(soft dramatic music) - Police misconduct is one of the worst challenges for American society today, and there's no accountability for that police misconduct.

It builds a bridge of mistrust between law enforcement and the community.

- If you look forward today, Black Lives Matter, where did that movement come from?

What inspired that movement?

It was police brutality.

- And that's why police misconduct is such an impediment.

- And so when we look at the Civil Rights Movement and the liberation of people of color in this country, it has always fundamentally come up against the hard rock of police brutality.

(mellow jazz music) - John Burris, just the word itself says, "Premier lawyer."

No other person in the Bay Area on the black side or the white side matches who this man is in the world of legal maneuverability on behalf of people who have been in one manner or another, mistreated.

- I became interested in law really after having watched the Civil Rights Movement unfold.

And there I could see that there were people who were marching and there were all that activity, but I was most intrigued by the lawyers, Thurgood Marshall, was somebody I read about a lot.

And so my interest always was the legal component of the Civil Rights Movement.

- I remember when we were very young and I asked him what did he want to be when he grew up?

And he said, "I wanna be a star."

- Being here brings back a lot of memories of my childhood, both positive and negative.

Positive in the sense that it provided economically for our family.

My father had six kids and to take care of, and it's a government salary, but the part that was painful to me as a little boy was hearing him talk about how he felt he was being discriminated against.

He and the other black men, they never got promoted.

They all had jobs where they were helpers, which essentially meant they had supervisors who were white men for the most part.

And this caused him a lot of angst down through the years.

And that pain was manifested in ways that he would strike out, he would be unhappy, and it affected us as children and our family.

But to his credit, he persevered because he had to take it, eat it, as they say, and he did so because he had a family to take care of, and he always took care of us in that sense.

He was never without a job.

- There were six kids.

There was no alternative.

You work and you do other things.

So as time progressed, John was watching all of this because not only did Mom and Daddy have full-time jobs, they also had side jobs.

There was always a hustle mentality in a positive way from our parents.

Well, we all were affected by "Perry Mason," but John in particular would sit on the edge of his seat and he would watch Perry Mason's every move, his diction, his body language, the way he presented his case, and the way he resolved the case.

- John Burris was one of our stalwarts.

He was one of the young guys that we all cared a lot about, and we really wanted him to be something.

- Willie Brown is a person I've known since living in Vallejo.

He was a young politician, and so I had became aware of him then.

And so then when I moved to San Francisco, going to college, I, and was considering, I think, working as an accountant initially, but ultimately law school, I had him, he wrote a letter for me for law school.

And since then, all down through the years, he's always been a person who looked out for me.

- Yeah, I first met John when he was pledging Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity.

And he was a student at Golden Gate University at the time.

- John had gone to Cal and entered the MBA school, business school, and that was quite a amazing thing.

I think at the time there probably were only, oh, maybe six or seven black people in the business school at Cal.

- As he got more and more into business studies, he realized that it didn't offer him the opportunity to work with people, and business just didn't cut it for him.

And so he just made that decision, "I don't want to, this is not for me."

And we were all surprised.

- We got reacquainted when he made a wise decision.

That decision was to go to law school.

And it was, while we were law students that I recall specifically when John became a leader.

- One of the most significant people in my professional life and in John's was Henry Ramsey.

Henry Ramsey was a professor's professor.

Henry was a no-nonsense person.

He believed in perfection.

And if you didn't give him that, he would not settle for anything less.

- Henry Ramsey encouraged all of us to go into civil rights law, and that's the type of stuff that resonated, especially with John.

- When we attended law school at UC Berkeley, it was not uncommon for tear gas to cover the campus because of protests that were going on in the late 1960s.

- The environment at UC Berkeley was incredibly unique.

It was the vortex of everything student-wise across the country.

The war in Vietnam was going on, and there were nonstop protests against that and the draft and all sorts of demonstrations.

It was a unique period because blacks were into the black movement.

John Burris and I met when we were at what then was called Boalt Hall Berkeley School of Law.

And it was a time of black consciousness.

It was a time where blacks said, "You know, enough of whites helping us.

We're gonna do this ourselves."

- John stood out, he became the president of the Black Law Students Association and actually led a strike during those days.

While in law school, John and I made plans of what we were going to do.

I decided that I would take an internship in a law firm in San Francisco, John decided to take an internship in Chicago.

(mellow jazz music) - I got involved one summer when I was working with this law firm with the Metcalfe Commission.

Ralph Metcalfe was a congressman of that era, and he was interested in having an investigation conducted to find out whether or not there was this level of brutality by Chicago PD against citizens of Chicago.

So I and a number of other law students were sort of captured to work on this.

And so the summer, I worked on interviewing people who had been beaten up by Chicago PD.

This is real eye-opening.

My experience before that had really been watching TV and seeing what happened in the Civil Rights Movement.

But now, this was in the early 70s, and it was kind of shocking to me that that level of brutality was taking place about Chicago PD, and no one seemed to care about it.

This was not an uncommon situation in Chicago.

So that sort of stuck in the back of my mind as the kind of conduct that I saw going on, and I really wanna do something about it.

And there was a report that was issued, and that report certainly found that there was misconduct that was taking place by Chicago PD against against African American citizens.

But for me, it wasn't so much the report, it was the activity.

And what I saw around the Chicago PD raised questions in my mind about whether this happened elsewhere.

(mellow jazz music) - [Newscaster] Oakland's all-white police department earned a reputation for head-knocking brutality that has left a well-remembered legacy of bitterness in the minds and hearts of many who lived in that time and place.

- When I was growing up in West Oakland, my perception of the Oakland Police Department was of a department that was brutal.

I saw Oakland police arrest a black man down near 7th and Broadway, and this officer had his billy club out and he was beating this poor guy.

- My uncles feared the police and oftentimes, you know, would come home after just running from the police and really would be explaining to my grandmother that they hadn't done anything.

And so the relationship and the view of the police that we had was very negative.

The police was not someone that we could trust and that they were causing tremendous harm, but we could advocate for ourselves.

And that's really what we were taught.

It was the home of the Black Panthers.

- [Crowd] Off the pigs!

♪ No more pigs in our community ♪ Off the pigs!

