicle that he bailed from the car and that shots were fired at Anaheim police.
Um, while Acevedo was on foot, they shot him to death, found a handgun next to his body.
However, the account was pretty muddy.
In the initial days after that shooting, there were claims that the shots were fired during the car chase and then switched to during the foot chase.
So that is also pretty murky.
Um, and there's a, understandably, there's a lot of public distrust.
And most of the anger at Anaheim also stemmed from the reaction to Anaheim police to protest about these shootings.
In the immediate aftermath of Diaz's shooting, um, people took to the streets and, you know, got up in the face of a bunch of police officers in the street.
Cops claimed that bottles were thrown at them.
They responded by firing, um, lead, uh, let's see, uh, lead birdshot wrapped in canvas from shotguns.
They're fired.
These are what they call drag stabilized bean bag rounds at a crowd and also use pepper balls on them.
And then a police dog was also set on the crowd.
And there's a video of, um, pretty shocking video of this dog tearing at the arm of a young man who's on the ground and fending off the dog with one arm while he's clutching his infant with the other.
And, uh, it's really, it's pretty chilling.
Yeah.
Wow.
Just think if that was a scene from, you know, some country where America wanted a regime change.
That'd be all over CNN.
Yeah.
Well, you know, unfortunately there's a narrative that law enforcement will push regarding these incidents where they say that the, uh, suspect was gang-related and that the crowd protesting the, uh, the shooting was violent and threw bottles or rocks at officers.
It's very similar to the, uh, circumstances that preceded the pretty infamous deployment of tear gas and other less lethal rounds on October 25th last year during, um, occupy Oakland protests against a police raid on their camp in which, uh, you know, a former, uh, former Marine was critically wounded.
He was put in a coma by three weeks by one of these, uh, less lethal rounds.
Right.
So yeah, it's pretty, it's pretty, uh, pretty similar in terms of the circumstance.
Yeah.
Less lethal.
I like that.
That just means more usable, but dangerous as hell.
Yeah.
And well now, um, do you happen to know the good keywords for people to search this video?
If they have not seen the YouTube, um, you know, the local news actually covered it and actually showed the whole video, I think.
And, and people can find that on YouTube and, uh, and judge for themselves, whether this crowd, which is mostly mothers and their children, I think.
Yeah.
I didn't do a head count or anything like that.
Maybe you did, but, uh, anybody thinks that the cops are right, that that crowd represented some dangerous mob that threatened their lives.
Come on.
You just search for Anaheim police dog video.
That's as simple as it gets.
It's no pop up on YouTube.
Yeah.
Dog mean German shepherd, right?
A German shepherd or a Malinois was a big, large, aggressive dog that was apparently, you know, the police claim that it escaped from the cruiser, um, that it was being held in.
But what I've heard police policing experts say in the days afterwards is that that dog was out of control.
It had poor training.
It reflected on the poor training of the officers.
It should have been able to, it should not have attacked anybody if it hadn't been commanded to, um, that it was really out of pocket.
And, uh, that those experts basically made the same comments on the behavior of the Anaheim police department.
I mean, you're not, you're not, you're not supposed to cross, you're not supposed to cross a human with your, with your, with your firearm.
You're not supposed to point your firearm at a human.
You're not supposed to level at anybody unless you're planning on using it or unless they point a, uh, let's say pose a serious threat to you.
It's what even pointing a firearm at someone, um, is defined by law enforcement as a use of force.
It's a low level use of force, but it's a significant threat that you, even if the gun is loaded with a quote, less legal round, unquote, it's still a significant threat of force.
And they even have to, they have to write on it.
Those incidents are documented normally.
Um, Anaheim police are very tight with their records.
They, um, they and a bunch of other Southern California police departments will actually refuse to release the names of officers involved in shooting incidents, as well as the names of the suspects involved in shooting incidents.
If you file a request under the state public records act law, that is highly unusual and it's actually, it could be in violent, it's in violation of state law.
There was a court decision last year that ruled that the names of officers involved in shooting are public because those individuals are public servants.
But now you mentioned in your article that in orange County, this district attorney, um, has actually prosecuted cops before, but in that case it was the homeless man and the only reason they prosecuted those cops for murdering him was because his father was a cop.
Well, you still have to be one of them to have the protection of the law when it comes to a conflict with them.
Well, the thing, the difference, main difference here is that, um, the Thomas Beating was videotaped.
The shooting of Diaz was not videotaped.
The aftermath was, Thomas Beating was videotaped.
There was not once, there were dozens and dozens of accounts of it.
