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Tue, 01 Dec 2020 11:00
Part One: The Worst Police Union In History
Hey, Robert here. It's been like two months since I had LASIK and I'm still seeing 2020. All I had to do was go in for a consultation, then go in for a maybe 10 minute procedure and then my eyes have been great ever since. You know, I healed up wonderfully. It was very simple, couldn't have been a better experience. So if you want to explore LASIK plus I can't recommend it enough. They have over 20 years experience in the industry and they performed more than two million treatments right now if you want to try getting LASIK plus you can get $1000 off of your surgery when you're treated in September, that's $500. Of per eye, just visitmylasikoffer.com to schedule your free consultation. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried true crime. And if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's breaker handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Hey there, it's Ebony Monet, your co-host for the San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we're speaking with Doctor Jane Goodall about the fascinating journey that led to her impactful behavioral discoveries on chimpanzees. It wasn't until one of the chimpanzees began to lose his fear of me, but I began to really make discoveries that actually shook the scientific world. Listen to amazing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Podcast. Pod cast. Podcast. I'm Robert Evans. This is behind the ******** a podcast where we talk about people who are bad with people who aren't bad. And today, the person who isn't bad to talk about the people who are bad is. Tuck. Woodstock. Tuck, how are you doing today? I'm OK. Thank you so much for having me with such a generous introduction. Not bad. I'll take it. Yeah, I'm going for it. Tuck, you are a Portland area journalist and podcaster and someone who I got. With your guests, with a bunch during you know, the whole year, really? How are you doing today, tuck? I'm OK, I'm alright. The sun is shining, which helps. I I think that there's this been this weird gift where yes, we do have to just cower inside because there is a pandemic, but we're getting like a little bit of extra sun out of it. So I'm just trying to take it where I can get it, you know? Yeah, take it where you can get it is a good motto for 2020. Just also feel like I didn't get the sun in the summer because we were both working like 9:00 PM to 5:00 AM, which is conveniently the only time it's dark in the summer. And so I was like, well, I was just out the entire night all summer. So I get some sun now. So you would wake up about an hour and a half before dusk and go out to get to your guest again. Yeah. The number of times that we all went to bed, like, as the sun was rising, I had to, like, invest in some, like, eye masks, you know? It's ridiculous. Yeah. It was a, in other words, a very healthy summer. And it was a healthy summer. It was a healthy summer. Because of our friends in the Portland Police Bureau, our our good buddies. And you know, when you're talking about the Portland Police Bureau, you're also talking about the Portland Police Association, which is the Portland Police union and oddly enough, one of the most important unions, if not the most important police unions in the entire country. Do you know much about the PA? You know, I know what I've heard while I was standing outside their union building and people were chanting at them, and I know that they don't love any. Effort to defund the PPB. And that's about as much as I know. I know that the guy in charge doesn't love the protests, which, you know, shocking personally. But no, I don't know that much. I'm excited to learn more about the people whose building we've been standing outside of all year. Yep, Yep, Yep. Well, that's what we're gonna do today. And because this is a, this is actually a subject, you know it, we're focusing on Portland today. But the PA is a subject that I think everyone, at least in the United States, should have some interest in. Because as, as it turns out, they kind of the Portland police union kind of set the tone for every police union in the United States because it was the first, it was the first successful police union in the country. So we want to start by talking a little bit about police unions. In general, so we can contextualize why they're a problem. So a 2018 Oxford University study of police unions in the 100 largest U.S. cities found that police protections in union contracts are directly and positively correlated with police violence and abuse towards citizens. This includes protections like contractual guarantees that officers found engaging in misconduct should not be publicly shamed, that they shouldn't be questioned within two days of a shooting or another act of fatal violence. And that they shouldn't be publicly identified after assaulting citizens. Shockingly, this causes police to hurt more people. Really surprising stuff. That's why I love unions, right? It's like all the cool worker protections, like you get to just kill people without any sort of repercussion or notice whatsoever. That's why I love a union. Go ahead. I remember when the steel Workers Union went on strike because they weren't getting to murder enough people and we were all like, yeah, you should get to murder more people. Yeah. Yeah, 2019. Study by the University of Chicago found that when Florida sheriff's deputies received collective bargaining rights, the main power imparted by unions, incidents of violent police conduct in Florida increased by 40% across the state, so this is not a subtle correlation. Now, Professor Rob Gilzow's research, which will be published in an upcoming study, found that nationwide police ability to collectively bargain led to a significant rise in police killings of civilians. And of course, people of color were subject to an outsized number of those killings. This may have something to do with the fact that police unions regularly sue to reinstate officers who are fired for killing innocent people. Nationwide, they succeed about 25% of the time, but in some cities the number is north of 70%. San Antonio would be one example. In Minneapolis, it's like 50% or so now. WBZ, a Chicago radio station, found that between 2007 and 2015, Chicago's independent Police Review Authority, which the Union fought for because they only wanted cops to judge us, the cops rather than. Billions to be able to fire cops. Uh, this body investigated 400 police shootings and found officers were justified in 398 of 400 incidents. So, you know, I'm surprised about those, too. That's really generous of them. Yeah, that's. I'm glad they found those two bad cops they like. See, we're a legit organization. We're just now, you know? We're real. We're real. Yeah. In Minneapolis, the police union also succeeded in replacing its Civilian review board with an office of Police Conduct Review. And over 8 years, the public filed more than 2600 misconduct complaints. 12 of those resulted in punishment. Again, I perfectly legitimate organization that's really found the 12 bad ones. Like, it's one of those things I interviewed a cop years and years ago about, like, police misconduct. And, you know, one of the statements he made to me is like, well, when when journalists get accused of bad behavior, do you tend to assume that, like, they were in the right or the wrong to, like, make the case that that's why cops back other cops? And I was like, I get what you're saying, but also if I were to hear that out of 2600 complaints of misconduct by journalists, only twelve were found valid, I'd say no, it's got to be at least 1300, right? Like, I know. You know, it's also are the complaints the journalist murdered people? Because I would take those more seriously personally. It does. It does have something to do with what the complaints are about, right? Like, yeah. So, yeah, that's just a little bit about unions. Because today, again, we're gonna be talking about the Union that started it all. Because every statistic I've just cited here and all the murders and beatings that those statistics represent, all the crimes against actual human beings can be tied in some ways back to a single specific police union, the Portland Police Association. Now, the Portland police were not always unionized, but they were always kind of ****. Like most police agencies in the United States, their story goes back further than the concept of police. Audience from 1851 to 1870, the City of Portland was policed by a Marshall who was elected or appointed