♪ No more pigs in our community ♪ Off the pigs!

- Well, we knew all the way back going to the Panthers days and what we were seeing going on in the black community and the protests and the individuals getting tired of it.

I'll never forget, I saw on West Grand and on San Pablo Avenue, a incident where the police beat the hell out of a black man.

I saw this with my own eyes and I remember sort of the hushed crowd as people were watching and feeling powerless.

And so we had seen the police as the individuals that were there to keep us in line, to make sure we were voiceless, to make sure that anything that we saw that was an injustice, we wouldn't say anything about.

And that we all understood, as my father used to say, "They were the judge, they were the jury, they're the executioner," it was the police.

- Starting out, I didn't know what kind of lawyer I was going to be.

I had thought, frankly, (chuckles) that criminal law was the law that you did as a civil rights lawyer.

And so when I got outta school, that was certainly my desire to be a criminal defense lawyer, although I took a detour.

I went to the state's attorney's office, Chicago, and Alameda County DA's Office.

- John came to the district attorney's office during the era where there had not been a history of African Americans being hired by the district attorney's office as lawyers.

- And so I'm a rookie, probably think I know more than I did.

And so, because that's just the way I was in those days when I was in Chicago, whatever reason, I got cases.

They were high-visibility cases then rather than the state's attorney's office.

And I understood that people were interested.

- During my time as a law clerk, I had the opportunity of meeting our top prosecutors.

John Burris was one of those.

- John was part of a new wave of young, talented black lawyers that were being hired by the Alameda County District Attorney's Office.

- I also understood that I was being mentored by Clint White here, you know, who was a judge and was the leading criminal defense lawyer at the time.

I would go to his office and just sit or go to his courtroom and just sit and watch him.

- Clinton White was really one of the pioneers that really opened the door for having other black attorneys see the opportunity that they potentially could have.

- Clint White, he had a booming voice, almost as if he was preaching under every circumstance.

Cross-examination by Clint White could be done from the back of the courtroom so that the jury would have their minds focused almost as if they're watching a movie.

- And the thing that came out of that, I says, "No one's like Clint White," that's number one.

(chuckles) "He's a beast of a man, so I got to, I feel I can do that too."

So, and I became a very aggressive lawyer in that sense.

He taught me, "Make sure they don't," he'd say, "You make sure they respect you, period.

And don't let them define you."

So much of my whole life was, I had, early in my career, I had a chip on my shoulder.

You know, I was not taking anything from anybody at any point in time.

- John picked up faster than anybody I've seen in a long, long time, the skillset.

- And he was also very well-respected by the establishment, the district attorney's office, the public defender's office, the judges, everybody respected John because John was a quality lawyer.

- I first met Johnnie Cochran when I was in the Alameda County DA's Office as a prosecutor, and he was in the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office as a prosecutor.

He was well-known lawyer at the time.

And so we started talking and he was telling me that he was getting ready to leave L.A.

DA's office and go do private practice and sue police.

And he says, "And Burris," he said, "Man, you should do that too."

And so that certainly was consistent with my view about what I wanted to do as a lawyer.

- After working in Sacramento and Washington as a public lawyer, John Burriss, Dave Alexander and I got together and decided we should form a black law firm.

It took a lot of courage, quite frankly, to do it 'cause there weren't many black law firms.

- Elihu Harris, former mayor of Oakland, is a dear friend of mine.

And the practice itself developed in such a way that I became sort of a criminal defense lawyer, not sort of, became a well-known criminal defense lawyer.

- Having a black law firm was extremely important, both to black people as a whole, but also for us as individuals.

- [John] March 17th, 1979, a young kid named Melvin Black was killed, brutally killed by OPD officers.

(soft dramatic music) (traffic whirring) - The killing of Melvin Black in this community was quite shocking.

Well I lived on 49th between Shattuck and Telegraph, and right around the corner, I heard about this case where this young brother had been shot and killed, and the police had tried to cover it up.

There was no need to kill him.

- The city went into an uproar because it was obviously an unjust killing.

There was talk in the office.

There was newspaper coverage.

It was widely known.

- In 1979, I was in high school.

I was at Oakland High School, and one of my classmates, Melvin Black, was killed by the Oakland Police.

And I remember we were so upset with what was going on that we boycotted, we boycotted school.

There was a bunch of people, there was a protest that's going on.

And it was all about the fact that the Oakland Police was killing people.

That wasn't the first kid that had gotten killed, but that was one that really made an impact on us.

- And in order to allay the concerns of the citizen, the mayor appointed John Burris to do an independent investigation and determine whether or not the use of force was justified or not.

- And so that's my first memory and knowledge of John Burriss was someone who was a truth seeker, who was appointed by Lionel Wilson, then the first black mayor, to actually go and find out what was the truth of the matter.

- And surprisingly, surprisingly to everyone, I found that the police conduct was wrong and that there was poor judgment and poor tactics.

And that resulted in the wrongful killing of this young boy.

The district attorney's office, the US attorney's office, the city attorney's office and the police department all issued views that were totally different from mine.

- It was understood that there was very much a potential for a coverup that police did not when they engage in this kind of misconduct, particularly if they killed someone, they did not want the truth to come out.

- Some think that the appointment was for the purpose of a whitewash, to have an African American attorney who was respected come in and say, "Nothing bad happened."

- And the Malcolm Black case was a project of our firm, Harris, Alexander and Burris.

- And as a consequence of that, I became public enemy number one to that group.

And that sort of spurred me on to make me appreciate that you cannot trust the official position that comes out in these kind of cases.

- I first became aware of the magnitude that my father was having on the community when he was the lead investigator back in 1979.

And the impact that the Melvin Black shooting had on me was Melvin Black was about 15 years old.

And in 1979, I was 15 years old.

And so I saw a lot of what could have potentially happened to me.

- And it wasn't happening because I could feel the racism that existed within the criminal justice system, not only from the police, the probation departments, the defense lawyers, the prosecutors, these people kept me in a state of anger all the time.

So I knew that I had to leave.

And in the back of my mind, I was going to start a practice where I was doing civil rights litigation.

- After Melvin Black case, John decided he really wanted to go after police misconduct and decided that he really couldn't do that in the constraints of a corporate law firm.

