Opponents of the Oakland Police Department routinely cite the so-called “Riders” case as justification for (a) keeping OPD under federal monitorship and (b) their accusations that the department is a cesspool of racism and police misconduct.
Several facts about the case, however, are conveniently overlooked.
(1) None of the defendants—the “Riders” themselves—was ever convicted of anything. In fact, after one of the longest trials in Alameda County history, all four Riders defendants were acquitted of all the crimes they were accused of by prosecutors.
(2) The jurors who acquitted the four cops had nothing but scorn for the prosecution. Interviewed after the trial, they were scathing in their criticism that prosecutors should never have brought such a frivolous case.
The Riders scandal occurred in 2000, twenty-five years ago. A quarter-century! How long must OPD be hounded for something that never even happened?
Well, from the perspective of a corrupt police hater like Robert Warshaw, twenty-five years isn’t enough. Will fifty be? One hundred? What is the statute of limitations here?
Another way to look at this is, in the same twenty-five years, 2,573 Oaklanders have been murdered in Oakland, a majority of whom (I must assume from the statistics) were Black men slaughtered by other Black men. How many of those dead bodies would still be alive if Oakland had had adequate policing? But the same progressives who complain about the Riders are the ones who have tried the hardest to defund the police. It begs the question, who is the greater threat to people of color in Oakland—criminal gang members, or the police?
You don’t want to ask such questions of police haters like Pamela Price, Carroll Fife, Nikki Bas, Rebecca Kaplan, Sheng Thao, Cat Brooks or Barbara Lee. They won’t answer you; if you ask them through Twitter or some other website, they’ll block you. (That’s called “cancel culture.”) They have no answer, because to answer truthfully would expose the dreadful lies behind their racist ideology and undermine their political raison d’etre.
But we can be truthful here.
Why did the U.S. Department of Justice launch their crusade against OPD and not instead open an investigation into why Oakland has so much crime? Why is Warshaw making a million bucks a year for persecuting OPD every time some poor shlub of a cop fills out a form incorrectly?
What the jurors said: “All crap”
After they acquitted all the defendants, jurors who were interviewed didn’t hold back from expressing their opinion that the entire prosecution had been a farce. Here are representative quotes:
The whistleblower cop whose allegations led to the trial was “one of the biggest liars” for the prosecution, said one juror. Another juror said of him, “He admitted that it did not bother him to lie. He had no morals.” A female juror stated, “It [the trial] was politically motivated from the very beginning. There was underlying feeling among many of us that this was all crap.” The jury foreman noted, “We looked at all the evidence and it’s clear the prosecutors brought us a bogus case…This case was a political effort to blame all the problems in the Oakland Police Department on the officers.” Clearly, the jurors, who knew more about the facts than anyone else, weren’t buying the prosecution’s case. But their considered verdict has been all but expunged—cancelled--from history, as the myth, repeated ad nauseum by progressives and the media, solidified that the Riders were rogue cops, in a rogue police department, who delighted in beating on people of color. It’s vital to remind people: the jurors themselves found the charges outrageous and false. So why does the belief persist today that the Riders were monsters? I think we know the answer: the real monsters are Mr. Warshaw and the radicals, including police haters in the media such as Darwin BondGraham, who will go to their graves wanting to defund the police and abolish the prisons.
It’s way past time to retire this egregious Riders lie, fire Warshaw, and let OPD do their damned jobs!
Steve Heimoff