to A2 year term. He could hire deputies, and these were basically just like freelance guys with guns and badges until the 1860s. It wasn't until 1870 that Portland was enough of a real city to merit its own police force. Initially called the Portland Metropolitan Police force, at the time the city had about 9000 residents and the police force was seven people, which. Seems like a good number for a police force to be compared to the current number, and I would take it for sure. Yeah, yeah, seven cops. I think they'd be nicer. Things grew rapidly from there, and in 1908 Portland became the first city anywhere in the USA to hire a female officer. So that's good. More woman. Yeah, the Bureau was also the first to use radios. In the early 1910s, it joined the proud tradition of U.S. law enforcement cracking the skulls of left wing labor organizers. And that's going to bring me briefly to the tale of Portland's Red Squad. Have you heard of the Red Squad now? I'm so excited we still have one, but they don't call it that anymore. Is it for communists? Yeah, it's for beating the **** out of communists. Well, leftists in general. Anarchists too. You know they don't like the Wobblies. So the Red Squad started to ramp up as a unit during the Roaring 20s, which, as a decade of increasing wealth inequality and ballooning fortunes for the rich was also a decade when a lot of people were like communism. Seems like maybe something we could try. And, you know, Portland's always had a left wing radical tradition. More than a dozen of its citizens went off to fight fascism in the Spanish Civil War, and the labor movement had a strong home here. And that was really the crux of it. Leftists kept organizing workers into unions, and business owners wanted those people identified and punished before they could mess up people's profit margins. So while some of the Red Squad was funded by the city, most of its money came from business owners in Portland who wanted to know which of their employees were considering joining a union so they could fire them. I'm obsessed with this. Do any of those. Businesses still exist. I need to know. That is a great question and should be looked into. I do not have that research in front of me, but I I it wouldn't be hard to do. I don't think people were reporting on. The Oregonian reported on it in the 30s. Gotta love them, yeah? Well, they have a mixed story in this episode too. So yeah, the 1930s Portland kind of sounds a lot like Portland today. Uh, for example. In 1934, they're Mayday celebration. Demonstrators hung the red revolutionary flag over City Hall, and a malfunctioning poll mechanism stopped the city from taking it down. The Portland Communist Party held a parade against hunger, fascism, and war, and for the first time in Portland's history, the protesters had a functional PA system. Demonstrators were called to meet at 3:00 PM to March to the Plaza Park for unemployment insurance, Social Security. Free milk for children and a release of class war prisoners. And that really scared rich people in the town. And the cops. The Red Squad started sending an officers to infiltrate left wing groups. After this, they hired agent provocateurs to suggest acts of violence during planning meetings that the police could then crack down violently before protests, claiming that they had intelligence about violence from protesters. Yeah, it's it's some good ****. Yeah. Were they, were they threatened by the unemployment or the milk for children? That's what I I really know what they're concerned about here. Equal, I would say, equal parts. Equal parts milk for little kids and unemployment insurance. In society, yeah, and I'm going to quote now from a 2000 write up for Lewis and Clark College by Michael Monk quote throughout the decade it's undercover agents and provocateurs made desperate efforts to suppress and destabilize radical political groups and union organizing, including pressuring Lincoln High School students, artists and anti fascist organizers. And again he's writing this in 2000. So before Rose City Antifa exists. Before Antifa is like a buzzword, like just kind of to note that the the Portland police is antipathy. Towards anti fascists goes back quite a ways, and there's a reason Portland police were sympathetic to fascism during the 1920s when the second KKK arose. It was something of a cross between like an MLM scheme and a hate group. Oregon was one of its centers of recruitment, it was one of the states with the most Klansmen, and there were a number of times where huge numbers of KKK guys would would March through the streets of Portland. And of course many of the Klansmen who marched through Portland were also cops. In 1923 a Portland Telegram article reported that the Police Bureau. This quote full to the brink with Klansmen. The Portland Police Bureau actually deputized 100 Klansmen handpicked by the local Grand Dragon and designated them Portland police vigilantes. They got badges. I love it. It's so cool and good. Yeah. I mean, it makes sense. You know, there's all the the chance of the street of, like, cops and Klan go hand in hand. And it's like, no, literally, they are just like the one hand to the other hand on the same human body. Yeah, it's not a euphemism. Yeah. Now, as you might expect, a police Bureau that consisted mostly of white supremacists and fascist sympathizers did not react kindly to the cause of organized labor. On July 11th, 1934, Portland's longshoreman. Went on strike, blocking the Union Pacific train line from delivering freight out of the port that gives Portland its name. The Portland police loaded up onto a train with a bunch of strike Breakers and attempted to drive through the union lines. When longshoremen threw rocks at them, the police drew shotguns and revolvers and fired wildly into the crowd. From a moving train. They wounded four and killed one. So that's good. Yeah, I you know, I guess the protests today could be worse. Firing live rounds at us from a movie vehicle. They did Ram us a couple of times with police cars, but not with a train, right? Yeah, it's getting smaller. We've reformed them. In 1936, a German naval vessel sailed into Portland's harbor. And of course, because it was 1936, the German Navy was, you know, bunch of bunch of Nazis. And yeah, this this vessel bore the swastika flag, which marked the very first time that the swastika was flown in the city of Portland. But of course, not the last time. The Evening Herald, a Klamath Falls newspaper, noted thousands of citizens who lined the West Harbor wall, and city officials gave the Imden, which was the ship and its men, an enthusiastic. Welcome. So thousands of Portlanders showed up to cheer for the first Nazis to come into town. They got to March like actual Nazis. Sailors got to March through the streets of Portland. It doesn't sound wrong to me. Now, those literal Nazis were of course protected by the police and they were opposed by a small number of brave anti fascist demonstrators. 11 of them were arrested, quote, on a charge of parading banners without permits by members of the Red Squad. Yeah, that's good. This is the danger the Nazis are here. I mean, honestly, this sounds exactly like what would happen to you today. Like it is not different. No, it's not at all. Like Nazis continue to March in town and the police continue to arrest the people who show up to oppose them. It's the same. It's the same. It's great. These Nazis had a boat, which I guess is a change. You know, I think we there's like the the Trump, the Trump vote things that we're thinking the other. But do you know what I'm talking about? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That was in like a yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's not the same, but I feel like it's like a similar energy. If we could come kind of combine those two things together. I think the sinking boat was one of my favorite things to see on Twitter all year. It's just like, no, the singing Trump because there were a lot of like Trump vessels that sunk non Trump vessels just trying to have a good time. Yeah. That I don't like as much now. Yeah, it's it's all great. So go ahead. The anti fascists who protested again, actual Nazis marching through the streets of Portland, carried banners denouncing Hitler and demanding that the US in no athletes to the Berlin Olympics. Nobody listened to them. And again, 11 of them were arrested. The newspaper notes that three of them were Reed college students. So congratulations, Reid. You had a strong reaction to that tuck. Yeah, I know a lot of people from Reed College and it it just tracks their their what is their slogan? Their slogan is like communism. Anarchy. Free love. What is it? It's something like that. It's really powerful. Good for them. Well, I'm proud of Reed College. The newspaper also notes that five of them were women, which says something about the times. I guess that that was that was a worthwhile statement to make. Yeah. And I I think before we move on, I want to read the names of the arrested people, because I think it's probably good to remember that while thousands of Portlanders showed up to be like, yay, Nazis, 11 people were like, **** you guys. And those people ruled John Hammond, Robert Lewis, William Wood, Esther Layton, who was the secretary of the American League against the war. Fascism, Mary Gould of the International Labor Defense League, Seth Nordling, Earl Stewart, Frank Weber, misses Violet Olson, and misses Levina Hinitt and Lillian Foster. So good on all of them. I did some research while you did read that list, because I too am a journalist and I just want to read to you. An unofficial motto of Reed is communism, atheism, free love, and can be found in the Reed College bookstore. It was a label that the read community claimed from critics during the 1920s. So hey, here we are. Yeah, this. Good on you read. So when World War Two started, the Portland police contained a number of officers who were members of Fascist and Nazi sympathetic organizations. They put their heads down and whistled loudly as their nation went to war against fascism. It was, rather ironically, this war that would finally convince the Portland police that all those labor organizers they'd beaten and shot over the years might have had a point. The cause of this was police chief Niles, a forward thinking cop who'd established one of the nation's first police academies in Portland in 1940. Prior to this, Portland police had been trained on the job, which means they were not trained at all. The book pickets pistols in politics, which is a complete history of the Portland Police Union, and I can send you a copy if you want it. It's it's fun reading notes that quote. Fresh recruits were given a star and a whistle and shoved out the door. Good. That's why would you need to train anyone to be feel like that's better, though, than what they're doing now. Now our cops are highly trained and it has not helped. Let's go back to the whistle star date whistle star. I do love a whistle. Yeah. You know who else loves whistles? Everybody loves whistles. Yeah, what do you. Yeah, and let's hear from our finish our, your plug there. I was going to go to ads and say that our, our, our, our sponsors all love whistles. Whistle company. Yeah, well, big whistle is actually heavily in bed with the police union, so I don't think we're going to get any of that money. Fair enough. Another sponsor? Spoiled. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. 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Slash behind betterhelp.com/behind this fall on revisionist history. Is there anything that we haven't talked about or or? Could have asked you like to add that seems relevant. You should have asked me why I'm missing fingers on my left hand. A story about sacrifice. I think his suffering drove him to try to alleviate suffering. And the shocking discovery I made where I faced the consequences of writing a book I thought would help people? Isn't that funny? It's not funny at all. It's depressing. Very depressing. Religious history is back with more. Listen to revisionist history on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. I've never seen less enthusiasm for a great idea in my life. We're back. OK, so we're talking about Henry Niles, the police chief, who's again, big modernizer. You know, also establishes Portland, or. Oregon's first police science school forms a discipline board for his cops, and he gives his cops modern uniforms, which at this point, they did still have to pay for themselves. But Niles had some problems that got in the way of him modernizing the Portland police. One of them was the fact that a lot of Portland cops were old as hell. The pension was bad in those days, and so people would hang on to the job. Even though they like really could barely walk anymore because again, it would be that or starve on the streets, old cops had never been forced to pass a civil service exam which was required of new recruits and that was also a problem for Harry because again, he once police to be professional. To make his dreams of a young, sexy, modern Portland Police Bureau reality, Niles had to find a bunch of extra money and what was at that point a very limited budget. So he decided to put all of the old cops on what he called Park Patrol, which would force them to spend 12 hour shifts on their feet. At a much lower rate of pay, uh, reducing their pay opened up funds for new cops. And basically, he was kind of hoping that making them walk all day would make a lot of them quit or die on the job and free up more money. Die on the job? Yeah, you kind of get that. He didn't say it, but he's giving the old guys a job that makes them walk 12 hours a day, you know? On the one hand, disrespectful. On the other hand, they are cops. They are cops. You're gonna kind of let this one even out. I'm still distracted by you calling it police science. Yeah, yeah. Like, like like fingerprinting and ****. Yeah, like, like the idea that there should be some rigor applied to how you determine whether or not a crime was committed by someone, as opposed to just being, like, grabbed the nearest person who isn't white and throw them in prison. No, they still didn't. Point is like, yeah, maybe like do science and stop with crimes. That's the idea. Cops walking like, you know, the the vandalism that sometimes you'll see that says, like, you know, kill a cop or whatever. But like, they should, like, have a subtitle. That's like by making them walk 12 hours a day in a park. Like, we're not bad people, we just want them to walk more, see what happens. We agree with Portland's old police chief. Exactly. Look in the book out Harry Niles, the leader of Antifa. He created didn't you say he created like discipline. Like the first discipline. Yeah. He yeah. There we discipline board. Yeah yeah. Which again he was very unpopular with the rank and file cops. As a rule, the people the cops hate most in Portland police history is their police chief. Although there's some debate. We'll we'll talk about that a little bit later too. So yeah Harry has all this plan to make a bunch of old cops walk until they die or quit and the City Council is like, this is a great idea and in September of 1941 they. Basically, back legally, his plan to do Park patrol. But then in December of 1941, Japan attacks Pearl Harbor and the US winds up in, you know, a thing like a big, like a big kerfuffle, I think would be the best way to describe what they call a world kerfuffle. Yeah, the big the big world kerfuffle. And this was a problem for officers, even officers who hadn't been Nazi sympathizers because people went kind of ******* at the start of the war and assumed that Oregon and California were going to be invaded by Japan. And this wasn't entirely irrational because the Empire of Japan did kill several Oregonians with bombs tied to balloons. So, like, yeah, that's we don't talk about that much, but there were some attacks on, on Oregon, I think it was Oregon. And Washington had, like, some minor strikes on their soil. It's like a thing that happened. Yeah. It rings a bell, but the balloon part I was just like, wait, pardon, that's a thing you can do. They tried some, they tried some wacky stuff. So a more direct problem for the police was that, number one, they suddenly had a whole new type of patrol duty to do because again, people were afraid of being invaded and #2. There were a whole bunch of young, fit cops that got drafted, and that meant that they couldn't really afford to get rid of all the old ones. So to make up for this, Niles put the entire Bureau on full time service with no days off. Portland police were expected to work 12 hour shifts seven days a week. And remember, they didn't get overtime. Yeah, so this is like pretty like. And again, no sympathy for them, but kind of a **** gig. Like, you can see why they would be unhappy with this, these, this state of affairs was originally supposed to last just three weeks, but once it became clear that this, you know, world kerfuffle thing was going to last more than a month, Niles extended the new schedule indefinitely. As you might expect, officers were not wild about this new state of