Um, he was the photo of, uh, Diaz, uh, of, uh, Thomas's body in the hospital afterwards, really, that went around the world, that went viral within hours.
And, um, you know, it was, there was a big difference between the two of these incidents because most of all, Diaz was a Latino and Anaheim police had him on paper as a quote gang member.
So they can make the excuse that their force was justified.
That's right.
I'm sorry.
We got to hold it right there.
We'll be right back.
Everybody with Ali Winston from color lines.com from Anaheim to Oakland police brutality still plagues California.
Oh, man.
Jeremy Sapienza's Twitter says Fallujah is like still all mad and whatever.
Get over it.
Ah, good old Jeremy.
Okay.
Welcome back to the show.
Ali Winston writes at color lines.com from Anaheim to Oakland police brutality still plagues California.
From Anaheim to Oakland police brutality still plagues.
California is the latest piece there.
And, uh, so let's see.
Now I'm trying to remember where we leave off Oakland somewhere.
Oh no.
I know where it was.
It was, uh, the difference between the videotaped beating of the white son of a cop, uh, and the prosecution of the cops that did that, uh, the, the murder, uh, they beat him to death, uh, compared to, uh, this one where they shot the guy in the back of the head as he was running away and then didn't render any aid to him.
Didn't even try.
And then, uh, turned on the crowd that assembled watching their war crime, uh, the cops of Anaheim in this case.
Yep.
That's exactly where we were.
And, um, one of the things that really disturbed me about the incident was, uh, the way that the Anaheim police deployed the next week to meet, um, protesters that came out the following Monday.
I mean, they basically deployed, deployed out in fatigue gear on APCs on armored personnel carriers and fired pretty indiscriminately on people out there.
Um, including credentialed media waiting their press passes in there and saying, you know, don't fire on us.
We're here to document this.
Um, one local videographer for a news station actually pulled up to the police line.
Um, they didn't know that the street was blockaded and, um, another TV, uh, TV camera was behind the police lines and basically captured one officer just kind of popping off a few rounds from a, what was it?
I think it was like a Remington 307 or something like that.
Popping off a few beanbag rounds into the windshield of this car.
It was pretty spectacular.
Um, it really, I mean, you could see the overlap of the police and the U S military, the increasing overlap to those two in the way that and I'm PD responded to a crowd control that night.
It was pretty disturbing.
All right.
And now, so tell us about the gangs of cops inside the cops in the LA County jails.
So most recently, this is, this is actually a pretty longstanding issue.
It's not new.
Um, it surfaces every, I mean, I want to say five years, seven years or so.
Um, so in mid nineties, there was a, uh, it was a bit of a flap caused by the revelation of, by the uncovering of a few, what they, what cops called social clubs, what the deputies called social clubs within the Los Angeles Sheriff's department, including, um, a group that operated out of Linwood station called Linwood Vikings, um, groups like the regulators, the nomads, um, a federal judge actually went so far as to call and they had their own insignia.
They had their own signs.
They had their own tattoos.
Um, and a federal judge went so far as to call the Vikings in particular, which operated out of Linwood, which is in Southeastern Los Angeles County.
And what used to be a very, um, what used to be a very white city in the mid fifties and sixties, they, you know, African-Americans called it Lily white Linwood.
And, um, there were, that was one of the areas which was in constant conflict with a lot of African-Americans from South central back in the 1950s and sixties, the federal judge called the Linwood Vikings, a quote, Neo-Nazi supremacist, unquote, and the assistant sheriff for Los Angeles County, but number two in the Los Angeles County Sheriff's department, the largest law enforcement department in law, largest law enforcement agency in California has one, has a tattoo from the Linwood Vikings.
He was part, he was assigned to Linwood station in the eighties.
He was part of this group.
He blew off the judge's concerns.
He said, no, they're not, they're a social club.
They're not a gang.
They don't act like this.
Well, um, so it's 2012 now.
And in 2010, there was a brawl at a dinner for off duty, LA County deputies, sheriff at the LA County sheriff's deputies in Montebello.
The group that started the ball turned out, it turned out through investigations by the Los Angeles times that they grew up in front of this ball was a group of officers known as the 3000 boys.
It was a clique of officers from the third floor, third floor of the County jail, um, that had, that had their own tattoo again, had their own tattoos, had their own gang signs.
They threw up, you know, the last three fingers on their hands to indicate what their, what their clique was.
And they had a very, they had a system for keeping deputy for keeping inmates in line.
They would beat, they'd beat the tar out of them.
And that's set off a bunch of outrage set off.