So John left, formed the Law offices of John Burris so that he would be able to focus on civil rights cases and the cases he thought were not being addressed appropriately by other lawyers.

- By then, I had become pretty well-known as a criminal defense lawyer.

I had a lot of big cases.

I did death penalty cases.

I really was sort of in the circuit at the time and becoming well-known.

And so when I started that I really got involved in a lot of different kinds of law practices.

- I had heard about John Burris and I had met him, and I knew I wanted to be a civil rights lawyer.

So when I came outta law school and I was waiting for my bar results, I contacted John and asked if I could start working for him.

John had, was developing a reputation as a fierce advocate, as someone who was adamant that justice had to be given.

I saw him as a great lawyer, as someone that I appreciated his mentorship and his friendship, but he was a friend to me.

- I met John in the early 80s and consequently, I've been able to watch him and become involved to some degree in numerous cases over time.

- George Woods is clearly one of John's best friends.

He's also a forensic psychiatrist.

And George was a good match for John in terms of the way they bounce ideas off of each other.

I think he was essential because George is so accurate became so well-known for his forensic assessments.

- And so John Burris called me about a case that he was working on, a young man that had gotten in trouble, and he cared so much about not only the young man, but the whole situation.

- I actually was first introduced to John Burris when he was representing the young man who had killed my brother.

John was a former prosecutor that had become a defense attorney.

And I happened to be in the courtroom while the trial was going on.

And as a 13, 14-year-old kid who had his only brother killed, John stood out to me.

He was somebody that I saw, and I thought, "Man, you know, that guy is tough."

He was smart, he was articulate.

But obviously at that point he was somebody that I felt like was a enemy, right?

Because he was defending the person who killed my brother.

But he had a job to do.

- John believes that when you see the right thing to do, that's what you do.

- I started doing misdemeanor jury trials at the Alameda County District Attorney's Office.

I had prosecuted, you know, cocaine cases and I had defended cocaine cases.

(mellow jazz music) I had had problems with cocaine and I had been arrested.

After I completed the rehab program, nobody would hire me.

I had just gotten outta rehab and I was driving to my therapy.

And on the radio, I heard about this woman who had been charged with two counts of murder for spontaneously aborting twins during a cocaine binge.

- At the time, I was representing a woman who was called a "cocaine mom."

I took this case on a pro bono basis, basically on the theory that, look, these were not murder, this was not murder.

This was, in fact a situation where this woman had a miscarriage, had two miscarriage, and she, in fact, had not tried to take care of them after she had delivered them because she had continued to do cocaine.

And so you can imagine the negative publicity that was being generated as a consequence of this case.

This woman was hated by everyone.

- So after I had finished my therapy session, I called John Burris's law office and I spoke to John and said that I would like to know if I could volunteer to help him on this case.

And he invited me to come down to his office and talk to him about that possibility.

- You help people if you could be helpful.

And that's sort of my mantra, if I can be helpful.

I talked to Mike at length about his status.

He assured me that he had gotten behind his problem and that he had gotten under control.

He was, and I just liked him and thought, if he could be helpful, that would be good for me and good for him too.

- And then when we got to the preliminary hearing, John had me do the cross-examination of the arresting officer who had grilled our client right after she had had surgery in her recovery room.

- And so we ultimately were able to resolve the case and determine one, that one of the fetuses was, in fact, a fetus and was not viable, and the other one had taken some air.

- And John Burris gave me the chance that helped me rebuild my career.

- The very, very good defense attorneys come in prepared and they know that evidence code.

I have the privilege of getting to work for the Alameda County DA's office.

And I was a trial junkie, but I also wanted to watch good trial lawyers.

And I heard that there was this man named John Burris.

- Well, I first became aware of John Burris, and I'll never forget the day because I was sitting in the jury box waiting for the court to call my case.

And suddenly, John Burris walks into the courtroom, and as he walks through, it was like the Red Sea parted.

- He cut his teeth at the Alameda County DA's Office and then was a criminal defense attorney when I knew him best, and he was feared.

- And I saw that the judge was very impressed with John citing all of the evidence code sections to him, you know, commingling the evidence code sections in with all of his arguments.

- There's certain people that have charisma in the courtroom, they know their way around, they own it.

And that's how John Burris is.

He knows how to reduce people to bubbling protoplasm on the stand, so that when you see him on the other side, you're like, "We got a problem."

- Now represented a 6-year-old African American child who was accused of attempted murder.

It was believed that he had assaulted a baby that was in a crib during kind of a rampage that he and several other young boys were involved in.

I represented him at a time when the community at large in Richmond asked me to come in and represent him, because they did not feel that he was being represented in a proper way.

So I took this case on pro bono and represented from the community itself.

And it was a very difficult and challenging matter because the district attorney at the time was adamant that he was gonna teach this 6-year-old boy the lessons of the community.

And I can remember strongly telling the lawyer that whatever you think you're going to do, you're not gonna be able to do it to this young boy.

And it became very important to me to prove that this young boy should not be charged in a criminal way.

That he should, in fact, be in social services.

That whatever happened, he should not be involved in the criminal justice system.

And so it was a challenge because I had to prove that despite what the district attorney's office said, that they had an expert that said he was competent, I had to have my own experts to come to court and show that this 6-year-old was not competent, that he did not understand the nature of the charges against him, and so therefore, he wasn't in a position to stand trial.

And we prevailed.

- John Burris was so committed to actually enunciating the facts and without being confrontational with any of the people who may disagree with him, with any of the prosecutors who may be doing the case, with any of the cops who might be testifying, John was so smooth.

- You know, I've been involved in the media a lot during the course of my practice as a lawyer, and I found it to be very helpful in terms of the clients that I represent.

I must admit, I went to law school at the time when that was, it was taboo.

You didn't have many, lawyers didn't do any of that, but I always understood that the media was a powerful instrument and that it can move people to appreciate conduct and activities taking place.

- But the other sort of standard communities didn't like it.

They saw it as something that was unconventional.

Many in the legal profession believed that it was inappropriate and not smart or wise.

And it demeaned the profession by engaging in communications and conversations which were outside the typical legal circles.