affairs inter John Hayes. He was a young, fresh faced and popular officer whose previous job had been as a pinball machine. Repairman. Shockingly, pinball machine repairman did not get paid well. So at age 22, John had created a labor union for pinball mechanics. In pursuit of this goal, he'd met members of the Multnomah County Central Labor Committee, and they helped him learn how to organize a bunch of pinball guys into a union that could bargain for better wages. I'm so mad that this is going to get bad soon, because I'm obsessed with pinball union and I would wear their T-shirts all day long. **** yeah, the pinball union. Unfortunately, the Pinball Union is irrevocably tainted. By their relationship to the Portland Police Association, it's really tragic, yeah. So nationally there's been a couple of attempts at police unions by the 40s, but none of them had worked out. The Boston police had unionized in the 19 teens and then gone on strike for better wages, which had resulted in a mass riot through the streets of Boston as citizens looted everything they could possibly find. President Woodrow Wilson had called the police strike a crime against civilization and told the American Federation of Labor President there is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere. Anytime every single striking Boston officer was fired and the union died a painful death, and the AFL revoked all police union charters after this point. So cops had tried to unionize and it had gone very badly for them. And there were not police unions when the John Hayes is like, what if I unionized the Portland police so they're not the first, but they are the 1st that will succeed at unionizing. So obviously this was a dangerous thing to try to do, and a lot of people felt that the police should not be able to organize under any circumstances. Those people would, of course, prove to be right. Uh Officer Hayes reached out to AFSCME, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, which is the largest trade union for public employees in the company. And he was like, you know, that thing that ended really badly last time. What if we do that again? This good stuff. It's just so interesting to me because I have a friend who organized, you know, helped organize the Union for apps me in Portland. And there's there's literally like a no cop apps me movement, right to get rid of the and I had no idea and I don't know if they knew either, that this actually happened like in Portland itself, you know. So, like, I didn't know this until it was actually Alan Kessler, who's a local lawyer that like, informed us of this book. And I did not know the Portland. I just thought they were another cop unit. But they are like the. Top union? Yep. So that's good. Explain something. Yeah. So, uh, AFSCME agreed to back the Portland police as long as they included a clause in their charter that they could never strike under any circumstances. And Hayes said, of course, of course we'll never strike. We would never strike. That will never happen. We? I promise the Portland police will never go on strike. And then, you know, asked me was like, OK, and they made a deal. And to make a long, boring story short, Hayes gradually succeeded in signing most of his fellow cops up for the Union under the Chiefs nose. The Portland Police Association went public in April of 1942. And the initial reaction was less than positive. The Oregonian on April 16th wrote an editorial about what a bad idea it would be to allow cops to unionize. The editorial writer noted that if police unionized, no matter what, those cops would always be suspected of, quote, greater loyalty to union than to official duty. I always wanted to congratulate The Oregonian editorial board for getting something right at some point in its long and storied history. It doesn't last long. Don't worry, this was the one time. I'm sure they fired that guy immediately. So yeah, public suspicion was not enough to stop the Portland Police Association from getting off the ground. On an April 28th, 1942, the PA held its first official meeting and voted for its first president. Now Hayes, as the founder of the Union, had acted as interim president during this early period, but his fellow officers felt that he was too young and inexperienced to represent them at the negotiating table. Instead, they picked a literal Nazi. They're like, they're like, let's do ageism and fascism all in one. Did the Nazis have a union? Because if not, I guess it could have been worse. They had the National Socialist German Workers Party, but yeah. So yeah, auto miners was the 1st President of the PA and he's described this way in the PA's weird biography of itself, which is very positive quote. He was an outspoken man, some would say loudmouth, whose accent revealed his German upbringing. Earlier he had been an active member of the German American Bund, though for self preservation and a nation at war with Germany. He later played down his interest in the land of his ancestors. Now that's. That's fun to me because they they say that like, well, he was a German man. He was a member of the book because he was interested in his German ancestry. That's not what the German American boomed was. The German American boomed was a literal Nazi organization in the United States that was funded by the Nazi Party in Germany. The boomed, waved swastika banners at mass rallies. They gave the fascist salute in Moss to giant portraits of Hitler. Their initial funding again came from the Nazi government. Fritz Kuhn, the leader of the boomed, summed up the group's. Theology in a speech he gave at Madison Square Garden in 1939. If you ask what we are actively fighting for under our Charter. First, a socially just white Gentile ruled United States. Second, Gentile controlled labor unions free from Jewish Moscow directed dominance. So. This is what's making faces that you doesn't work for podcasting, but I'm just like. The first President of the Portland Police Association. A literal Nazi? Yeah, a sense. It's good stuff. Boomed rallies featured banners with catchy slogans like stop Jewish domination of Christian Americans and Wake Up America, smash Jewish communists. Oh my God. God. It's good stuff. It's not subtle. No, no. And I you have to love that. The Portland Police Association's biography of itself just says like he was interested in his German heritage. No, dude was a Nazi. Oh my God, the branding of that is just. Yeah, it's great. Good stuff. It's rude to Germany because they, like, conflates the two. It's like if you have German heritage, it just means you love, like, to be a Nazi. You know? It's like, we can separate those two things. We can separate the people. I not. Yeah. The PBA can't. I can. I enjoy the aspects of German heritage that are, for example, creative sausages. Yeah. Leader Hosen later. Hosen fine. Yeah. No one has any issues with that part. Yeah, so it would be fair to call miners a Nazi. Now there were some German Americans who joined the Boone, did not really knowing what it was, but those folks tended to leave pretty quickly once they saw the swastika banners and heard all the talk about the Jews. Miners remained in the Bund until it was forcibly disbanded after the outbreak of US involvement in World War Two, which would, you know, suggest he was pretty ******* committed. And now he was the 1st President of the Portland Police Association. Good stuff, good guy. So the EPA's first big victory came that October, when it succeeded in getting its officers time and 1/2 pay for working on Halloween. It also got officers overtime pay for working security at Ball games, which they'd previously done on a volunteer basis. I'm not sure if this was the first time police anywhere in the nation got overtime pay. It might have been, but it was the first time that a police union succeeded in getting a blanket overtime agreement out of a city in the United States. This is like the start of police overtime. Thanks, Portland. Yeah, and now it is like bankrupting the city of Portland. Do you love it? Love it? Yeah. It's so good. So President miners, the Nazi, learned in 1943 that some of his officers were still working at ball games for free as actual volunteers out of, I don't know, some sense of civic responsibility or something. And this is discussed. The games are nice. He was disgusted by this. He told the union that these men were playing into the hands of the opposition and I have to credit him for not saying the Jews there. He actually read the badge numbers of these men allowed to the Union so that, like, people would know who were the the I I guess that the traitors within their midst, which they get really mad at us when we read their badge numbers. But that's a great point. Nobody's allowed to read bad numbers anymore. It was kind of * **** **** from the President of the Union, but, you know, in fairness to him, 1943 was kind of a rough year for Nazis, so maybe miners was just in the mood. Now at this time the police were not the only force providing law and order type services to the city of Portland. There was also the Veterans Guard and patrol. Now this was a group of World War One vets who had formed to defend their homeland while younger men fought fascism abroad. 