Uh, actually there's an ongoing federal investigation into them.
And just this past May, uh, the LA times again revealed the existence of a different set called the jump out.
Boys jump out.
Boys are part of, uh, LA County, the LA County sheriff's gang task force.
So they're not in the jails.
They're on the streets and they have, you know, they value highly aggressive behavior.
They have their own tattoos, skull, uh, hand of a flaming skull with red eyes, hand of cards and a skeletal hand holding a revolver.
If the cop who bears us, who wears this tattoo was involved in a shooting, they tattoo smoke onto the barrel of the revolver.
So they actually celebrate officer involved shootings.
And that's the sort of culture that exists that has existed in sections of the LA County sheriff's department for years, if not decades.
So it's like a, and who, I don't know the exact code of it or whatever, but it's like getting a spiderweb tattoo from being in prison or, or the teardrop colored in or not colored in or whatever, signifying whatever crimes you supposedly committed.
That's just how the cops are.
Well, certain groups of them.
Yeah.
Whether there's smoke coming out of the barrel of the revolver in the tattoo and that kind of thing, that's great.
I like that.
It's a, it has a nice symmetry, right?
The, uh, the cops, I mean, the gangs are basically just acting like cops in the first place, but then the cops that imprisoned the gangsters, they end up just turning right into them to mirroring their behavior.
It's like chimpanzees or something.
Yeah.
It's really insidious.
This is what happens when you try and, you know, when you go on with perpetuating the same cycle of violence and conflict that has been going on with LA gangs.
And again, with the police for, what is it now?
50 years, 60 years since the second world war.
I mean, you have the police department and the street gangs basically mirror one another.
And in some cases there have been cases, there have been instances of deputies in the jail, um, you know, trafficking controlled substances for these gangs and in and out of the jail and engaging in this contraband.
So the overlap is, it's really alarming.
The fact that there's this kind of culture that they, it breeds similarity and it breeds aggression and it breeds a contempt for life.
Hmm.
Well, you know, Murray Rothbard always said the state is just organized crime writ large.
So they're really not different in kind, just in the expense of their uniforms or whatever.
Really?
There's, it brings, it really, incidents like this and the kind of systematic refusal of the LA County Sheriff's department to address their existence, um, brings into question the, uh, the culture that, that, um, that law enforcement agency is created and whether the folks in charge of the Sheriff's department down there really carry root that, that stuff out.
Um, up North, actually in Oakland, we do have, we had a similar group of officers called the riders, um, that engage in train day style behavior.
Um, one of them actually is fled because three of them were charged and acquitted on hung juries, but the city paid out 10.5 million in a civil set, civil sediments.
And, um, one of them actually fled the country and it's still a fugitive down in Mexico.
So there's former cop in Oakland who's on the FBI's wanted list.
Um, really that, Oh yeah.
Frank Vasquez.
Wow.
And that happened back in 2000, what?
2000, 12 years ago.
So since 2003, the police department up here has been under a federal consent decree to kind of clean up their culture, but they have not succeeded in doing that.
Um, there've been, there've been a series of officer involved shootings up here and not serious, but there's been dozens of them over the past decade that have really raised questions about the department's ability to get, to train their officers, to use force appropriately into the violent city.
And, you know, there are a lot of, there are a lot of firearms up here.
There's a lot of, there's a lot of, uh, shootings up here as well.
But the police have a pretty longstanding rap.
They have a pretty bad rap for using force.
And that's most recently in evidence with the shooting, this kid, Alan Bluford, um, he was killed down in East Oakland by an officer, um, who was hired by a former veteran who was hired by Oakland PD while he had an ongoing investigation into a jailhouse beating that he participated in while he was in New York city police officer.
So that investigation hadn't closed out and OPD still hired him.
So that's the sort of vetting process they go through.
And, um, you know, up here there are, there's also another call.
There's, you know, not, there's no evidence of the similarity of that sort of gang culture that you have within the Los Angeles Sheriff's department.
But at the same time, you know, they, there are photographs posted.
There are flyers posted around the department.
One of the, uh, pretty, the mayor up here is Asian American.
Yeah.
Well, you know, the sub police gangs, kind of the gangs within the police, it's not that they're really different in kind, just shows how lawless that they are allowed to get, you know, they can spin out as far as they want.
They have total immunity and impunity, do what they want.
That's the lesson to me.
I mean, I'm sorry.
We're out of time.
Thank you so much for your time on the show.
I really appreciate it.
No problem Scott.
Thank you so much.
That's Ali Winston writing for color lines.com.
And he's also a San Francisco public radio 91.7.