And as such, many looked at it with disdain.

- And so I saw it as an opportunity through the media for people to become aware of the kind of cases and the work that I was involved in.

And it's also important in terms of the clients that I represent, because many of the clients that I represent, all of them cannot speak for themselves.

These are people who are on the lower end of the economic trend, on the social strata, and they have no political real power.

And so what I do is speak for them, because what happens is when something happens bad to them, the police will undoubtedly give a negative account of what has taken place, projects the victim in the most negative light.

And the family has no way of speaking for themselves.

So I've become their advocate because I then speak for them.

- You know, John had this strong sense of justice and wanting justice to be served.

- I think the biggest support that he has had, other than, you know, family, et cetera, has been his mother.

- My mom walked John through every case that he had, and he ran the cases by her, you know, because she was a psychiatric technician.

My mom was an advocate for John in terms of whatever it is that he was involved in.

I can't explain to you how proud I was of John.

There were times when I was a little bit concerned because he took on some very serious cases where he really could have gotten hurt or killed, but John had a sense of courage about him.

- I was a pretty well-established police litigation lawyer.

I had done a number of cases and sort of was the leading person in this area because it had not been developed much before.

- I met John Burris over in Alameda County and I was active in Civil Rights Movement, the movement in those days, and so was he along with a lot of other people.

So I really got to know him when he was trying the Rodney King case, watching the brutality of the Los Angeles Police Department, I thought John had a lot of guts for taking it on.

- And so when those officers were acquitted, we were all just stunned.

That traumatized the entire country.

And as black lawyers, we were in a position to address it.

And then John got the opportunity to hold them accountable civilly.

- Our fight at the time when representing Rodney King was to overcome this huge negativism that surrounded him because their view was, "He got what he deserved.

The police wouldn't have done that him but for his own conduct."

So that was an attitude and the mindset.

White officers had basically been getting away with this for years, and the white community had no idea, the black community did, because we knew in Oakland, it was clear in San Francisco, obviously in Chicago and New York and Philadelphia, these were common occurrences that were happening.

So Rodney King really presented the first time that there was a video camera that really showed the brutality of a police officer.

(camera clicking) - But you were taking on the Los Angeles Police Department, just not 10 or 12 police officers that beat the hell outta that poor guy.

He took on the whole police department, the whole regiment, if you will, the whole hierarchy of police.

He had the guts of a tiger.

And that's what I loved about him.

Nobody shouted him down, nobody mentally put him down.

He walked into that courtroom, he was not a loud speaker, but boy, when he walked into that courtroom, you listened to him and you knew what he was doing.

- Our fight at the time when representing Rodney King was to overcome this huge negativism that surrounded him and that had great depths, and so we kept fighting through it, and ultimately, we were able to get a very good verdict for him.

And that was, in many ways, like the first major case that the public was willing to acknowledge that there was some police brutality that took place.

And that only happened because of the video camera.

- I had the experience after that, he brought me in to work on the attorney's fee motion, which is one of the things that I specialized in as a civil rights lawyer.

And so I then, you know, got to work on the Rodney King case, which was a great experience.

- I had been doing police cases, and shortly thereafter, Tupac came along.

Tupac was beaten up by OPD officers, by two officers whom I had been suing on a regular basis and who were outrageous people.

And frankly, when Tupac's case come along, I was more interested in them than I was Tupac.

And so Tupac's case allowed me to sue these officers.

Ultimately, they both left the force, which was important because my view on all this always is never just to do the individual case itself, is to make that case bigger and more significant than the four corners of the case.

So in that particular case, I was trying to get rid of these officers, and Tupac allowed me to do that.

- He was taking the darkness out and bringing light to the problems.

He brought awareness by using what is called, "free media" to enhance his talents.

- Now, all that was further developed after the Rodney King trial, and maybe during the Rodney King case, because that case was such a high-visibility case (cameras clicking) (soft dramatic music) that every day you're in the media, and that's, you know, you're trying the case in front of the media.

Everybody writes about it, talks about it.

And so become well-known in that sense.

And then shortly thereafter that, of course, then O.J.

Simpson happened.

And so then I became a media person there because I became one of these talking heads, and I was on media every day, two or three times a day.

Well, that, one, gives you a lot of experience in dealing with the media, but it also gives you some credibility too.

- At the time John Burris did the Rodney King matter, there was no such thing as a legal television analyst.

- And so we were part of that initial group of talking heads, if you will, and the individual lawyers who were giving opinions about what we saw in court that day.

- Reasons that escape me, he was never put on the witness stand by the prosecution.

John Burris, you would have put him on the stand, would you not?

- Yeah, I would've put him on.

I thought it was an error in judgment in they're not putting him on.

I understand that they probably had a switch in strategy as the trial progressed and therefore made the decision not to do it, even though they promised earlier to do so.

It was a bad decision on their part.

They needed... And it was kind of interesting because I was in a position having been both a prosecutor at first and a defense lawyer later to really appreciate both sides of the case.

- Not only did he walk through that process and walked us with him through that process, he actually carried us into the courtroom.

- I first met John in 1994, the O.J.

Simpson trial's receiving national attention.

And John and I were regular guests, it was Geraldo Rivera on CNBC, Rivera devoted every night to the O.J.

Simpson case.

And probably once or twice a week, John and I together were guests on the program.

- And so Erwin was a prosecutor and I was a defense lawyer, so we were often on the same shows where he would give a prosecutor's point of view, I'd give a defense point of view.

And we actually developed a friendship over the year and a half or so that took place.

- John Burris sort of crept onto my radar slowly.

I knew he had a reputation working in Los Angeles with Johnnie Cochran, and he had represented Tupac Shakur as well, so he was known.

In TV, we call it, "Coming through the glass."

And he was one of the first legal analysts that came through the glass in a way that made sense to the average viewer.

And that is critical because there's a lot of legal analysts out there, but they're sitting and parsing through the small things.

- As a consequence of being involved in this, then I become now a resource for the media on issues, whether it's police issues or employment issues or contemporary issues that have some civil rights issues, I become a resource.

(traffic whirring) (mellow electronic music) - In the 1990s, Oakland and Alameda County were in the grip of the War on Drugs.