3500 of these guys worked for free, protecting their neighborhoods and guarding their community with skills honed in deadly battle. Now some people might consider this kind of a win win because it didn't cost anyone anything and these guys clearly knew what they were doing. I'm sure they were as racist as everyone else back then, but I. I haven't heard anything that would suggest they were worse than the police, and they were probably, broadly speaking, more competent. Yeah, but miners hated this because, again, the Veterans Guard were not getting paid and he was all about getting more money for cops. As pickets, pistols, and politics notes, in the view of the police union, the veteran guard and patrol simply made it more difficult for professional police to get their demands met by the city. After all, many police services were being performed for free by these patriotic veterans. We got to shut that **** down. Now the police union succeeded in pushing down any attempt to form like a civic safety patrol not made-up of a tiny cadre of unaccountable men, paid increasingly vast sums of money to do violence. That task accomplished in 1945, miners set himself to the job of fighting another scourge to civic order. Hollywood. See, the end of World War Two was the start of a gangster revolution in Hollywood films. The gangster era of the 20s and 30s was distant enough that people could make good movies about it now, and police around the country were horrified. See their mortal enemies turned into heroes on the silver screen now at this point unionization was still very rare for police officers. It was not just Portland, but they were one of the few. So the cause of opposing gangster movies on behalf of lawmen everywhere fell upon the Portland Police Association. The Portland police publicized the release of a resolution stating that the United States and foreign nations were quote to be flooded with a series of gangster motion pictures. Now the PA was concerned with the influence of such pictures on the impressionable. Adolescent mind and argued that Hollywood producers and again got a credit miners for not just saying Jews there. We're responsible for any harms that this caused. Such films can be motivated only by greed and can feel no concern for the welfare of our country or its youth. Wait, I'm obsessed with them being like this is motivated by greed when, like, they are the ones that are like, everyone has to get paid all the time. Yeah, no volunteering at the baseball game. It is funny that he accuses them of being greedy, yeah? Now, I don't want to lean too much on the Nazi stuff, but it is telling that one of the things this literal Nazi President of the PPA makes, one of his first priorities is to attack Hollywood producers. A little bit of a tell. Little bit of a tell, yeah. Anyway, the resolution concluded by proposing an investigation of Hollywood producers by the House UN American Activities Committee, which absolutely did happen and culminated in the second Red Square. Now, a lot went into that. I'm not going to give the. GPA. Credit for all of it. But they were a force in sparking the second Red Scare. You know? That's cool. OK? It is scary. The first time you said square, I'm like the Red Square at the red. OK, cool. No, that's just like a communist who wears a suit. Well, anyway, good job for doing the red scare. Yeah, thanks, guys. Thanks for starting the bar, ball rolling on, ruining the lives of people in Hollywood who happen to think that socialism might be a good idea. Ahead of the Curve Trail Blazers. Where the basketball team gets its name. Yeah yeah. From the PTA's hatred of people having opinions now. In Portland Police Association terms, most of the late 1940s and 1950s were a set of Labor rights improvements. Police won a 40 hour workweek, they won expanded sick days, and they want better and more comfortable uniforms that they didn't have to pay for. This is mostly stuff that, if you assume police should exist, is not really that problematic. Pretty basic like workers rights. The PA pooled its bargaining power with the firefighters union to get a proper pension system set up and. Actually, the the firefighters were critical in allowing the PPA to survive because in the early days, again, there was a lot of resistance and they weren't recognized for years by the City of Portland itself. It was the firefighters who first gave them legitimacy by saying, like, hey will, we will bargain with you and that way they'll have to deal with you because they have to deal with firefighters. The PA's biography says something about this that I think is very telling quote. The thinking was that the firefighters had a better chance of winning the voters favor. They were, after all, the good guys. In the public's view, the ones who saved people instead of bossing them around. Yeah, it's fun that cops recognize that. Yes, we do like firefighters better than you, because they're only job is to save people. They're actually helping people. Their job is undebatable necessary, whereas you are cops. So. There was initially consensus among union leadership that the PA should not donate to directly or back directly political candidates, that it would be wrong for them to get political. Getting involved in partisan politics would be unseemly for a group of men and women who are supposed to be civil servants, protecting all citizens. This would last until the 70s, but we'll talk about that story a little bit later. For right now, we need to turn away from pickets, pistols, and politics, which has been the source for everything but the stuff about the Red Squad and the boomed, and turn to a slightly better source because, shockingly, for a book. At the behest of a police union, pickets pistols and politics says almost nothing about race relations in Portland, or police behavior towards Black Portlanders. It does occasionally mention that, like civil rights groups had problems with Portland police, but it'll make statements like black activists believe that police showed a racial bias, and that's kind of the most that you'll get out of out of the book. So for this next bit of the episode, I'm going to turn to a dissertation written by Catherine Nelson at Portland State University. Its title is on the murder of Ricky Johnson. The Portland Police Bureau deadly force and the struggle for civil rights in Oregon and it's a really good read. Like a very I would. I would recommend it above the unions propaganda book, although they both have some interesting stuff in them. So legally, Oregon didn't have segregation in the 1940s or 50s or 60s, right? Like we were not one of the, if you like Google, like maps of states that had segregation. Oregon's right there with California as like discrimination for race or color, forbidden by law state. But that that's not really true. That's just like there wasn't legal segregation. It did absolutely happen. As historian Elizabeth Mclagan notes, black people in Portland were regularly refused admission to restaurants, theaters and hotels. Medical care was difficult to obtain. Unions barred blacks from membership, employment practices confined them to certain jobs, and integrated housing was resisted, according to a longtime black resident. Oregon was a clan state, a hellhole. It's not. It was not a not nice, uh, I think is a good way to sum that up. Henry Stevenson was a black World War 2 veteran who moved to Portland in 1960. Here's how he described his experience. Living in Portland at that time was almost like living in Alabama. Black folks had it rough. The system, especially the police, had a whole lot of feet on black people's necks. It was nothing for a cop to just shoot a brother. When this did happen, there was no consequences. The cops weren't afraid of being reprimanded in any way. Well, that hasn't changed. No, no, not really. The Portland police did have a disciplinary board, but officer reprimands were complaint driven, and the Portland police didn't listen to complaints if they weren't made by white people. The traditionally black neighborhood of Albina received way more policing than any other neighborhood in the city, and again, that hasn't really changed. I'm here right now and I can tell you it has not changed. Yay, uh? This is a bad time to go into an ad break. It's like you're really going to choose now. This is what you're choosing. You know, I'm not even going to just try it. Here's. Capitalism, yeah. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. 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This fall on revisionist history, is there anything that we haven't talked about, or I should have asked you or you'd like to add that seems relevant? You should have asked me why I'm missing fingers on my left hand. A story about sacrifice. I think his suffering drove him to try to alleviate suffering. And the shocking discovery I made where I faced the consequences of writing a book I thought would help people? Isn't that funny? That's not funny at all. It's depressing. Very depressing. Religious history is back with more. Listen to revisionist history on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. I've never seen less enthusiasm for a great idea in my life. We've returned, so yeah. Portland police pretty bad on on race relations and and such. Lee Anderson, a black portlander, commented in 1925 that we are surrounded by a prejudice that you do not find in our neighboring states. 45 years later, in 1967, a young black man commented to a local newspaper. Where else but Albina? Do cops hang around streets and parks all day, like plantation overseers? Which is pretty strong statement. Yep, Yep. In her dissertation for PSU, Katherine Nelson cites sociologist Robert Staples, who studied the Portland Police Bureau and noted that throughout its history it had acted as a, quote colonial force that acted as agents to enforce the status quo and protect the property of the colonizers who live outside black communities. Yeah, Yep. Not hell yeah, that it's good. It's just like a well phrased. Yeah, hell yeah. For the accuracy, not for, you know, colonialism. Yeah, yeah. Not hell yeah. To colonialism. The Bureau quote the Bureau focused their effort and this is from Kathleen's paper. The Bureau focused their efforts on protecting property largely owned by whites within the black community and serving the white community while providing few benefits and little protection to Portland's black community. The PPB rarely protected the rights of Portland's black citizens, yet they routinely tolerated Vigilanteism union protection, organized crime, and police brutality within the Bureau. Now, this is another thing that the PA's book tends to leave out. It does note a few occasions in which the police look the other way while unions, they were allied with committed crimes. But it does not go into detail about how extensive this relationship was, so we're going to go into detail about some of that stuff. Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's. Bed stuff. Yeah, but first we're going to go into detail about something else. In 1945, a black man named Irvin Jones was shot through the window of his house by a Portland police officer who assumed the victim was someone he had a warrant for. The fact that he suspected someone might have a warrant out and then immediately opened fire should tell you something about the Bureau's use of force procedures. During this time, a coroner's inquest was held and the jury decided that officers involved were not guilty and no one was charged. Again, we're going to talk about this happening a lot. It it this is kind of at least the first case of this I was able to find now. Throughout the 1940s, Portland's Black community increased from 2000 to more than 22,000 people. And this again happened right around the same time the 1940s that the PPB created the US's first successful police union. So as Portland's black population increased, Portland's police force got more protections and became basically immune to being criticized by, or at least to being punished by the city government. During the 1950s, uh African Americans in Portland achieved a number of civil rights victories, including the Public Accommodation Act of 1953, which illegalized public discrimination and at the same time the PPB furthered their reputation as you know, a police force that was willing to turn a blind eye to organized crime. By the 1960s the PPB had implemented a tough on crime mentality and this meant that they were mainly targeting Portland's black neighborhoods as areas, of quote, miscreant behavior. By adopting a tough on crime stance that PPB saw a rise in police related shootings. And for those living in Portland's black community, it seemed as if young men were getting shot more often than, you know, basically any other group of people. And the statistics kind of bear this out now. At around the same time, enterprising Portland police officers developed what was called the payoff system, which is what it sounds like. Racketeers would run unlicensed bars, brothels, and casinos that all bribed officers for their right to exist. Since any complaints about and potential disciplinary actions had to go through the PA, no officers were punished for taking bribes to allow crime. The local government was fine. With this, as long as all the illegal activity was kept confined to North Portland, AKA Albina. So you see what's happening here. The Portland police are allowing criminals and gangs and whatnot, often organized by the Teamsters, which is a union that supported them. And they supported the Teamsters running criminal rackets as long as those criminal enterprises were run in Albena. And at the same time they were increasing their patrols of Albina and justifying it by saying this is where all the crime happens. Yeah, it's Umm. Pretty dark when you look at it like that. Don't worry, they put salt and straws in Albina now, so it's all gentrified. We fixed, thank God. So up until 1946 the PPB had only hired 2 black officers in its entire history. This situation had improved by the 1960s, but not by much. About 1% of the forces, 720 officers were black. When people started to notice that this was maybe a problem, the police personnel director asked Captain Bill Taylor if he could be listed as Native American. Taylor had a small fraction of indigenous. Ancestry, although he did not quite identify as indigenous. Still, the PPB made the change to his identity in the paperwork and started bragging that Portland had hired its first Native American police captain. Yes, this is literally like textbook pretending anism like it's like just like just exactly what every indigenous person is talking about when they talk about pretentions is, yeah, nauseating. It's it's great. So the whole situation did eventually get bad enough that the Federal Bureau of Investigation looked into the PB, and the publicized nature of this whole case gave Portland a reputation as a city of vice and sin. The men of the PA generally viewed their police chief and appointee. Is the enemy of their ability to milk as much money out of the job as possible. Charles Prey was the chief from 1949 to 1951, and he had a mandate to clamp down on the outrageous corruption in the Bureau. Unfortunately, he had no influence over the PA because the chief is not a member of the Union, and the PA was kind of the Nexus of police corruption. Prey complained that everybody at the police station seemed to know where gambling was conducted, but that no one would talk to him. It turns out that even cops are too smart to talk to cops. That's so interesting. There's that dynamic of the police chief being like, what if we weren't so bad? And then everyone at the Union hall being like, we're gonna go gambling and we won't tell you where it is. Yeah, what if we weren't actual criminals while arresting people? And the Union was not cool with that in in 1954, perennial ******** pod side character, the FBI carried out a massive wiretapping operation on Portland's gambling dens, brothels, and illegal bars, many of which were operated by Teamsters allied with the PA their investigation revealed that by 1954, both the mayor and the police chief, Jim Purcell, were actively protecting criminal enterprises. Purcell was indicted for incompetence and criminal behavior. A grand jury was convened, and from August 1956 to September of 1957, more than 115. Indictments were issued against Portland police officers. Uh, it's good stuff. Wait for what? For you know, operating illegal gambling dens and brothels. There was 115 of those