The 'Monstrous Beastliness' of Urban Policing

OAKL AND, CALIFORNIA, IS “the edge case in American policing,” journalists Ali Winston and Darwin BondGraham declare in The Riders Come Out at Night. “More has been done to try to reform the Oakland Police Department than any other police force in the United States.”

- C.J. CIARAMELLA

It’s a bold claim, given the crowded field competing for the title. In Baltimore during 2016, a vice squad was essentially operating a criminal enterprise, using the police department as a front. The corruption and violence exposed in the Rampart scandal, which unfolded in the late 1990s and early 2000s, landed the Los Angeles Police Department under federal oversight for 12 years. Chicago is Chicago. But in their deeply reported and comprehensive book, Winston and BondGraham make a persuasive case that Oakland’s entrenched police corruption best demonstrates “the still-unfulfilled promise of reforming law enforcement.”

The eponymous Riders were a clique of four Oakland police officers known for terrorizing minority neighborhoods. The book opens in 2000, with an idealistic rookie, Keith Batt, being paired with a Rider for field training and quickly learning the grimy truth about urban policing. “Fuck all that shit you learned in the police academy,” one Rider tells Batt. “Fuck probable cause. We’re going to just go out and grab these motherfuckers.”

After witnessing and participating in kidnappings, beatings, cover-ups, and frame-ups, Batt blew the whistle, setting off a legal saga that is still ongoing. The Riders Come Out at Night follows the ensuing two decades of attempts to clean up the Oakland Police Department (OPD).

The local district attorney filed criminal charges against the Riders, one of whom immediately fled the country and remains a fugitive. The prosecution of the remaining three Riders ended in two mistrials. The Riders’ attorneys argued, with a fair amount of evidence, that the officers had been doing what police brass and other city officials demanded.