You know, crack cocaine was everywhere in Oakland.

There were, you know, there were drug wars that were going on.

- Things were turbulent in Oakland, there was a lot of crime, a lot of violence.

And I think at the same time, there was a problem in that not only were there violent people, but there were some bad cops.

- The Oakland Police Department had a reputation as being the most racist police department in the United States, and given the problems of drugs and violence in the black community, they thought they were the specialists to deal with it.

- So as a result of the Rodney King case, in my opinion, John became a person to watch, a leader.

He created that go power in a lot of younger lawyers to take on local police departments around the state.

(traffic whirring) - Around 1999, 2000, as I was attending UC Berkeley, our community was under siege.

If you were driving around in West Oakland, you knew that it was a high likelihood that then he stopped and harassed.

And my friends and I knew that, people walking down the street knew that.

And so you're always kind of like on guard when you saw the police.

- Growing up in Oakland, you never truly trusted the police.

You always was afraid that their motives was, "You're black and we're not gonna treat you with any respect."

And they were always intimidating, and they were always violating your rights, you know, "Get on the ground," whatever.

You could just be coming from playing basketball.

- You know, this is still in the midst of the War on Drugs.

And so these are cops that have been set out into the community to make enforcement stops, to get bad guys and bad people off the streets.

The problem was they had no discretion.

And so this was what was going on in my community and I saw it firsthand.

- The Oakland Riders case is a case where at least four, but more officers were engaged in this consistent pattern trying to force confessions and causing people to go to jail for crimes they didn't commit.

Now this was a function in many ways of sort of an unwritten, unspoken policy that existed within the department itself.

- When I joined the Oakland Police Department in the late 1990s, you know, I immediately began to work in patrol.

I was working the night shift, I was interacting with people that were from the community and I had a connection, but I oftentimes heard stories about the things that was happening in the streets that I didn't know about.

And soon I learned about the Riders.

And that really happened when the investigation broke out.

And these were individuals that I had actually sat in a room with.

- [Newscaster] The four officers are accused of conspiracy, kidnapping, assault, making false police reports and planting evidence.

They worked the midnight shift in West Oakland and got nicknamed, "the Riders."

- Now that the district attorney's office has looked at at least 50 cases, we also know that there may be, and we know this from conversation we've had in various departments, that there may be as many as 300 people that will be looked at and examined for purposes of having their cases thrown out.

- You know, the Rider's case was interesting in that we first became aware of the Rider's case because the police chief reported it to us.

You know, the Rider's case was not a case that was initially investigated by the district attorney's office.

It was a case that was brought to us by their own department.

And that was when we first became aware of a major police corruption case.

- There's more trouble tonight, legal trouble for the Oakland police officers who were known as the Riders.

- [Reporter] The district attorney lowers the boom on four Oakland police officers accused of assault and kidnapping.

- The case of alleged corruption in the Oakland Police Department has exploded.

- Based on what I've learned and I've been told by my investigators, it appears to be isolated, but we're continuing our probe just as the DA's office is to go back to see what other cases these officers have been involved in.

- It was started when Jerry Brown was mayor of Oakland, but it didn't go reported.

And the police were abusing their authority, some say directly, some say indirectly on orders from then Mayor Jerry Brown to clean up West Oakland.

- Four officers have been caught.

It doesn't mean that there are other officers who are on the department who were not engaged in the conduct because they clearly are.

- They were planting drugs on people.

They were falsely arresting them.

They were breaking in and kidnapping them.

These were the charges against them.

- [Reporter] They were taken off the streets after a rookie cop turned them in.

In the indictment, the rookie was told not to be a snitch and that he should disregard the training learned in the police academy and arrest suspects on contact without lawful reason.

- And to be honest with you, it only happened to come forward when one police officer says, "I can't believe this is what policing is all about."

- Well, what was unique about the Rider's case was that you had a young, brand new officer who was going through his field training, and that new officer happened to finish off number one in his academy class.

And he ended up quitting the force after about two weeks in field training.

- And that was a big change that somebody from within the institution was willing to go public with the evidence.

But it set off this whole question about police integrity and also crossing the blue line.

- You were unable to trust anything these officers had in their reports.

You just couldn't trust anything they said.

- You know, they didn't care as long as you were African American, and you know, they didn't like you or you know, they didn't like most African Americans, and so they would bust you.

- Okay, by the time this happened, John Burris had 20 years of history of being adverse to the police department and the Oakland police officers.

And so after 20 years of John Burris being the leading advocate for police accountability, he was, quite frankly, adversarial with the police department, and they were looking for any opportunity to get Burris, if you will.

- It is very difficult to bring successful suits against police officers and police departments.

There are so many ways in which the law is stacked in favor of the police officer and the police department.

- So Jim Chanin and I saw that this is our opportunity.

Jim and I became real colleagues before the Rider's case.

And because there wasn't many civil rights lawyers out there together, we'd run into each other.

And so we did one or two cases together, and I didn't wanna do just an individual case.

I had plenty of those, I wanted to do a case that had a greater impact.

- And he said, "Well, let's do this together."

And I said, "Great, yeah, let's do it."

So we decided that we had to have a consent decree.

We both agreed we were not going to settle without a consent decree.

So the consent decree negotiations started almost immediately after the Rider's case started.

- And John filed a lawsuit against the class action in which he represented 119 Oakland citizens.

John made federal charges of a violation of these citizen's civil rights under the civil rights law, which is federal.

So he filed it in federal court and I drew the case, that they're assigned randomly, and the case was assigned to me.

- When I first started working for Mr.

Burris, I had the opportunity to work on the Oakland Rider's case against OPD.

So my job at that time was to help keep track of the 119 plaintiffs that we had in that case.

And, you know, go out into the community, find them, get information from them to flesh out kind of what had happened to them as a result of their abuse by OPD.

- I mean, I remember a time when I was a young officer in the department after the Rider's, you know, civil lawsuit was filed where there was officers that was saying, "(censored) John Burris," like felt like John Burris was the evil person.

And I would hear the screams from officers about, "Man, I just got (censored) served," or "John Burris nailed me," you know?

"I'm getting sued by Burris and them."

- When I took on the Rider's case, it was my clear goal at the time to take complete control of this department and to revamp it totally.

Change the culture, stop racial profiling, stop discriminatory policing, stop the beatings, stop the shootings.

I mean, all this, this was my goal.

- And John settled for almost $11 million.

This was a settlement, it's important to realize that the city sat down with John and they said, "Here's what you've charged us with."

And they agreed to it, it wasn't like there was a fight and we didn't do it.

They said, "We're going to correct those things."

And they estimated that they would do it in five years.

- Thelton Henderson went out of his way to be fair.

I mean, he was a judge.

And he himself had been a victim of racial prejudice when he worked for the department of justice.

- So a federal consent decree is a negotiated settlement agreement, also referred to as an NSA.

What that is is an agreement between the municipality, the city, and the plaintiffs in the case, might be the federal government, sometimes it might just be the group of people who we represent who have been directly victimized by the police.

- And we got an agreement that set forth and gave us the opportunity to rewrite all the policies in the department and to require training on all the policies and to hold people accountable.

- He was helping to get rid of people that shouldn't be a part of policing at all.

And so really, you know, I thought he had a role because it was clear that there were things happening in our community by some officers that shouldn't have happened.

(mellow electronic music) - I've been a sports agent since 1989, and I've represented athletes all over America, but the bulk of the athletes that's come out of Oakland since that period.

- [John] Aaron Goodwin had become almost like a nephew to me in many ways.

Obviously, he's had a lot of clients.

So he's obviously a good agent, most notably Gary Payton.

I think I represented Jason Kidd at one point in time, and we've had different cases that I've been involved in.

So in the 30 years or 40 years I've been doing this work, Aaron has been a different clientele.

- So I ended up doing a partnership with him and having my offices inside of the same offices that John had across from the Coliseum.

And literally my office was next to his office.

And strangely enough, right around the time of the Rider's case in 2003, I was leaving my home to go pick up my daughters.

And I was coming down Skyline and noticed I was being followed by a police officer.

And I wasn't sure if he was following me or just going the same direction, but he continued to follow me and I was going a shortcut from the Oakland Hills to Lakeshore.

So as I'm going through Trestle Glen, all of a sudden, there's a second car behind me.

And I go a little bit further and two other cars come outta nowhere and cut off the road.

And then they start hollering at me to get out of the car.

There's a woman officer, there's four white male officers and one white woman officer, and she tells me to, "Shut the (censored) up and get out of the car."

My car was equipped with a dictation type system where I can just talk to it and say, call whoever I want to have called.

So right at that time I said, "Call John Burris," and John answers and I tell John, "Hey, I'm surrounded by police officers.

They got their guns out."

And he tells me, "Just get out the car, do whatever they tell you to do."

So I get out the car and when I got out the car, that same woman officer tells me I'm standing too close to the car.

And then she tells me, "Get on the ground and crawl over here to us."

And I said, "What?"

And she said, "Crawl over here to us."

I said, "I'm not about to crawl over to you."

I said, "I just told you, you got the wrong (censored) person.

Take the time to come check my license and see who I am," right?

At this time, two of the officers come over and they grabbed me and they forced me down.

And the woman's got her gun on my head, and she's nervous, so the gun is kind of like hitting my head.

And I'm like, "Hey, listen, take the gun off of me."

Around the same time, John Burris shows up.

J.B.

is talking to them, "Take the handcuffs off of him," and they clear me, and the way they clear me is by I making me wait.

I no longer have the handcuffs on, but they make me wait until the person who had called Oakland Police came down and identified that it wasn't me.

It was about a black man in a black truck.

So the whole time I didn't fit anything, but I was just being profiled.

- It's taken Oakland a long time to comply with the consent decree because it was rotten to the core.

And there's very little progress made in the first few years.

- I'm fighting this battle.

I believe in my position.

I believe what I'm doing is right for the people I represent.

I don't care what the other people think because I know they represent the other side.

The other side only represents trying to convince the public that what they did was right.

My view is to uncover what they have done and demonstrate to the public that these people, in fact, acted improperly, they violated my client's civil rights.

And so my job is to prove to them that what their police did was wrong.

- You know, one of John Burris's biggest cases was the Oscar Grant tragedy.

That was a situation where there were a lot of factors that led up to it.

It didn't have to happen.

Clear lines of guilt to innocence were wavering.

- The Oscar Grant situation, that is Oscar being killed by a black police officer on the platform with a number of his friends present, was a case that came to me within a day or so.

- When my nephew Oscar Grant was murdered, we knew that we needed the best civil rights attorney that we can find, and we felt that someone with some skills can help us get justice.

And so that's when our relationship with John Burris really began.

- And so I could see immediately that this case was bigger than the average case.

I went out to the scene that very first day that I got the case, I got all the boys who were present, went out to the scene, reenacted the scene so I can see where everyone was at the time the shooting of Oscar taken place, what role each person played.

And immediately, I could see this is flat-out murder.

And I could also see, this is gonna be a big deal.

- Oscar's was the first cell phone murder that the world was able to see and witness on social media.

- Because they saw this young man getting shot and killed in front of them, what appeared to be no reason at all.

There were a lot of people who saw this, and they all had cell phones.

There was a train going east and there was a train going west.

And those trains had each stopped.

(gun blasting) - Shooting somebody!

- Get on the train!

They just shot him!

- Get on the train!

- They just shot that guy!

- So this was a situation with cell phones were being clicked as this whole beating and shooting took place, and so there were a lot of witnesses to it, and that made it horrifying for everyone.

- And I remember being with the lawyers in my office the first time we got the video and we played it, and everybody just looked and we were just astonished like, "Wow, they just killed him."

- Johannes Mehserle makes the claim that he meant to use his taser.

- So that's how the case started.

And that case then led to publicity that was generated with the family and ultimately to the DA.

- Some of the challenges that John met in representing us was that he would go with us to the criminal trial.

I mean, it started there, you know, though John wasn't representing us in the criminal aspect, he was representing us in the civil aspect, he was helping coaching us in understanding what was going on.

And of course, one of the challenges was he got gagged.

- I'm thrown in the middle of this, you know, as the lawyer trying to help the clients navigate through all of this, through both the criminal component of it, but I had to work through that with the family members and the different community group people who had different interests in the case.

You know, they all didn't have the same interest in me helping resolve the case.

Some wanted to promote this as, you know, a communist thing.

Some wanted to promote it as Black Lives this, and others wanted to promote it as, you know, the world's coming to an end kind of thing, and others wanted this is the most massive police misconduct in the world, all these forces were there.

- I thought it was pretty impressive is how he managed to weave himself through that and the case through that, never taking the eye off his two goals, one, was to seek changes from the policing, and two, and this is very important, to make sure that it was Oscar Grant's daughter who got the benefit of any sort of settlement.

- Social justice is a large part of what John does, but not only is it a part of what he does, but it is what he has taught.

- So what I know and what I've learned about John Burris is through the study of policing and living in the Bay Area and hearing this name come up again and again when everyone is trying to hold the police accountable for bad behaviors.

- John hasn't won all his cases.

There have been times when John has struggled with either losing a case that he felt as though he should have won or found himself in a very difficult situation and how to work himself out.

- So I've been teaching courses on the criminal justice system and policing for 20 years now.

I've studied policing from both sides of the dividing line, right?

So from the side of the folks who are most impacted by policing and the side of the people doing the policing.

And I've also studied video recordings of police encounters for a long time, so I feel like I have a good sense of what's happening both in these encounters and historically.

And if you think about policing as a mechanism for distributing force, basically, right?

That's sanctioned by the state across populations and across space, that means all over the country there are people who are living in places who are getting a fundamentally different type of policing.

- In our profession, John would be described as a Type A personality.

John is wherever you want him to be and often where you might not want him to be.

And the part that most people don't see is that John is an emotional person.

- When I first started out, I'm fighting battles by myself.

There weren't other people doing this type of work.

People did not believe in the work that I was doing.

And so it took a long time.

These young lawyers that are here now, and they're working for me, they, (chuckles) I've been at it for 20, 25, 30 years before they got here.

Now since Rodney King, when you had the the video camera, things started to change a little bit.

- John Burris through his work as a lawyer, has made a tremendous difference with regard to advancing civil rights, getting recovery for victims of abuses.

But one of the things that's also important is John Burris has played a key role in mentoring and training so many of the civil rights lawyers of today.

- I first became aware of John Burris when he represented the family of Oscar Grant.

And he was a trailblazer because for somebody like me at the time who was still in law school, you saw how adequate, zealous representation of black people, the black community, the black culture.

- Being a civil rights lawyer is a challenge in terms of the work itself because you're essentially challenging the police.

So in the 30 years or 40 years I've been doing this work, I've seen this whole progression.

When I first started, jurors did not believe that police did anything wrong.

I had to overcome that over a period of time.

And so in the cases that I've been involved in, some of which I've talked about before, the Rodney King case, even though Rodney King was the one that was beaten, the juror's view and the public's view was he was the bad person.

- I grew up in San Francisco, I grew up in public housing and there was, unfortunately, a lot of tension with the police department, and we witnessed police brutality.

There was no cell phone video footage and other tools that exist now.

There was only the hope and the prayer that someone like a John Burris would be around to help us combat it.

- Many of our civil rights attorneys are fighting the battle that needs to be fought within the constraints of the law.

Now folks will say, "Well, the law doesn't serve us."

And to some measure that is true.

And yet it is, the law exists.

- There's a great deal of systemic racism in our civil and criminal justice systems.

If you're representing a civil defendant, you get paid.

Often if you represent a plaintiff's rights case, you get paid only if you win, it's a much harder practice.

- And so when I think about the work that he's doing, I think about it again in that context of in a world where it is extremely difficult, right?

To hold the police accountable for bad behavior because all the protections, the balance of protections is on the side of the police.

- Being a civil rights attorney, you have to be all in.

And what I mean by that is you don't have the luxury of someone financing you.

You don't have the luxury of having all the information upfront like the police do.

As a plaintiff's side civil rights attorney, you have none of that, and instead, you have to go to the scene, knock on stranger's doors, and try to convince people that it's okay to tell us what happened.

Then you have to get on the media and deal with reporters who are friendly to police, who heard the story that the police, the police narrative first, so you have to counter that.

- Many times the people administering public safety do not come through the process as it relates to public safety.

Our recruitment process should not be limited to ex-military.

And when that happens, we don't have to misinterpret conduct of people that leads to the opportunity for John Burris to sue you.

- Many of us today know about Attorney Crump.

Benjamin Crump is wise enough to realize that he brings publicity to his case through the idea of making sure that the community is aware of it.

And John started that whole perception way back in 2012.

- As our relationship developed from Oscar Grant, Uncle Bobby is Oscar Grant's uncle, I was the lawyer for their family.

And so during the course of that, Uncle Bobby developed this foundation whereby he became sort of the spokesperson for all the people had been killed by the police.

- And so we would call John up and ask him come to speak at one of our conferences that we're having.

We might have 150 to 200 families at the conference.

John will come and present, you know, at the conference.

He will stand with us when we have families that might come into town, and you know, wanna get ideas on what's going on.

Or John will talk to families that has been impacted by police violence.

- I have over the last several years have spoken at his organization, at his annual event and many times to talk to the various women, and but also to allow them to know that there are people out there who represent them.

To me, it's tightening the bond that these, that family members have whose family members have been killed by the police.

- And so we have these conferences for the sole purpose of making sure that no family that's been impacted in this egregious act of police violence has to feel like they're alone.

- And Oscar Families have been very good about providing support, and I sort of see myself as an adjunct to their group, to be helpful, to get them to get the message out.

And I also bring to help people understand what has happened to them.

And it didn't happen to just them.

That it's happened to a lot of different people.

Mentoring program that I started 14 years ago, my objective always has been to bring together young teenage boys from the inner city who are in public schools, who may not have two, intact family and bring them together with men, some of whom have had a similar background.

Each of you in high school have a view and maybe you don't, about what you wanna be when you grow up, most people don't.

I certainly did not, but I did start thinking about it, and I want you all to start thinking about it as well.

- So, The Way Forward Now has grown into this multi-year, incredible movement between young men and mentors.

- I met John Burris at a Cal camp, and then I heard that John was doing his event up at his house.

And I got in contact with him and he asked me to bring some kids.

And from there, I just became super engrossed in, you know, his mentor program, Boys to Men/Men to Boys: The Way Forward.

- I've been in television sports for almost 40 years, and I'm still learning, still learning.

I learned from just about every show that I do.

To me, there's no such thing as a perfect show.

- All of us black men, whatever, whatever we do, whatever career, we have to make a difference.

We have to inject ourselves into the lives of men, women, the community, being leaders.

- And so the objective is to show them that it can happen to you.

That you don't have to start with a silver spoon in your mouth.

You can start wherever you start from.

You just gotta wanna do it, you gotta have some initiative about yourself and some drive, and don't let people tell you you can't do it.

- Well, I think John seen a lot of things go wrong, and he understands the answers to what he believes can fix some of those problems.

- Being a police officer here in Oakland, I mean, it is dangerous.

We face a lot of dangers every day, but what I found out is the best tool, the best weapon that I've had to protect me as a police officer was being able to speak to people.

I believe it's kept me safe, kept me out of a lot of dangerous situations.

- Everything I was doing, you know, in the grassroots is what John was doing in his backyard.

So for me, it was a natural fit and something I've been engaged with him for the last 15 years.

- I have great joy in watching men interact with the boys and myself.

And as I look at the programs that I've had down through the years, I've gotten great pleasure from that.

- John is the linchpin of the Oakland community.

He's the person that people go to when they are trying to understand what's happening politically in Oakland.

- John has always been a public person.

And so when I started dating him, I knew that that came with the territory.

The public loves him and they want to see him and they take pride in him.

He always says, "Yes."

He's always open to the community.

And it is easy for him to relate to anybody.

Anybody who asks him to do anything in terms of helping the community, I can think of very few times that he would say, "No."

And so, actually, as we go to any number in any months, in one month, we might go to 10 different affairs.

And so it's really gratifying to be able to support him.

And so when I met John, I was pretty well-grounded in my career as a law professor, North Carolina Central University School of Law.

He helped me in so many ways.

In my trial practice course, he would either give lectures on things like evidence and rules of evidentiary procedure, how to do an opening statement, how to do a closing statement.

- He has taken on really very challenging cases, and he has always stayed focused on the facts of those cases and what was most important to the people that he represented.

And he also was very good at explaining to the public as to why he was moving forward with a particular case.

- In order to make a confessions, that there was no tape recorder, so he undoubtedly is a person whose case has to be looked at.

Now when we did the Riders case, we had to go back and look at over a hundred convictions that have taken place by those officers to have them meet, to set aside because they were all bogus and fake.

And we'll have to find out how many officers we have, how many cases we have here, maybe like his, where these officers that we know engaged in misconduct and used their position of authority to cause people to be arrested and jailed for no legitimate reason.

- John has always been a mentor to law students and others.

And so my situation was just perfect.

Any group that was on campus at the law school, they were interested in talking to him because, of course, Tupac was big to them.

And so Rodney King and Tupac meant that they wanted to see this man.

And then once they met him, they wanted to learn from him.

- And I would talk at least once a year to the various students who had an interest in civil rights.

- Harry Daniels was a student in my first year of property course and also my third year family law course, and so I got to know him quite well and he always told me he wanted to be a civil rights lawyer.

So obviously, I said, "Well, you have to meet my husband."

- He told me he wanted to do the kind of work that I was doing, and so after he finished his stint in the public defender's office, he started his own office in Atlanta, Georgia.

So for the last 10 years, he's been doing this type of work.

- And so it was good to see the mentoring that John was able to give him and then the lawyer that he became as a result of his own ambition and ability, as well as the guidance that John had given him over the years.

- What fuels John?

What keeps him driving?

What keeps him working as hard as he does?

Talking and training and being a mentor for others who want to be like John is a passion, a burning passion for justice.

- We have assembled this, some people say a dream team of lawyers.

We have John Burris, renowned civil rights attorney for Oakland, California who represented the likes of Rodney King, Tupac Shakur, the goes on and on.

Of course, everybody know the renowned Benjamin Crump who represent Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, on and on, Tyree Nichols.

- Harry Daniels, one of the best young lawyers practicing today, took John's class.

And Harry brought us all together for a case in Mississippi that we call, "The civil rights lawyer dream team."

And so I'm very proud to be co-counselor with John and Harry and Lee, and we go do justice in a place where black people don't often get justice, in the deep South.

- We wanna send a message to the city of Mobile, Alabama.

It doesn't matter how far you away from the large cities, the Gulf Coast, because as Dr.

King said, "Injustice anywhere is a threat of justice everywhere."

- Thank you.

Thank you.

- It matters when you can bring, you know, the pioneers and the present day civil rights warriors together to go do battle for our people.

- The conduct of the police that created this confrontation, the manner in which they were trying to force their will when they lawfully didn't have a right to do that, and then by creating this confrontation, then they used force, a taser, that ultimately killed him.

And all they can think about is the number of volts that this kid received and this young man received in his body when he should not have received any.

- Some of the high-profile black attorneys in this country all was on that site.

We was there as a family in support of Jawan.

Benjamin Crump was there along with us as a family, standing with them, - These national civil rights lawyers to shine the light of the nation's attention on Birmingham, Alabama, because Jawan Dallas life matters.

The fact that you can be a person who's committed no crime, but yet sentenced to death, we believe because he fit a certain description of what police think are criminals.

I think there are some young law students out there watching us just like we watched John when he was, you know, blazing trails and getting justice where there was an impediment, obstacles, hurdles to get justice.

- He handles every case of importance that I know of in the Bay Area and around the country.

I think you could call John, "The Godfather of Police Litigation."

- So for 30 years or so, I've been teaching lawyers about police brutality, and I've hired lawyers, and some have been with me for a number of years.

It is my mission, as I tell everyone, to teach as many lawyers as I can about civil rights issues.

And I'm also running my own relay.

And when I finish this relay, I need for you to be running stride for stride with me, so when I pass you the baton, you're not stopping.

(bright jazz music) (bright jazz music continues) (bright jazz music continues) (bright jazz music continues) (bright jazz music continues)