doing wow. OK. At least 115 officers that were implicated in that sort of behavior. How many officers did they have? Last time I heard there were seven. It was like a couple 100 like it was such a high percentage. That's a lot of Wild Well, in the way that the text makes it seem, basically everyone was on the take to 1 extent or another. These were just the ones that the FBI, like the FBI was not going to. Indict the entire police Bureau. They had to pick the most egregious examples. And this is the last time the FBI will be the good guys in this story, because it turns out they were fine. It well, we'll get to that. By the 1960s, Portland's black population had decreased to just 15,000. Remember they they hit their head at about 22,000 people in the 1940s. Right? So all of this, both the police like directly encouraging crime in the black neighborhood and also the police massively increasing patrols. And Albina led to about a 7000 person decrease in the black population of Portland, 80% of whom lived in Albina, which was about 2 1/2 square miles at that point in time. In 1968, Kenneth Gervais released a study on the Portland Police Bureau. He interviewed a number of Portland police officers during this time and found that they believed political radicals, professional criminals, ******* and civil rights groups all ought to be subjected to intense police surveillance. Interesting. The groups that he classifieds as basically the same. Yeah, yeah. The Red Squad morphed into the intelligence unit, which mostly spied on black activists like the city's nascent Black Panthers chapter. And I'm going to quote from Catherine Nelson here. The intelligence unit spied on black activists and used the gathered information to spread rumors that were meant to spark opposition from the community. Police often used a relevant information to support their charges, and many of the targets were previous victims of police brutality. Police perpetuated a false image of what? Black activists and citizens were advocating for by painting them as anti government radicals or communists. The greater community often aided in this surveillance work and would report seemingly innocent behavior as potentially malicious activist work. It's all different now. Umm. In the summer of 1967, a group of young black Portlanders threw rocks and bottles at nearby police officers. This eventually turned into a riot known as the Irving Park riot, where fires were set, windows broken, and a local stereo store looted. Not one specific instance initiated the Irving Park riot. Instead, black citizens felt frustrated with unsolicited police presence in Albina. The Irving Park riot took place during the long, hot summer, which witnessed urban rebellions in African American neighborhoods in Boston, Chicago, and Portland at the same time that a white, middle class hippie movement. Enjoyed what they termed this summer of love. Often these riots had no instigating factor, which left police and city officials puzzled. In Milwaukee's black community, heavy police surveillance of a school program caused the youth to riot. Milwaukee Police Chief John Paulson claimed that a ******** group of young hoodlums was to blame. Again, very different. And we're talking about the Milwaukee that's a suburb of Portland. Was going to ask Wisconsin. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the Bureau used the Irving Park. The Portland Police Bureau, not the federal one, used the Irving Park riot as an excuse to intensify surveillance in Alpena. This time they were aided by the FBI, who hated illegal gambling and prostitution but loved them some disrupting a civil rights movement now. We talked about COINTELPRO, FBI Director Hoover standing order to infiltrate, discredit, and disrupt left wing civil rights and civil rights organizations. The FBI sent COINTELPRO agents to Portland and they encouraged the PPB to engage in ******* 1 sabotage effort involved FBI agents suddenly threatening local doctors to stop them from volunteering their time at the Portland Black Panthers Free Health Clinic. It's just that kind of **** where I'm like, how do you do that? And you're like, I am the good guy in this scenario, preventing health care. This is going to be so popular in the future. Go home to your wife. What did she do today? Threaten some doctors feeling great. They were going to help some poor children. Not anymore, they're not. Not after the Bureau got on the case. Just imagining Joe Friday threatening a doctor. It's. So Umm. Yeah, the FBI COINTELPRO unit also got the PPB to lie about black nationalists who were police informants. Like pretending people. They actually would set up meetings with people who were police informants and black nationalist leaders so that they could then discredit them within the community as police informants. At one point they even put out fake information about anti-Semitism from Portland's black nationalists to lower their support from the Jewish community, who is otherwise very supportive of their causes. Good stuff. While the FBI was forced to disband their cointel pro teams after 1971, the PPB continued to carry out similar programs in order to harm Black liberation organizations. One example of this would be the work of Detective Brown, a leading member of the PPB's Red Squad. Brown also happened to be the American Legion's top Red Hunter, and he successfully badgered the school board into denying civil rights groups the use of high school auditoriums. I mean, yeah, again, like the phrase is civil rights. Anyone who's like this is objectively bad, right? No, absolutely not. It's funny you say that, tuck, because in the 1960s, another study into the Portland Police Bureau noted that 86% of its officers felt that the civil rights movement was moving much too fast. Can't have too many rights. What will we do? We won't have anything to police because people will be allowed to do things. But who will we shoot? Ask the Portland police. Don't worry, they figure it out, the study concluded. That quote, the feeling that the public does not respect the police officer or holds him in contempt, will most certainly affect the officer's attitude and behavior towards the citizen. Officers, the report noted, wanted to emphasize to black people that complacent behavior was incredibly important if they wanted to remain safe. Oh my God. I hate this. They didn't have masks back then. Like, they don't have much of a mask now, but they didn't have any at all back then, right? Oh my God. I was just thinking about you were talking about COINTELPRO and, like, spreading rumors about each other. I'm like, it's so nice that they have to do that now because we just have Twitter, you know? Like they're like, oh, we can just chill. Like, they all just just do it to each other. Yeah, they're very, very fun people in general. Yeah, so throughout the 1960s, the PA grew in influence not just in Portland, but nationwide. They helped found a national police union, which provided some unity to all the different unions that had been spawned by the success of the PPA. In 1969, the PA had voted, along with 30 other delegates, that police strikes would remain banned under the National Union Charter. When Joylette Illinois officers had gone on strike in 1967, AFSCME had revoked their charter and the PA had condemned them. But in late 1969, contract negotiations. Between the PPA and the City of Portland broke down. In 1968, the Portland City Council finally declared the city a public employer and bargaining agent, and had voted to allow collective bargaining for city employees. The PA was officially declared a chartered police union, and again, this was like its first official recognition from the city. Now, the president at the time was a guy named David Callison, and he wound up becoming the first PBA president to sign a Portland police contract. The PA sat down to negotiate in the spring of 1968. The city wanted to establish a set of ground rules that all seven of the unions recognized by the city would have to abide by. The PA complained about this because they didn't think that the rules that bound everyone else should apply to them. Now, they did have some justification for this, mainly the fact that they had a no strike clause and other unions were allowed to strike. So if they're not allowed to strike, why should they have to abide by the same conditions as every other union? Now, in the first round of negotiations, the other six employee groups, including the firefighters union, agreed to new contracts and signed with the city. The Portland police did not, though. This was considered odd since traditionally Portland's firefighters and its police officers had drawn the same base pay. Since the firefighters union had backed the police union in establishing it in the 1st place, there was a sense that both groups ought to stand together. But the Portland police felt they deserved more money than firefighters, so they left the firefighters behind and demanded more money. The city refused this, and negotiations ground on for months and well into 1969. I'm going to quote again from pickets, pistols, and politics. Callison decided to try to break the impasse in a more subtle fashion. He started waging psychological warfare, and this way Callison managed to scare away at least one member of the city's negotiating team. Callison ran the man's name through police like like databases and stuff, and found his criminal record. He called a friend who worked at The Oregonian and asked him to check the newspapers. Library and the the friends sent along a few clippings of articles about the man in question, news of promotion, social activities, and other innocent doings. The guy was apparently pure as snow, but Callison went ahead and put the information in a file. Folder. He neatly printed the man's name on the tab. At the beginning of the next negotiating session, he put the file in a prominent place. As he spread out his papers, the folder caught the man's eyes sometime during the session. He could not stop glancing nervously, they added, and it sat conspicuously within Callison's reach. Finally, he could not stand it any longer. What is this? He demanded. Oh, Callison said, smiling. This is my file on you, Callison. Kept smiling at him while thinking craftily to himself that surely one of the joys of being a police officer was that he could make people feel guilty even when they were not. The man excused himself and never returned to the negotiations. The joys of policing could make innocent people feel guilty. That's why I go to work every day personally, is to make innocent people feel bad. I love that that story involves some first illegally using the police record system to try to dig up dirt on somebody, and then when he couldn't find dirt on the person, he just lies and pretends that he hasn't noticed. It does seem like sort of a useful tactic just for us all to know. Like, oh, if you can't do the work, you just make a file and you label it the work. And you put it on the table, so I'll try it. We could talk about how Alex Jones does his show. It is basically the same strategy. So despite the psychological warfare, the city wouldn't budge. It became clear to the Union that a strike was their only option. The PA Charter expressly banned strikes. They'd condemned the other departments for considering strikes like. So basically, previous to this, the PA had told other departments that you have to have no strike clauses in your union contracts. And they they helped to form a national police union, and they forbade members of that union from striking, but now they needed to strike in order to get more money. So they strong armed AFSCME into releasing the PA from its no strike. Laws, which was removed first from their contract and then from the International Brotherhood of Police Officers Constitution. Subsequently. The EPA has always been the bellwether of US police unions, and when they succeeded, the rest of the nation's cops copied them. So when they decided striking was cool, suddenly police unions across the country were able to strike again. And strike the Portland police did, marching around City Hall with signs that said crime pays, police work doesn't, no pay, no pigs. And other rib ticklers, yeah, they called themselves pigs. That was there. Wow. Yeah, it's great through their crooked arrangements to look the other way at criminal enterprises run by Teamsters and longshoremen. Over the years they were able to get both unions to abide by the picket lines and refused to cross them. The police then started picketing the docks, which effectively locked down all trade within the city of Portland. This cratered the local economy and the city government was forced to come to the table and give the PA the raise they thought it's that they deserved. Not only did the Portland police become the highest paid civil servants in the city, they gained retroactive pay hikes for the previous. 17 months that they'd worked without a contract. The whole process had taken nearly two years of negotiation, but as the PA owned biography states, the result was a contract that would serve as the model for police groups around the country. I don't have any, like, cute comments. I'm just, like, so mad. It's infuriating, right? Like, they're even ******* over other cops because for years they would, like, throw other cops under the bus when they tried to strike. But as soon as Portland cops want more money, like Striking's good now it's amazing. It's so Craven. And they they held the city hostage. They threatened to destroy the city's economy, which is like seems sort of like what a criminals would do, you know, just like blackmail a whole city for money. We're good. It does seem illegal, yeah, but I'm not a law nowhere guy, not a law dealer, or nowhere on basic common sense. Yeah, it it seems, I don't know super unethical what the Portland police did, but. They're the police. Who's who's going to arrest them? On strike, you know, like, yeah, the FBI is not gonna **** with him now. They need him to help screw with the Black Panthers, right? Got to, like, interrupt those free breakfast programs. Make it really have doctors helping people. Look, we'd love to stop the police from holding the city hostage, but we've got a lot of doctors to threaten. Tuck that is the end of part one. Do you have any plegables that you'd like to plug? Oh gosh, yeah. So I make a podcast called Gender reveals about trans people, and while we're making the show, we also raise money to support trans people, specifically trans people of color. And we're recording this on Trans Day of remembrance. So even though you're not listening to it, then you can retroactively commemorate Trans Day of remembrance by donating to the gender reveal Patreon. At patreon.com/gender. And then we take that money and give it to black and indigenous trans people and trans people of color. So, you know, almost as fun as funding cops for like hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, you can give trans people like $10. Which, yeah, might. Might. It probably will not be used to tear gas you. I feel confident making that statement. What was that? What was that link again? That is patreon.com/gender. I got that handle. Apparently no one's ever done gender before. So patreon.com/gender. That's great. Patreon.com/gender give give some bucks if you've got some bucks. And that is, I think the note that we're gonna end episode one on. When we come back, we'll talk. Had some real some real bleak **** to be honest and great. I cannot wait to try to make that fun, yeah? I actually completely forgot to plug the new podcast about Portland and the Portland police that this two parter episode was made in part to promote. Because I'm a hack and a fraud, so check out uprising. A guide from Portland on all of the podcast places all the places you know where the pods and they're casted all the all the different spots. There's two episodes. It's called uprising, a guide from Portland. There's a colon after the word uprising. Maybe not our best call title wise anyway. Yay. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams, let's break or handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Hey there, it's Ebony Monet, your co-host for the San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we're speaking with Doctor Jane Goodall about the fascinating journey that led to her impactful behavioral discoveries on chimpanzees. It wasn't until one of the chimpanzees began to lose his fear of me, but I began to really make discoveries that actually shook the scientific world. Listen to amazing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Bobby Bones from the Bobby cast. We are Nashville's most listened to music podcast in depth interviews with your favorite country artists, plus the biggest songwriters and producers in Nashville, all from the comfort of my own home so it gets a little more laid back. They're sharing stories behind the biggest songs in country music and personal stories that you will not hear anywhere else. So if you love country music, I think you will love this podcast. Listen to the Bobby cast on iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcast.