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Welcome to episode 295 of Behind the Shield podcast.
As always, my name is James Gearing.
And this week I am extremely excited to welcome on the show Ron Stallworth.
Now Ron is a career veteran of the Colorado Springs Police Department, but he is also
the gentleman featured in the movie Black Klansman based on a book he wrote of the same
name.
So if you haven't seen it, very long story short, Ron was able to infiltrate the KKK
as a young black police officer.
So I'm going to let him tell the story on this interview, but as you can imagine, an
incredible story, some very powerful lessons and tangents in this interview as well.
So before we get to that conversation, please just take a moment, go to whichever app you
listen to this podcast on, subscribe to the show, leave feedback.
I really do love reading what you write.
And then of course, leave a rating.
The five star ratings do really make us more visible when people are looking for a podcast
like this.
And then lastly, take whichever means you have and share these incredible episodes.
We're approaching 300 episodes of Behind the Shield podcast.
That's 300 people telling their stories that I know will change lives around the world
if we can just get these recordings to the people that need to hear them.
So with that being said, I introduce to you Ron Stallworth.
Enjoy.
Brilliant.
So I'd love to start at the very beginning then.
Where on planet earth are we finding you today?
On planet earth, you're finding me in El Paso, Texas where I grew up.
Excellent.
All right.
Well, that's where I'd love to start.
So if you wouldn't mind telling me like what your family dynamic was, what your parents
did and how many siblings you had.
I come from a divorced family.
I was raised by my mother.
She's deceased now.
My father was military.
He's a real worthless bastard.
And my mother was the glue that kept us together.
And there were five of us in the family.
I'm the third of the five.
And that's the basic story.
Right.
So obviously, we're going to talk about how you certainly thought outside the box when
it came to your career in law enforcement.
Were there any elements of your upbringing with your mother and your brothers and sisters
that you think contributed to you being innovative when it came to your police career?
Not really.
My mother was a minimum wage worker for her entire life.
She raised five kids on minimum wage and never once did she go into welfare roles to supplement
her income.
She worked.
I'm very proud and always have been proud of the fact that that was her first basic
personality.
She had one basic rule, and that was because she dropped out of high school in her junior
year in Chicago, she had one basic rule that she lived by, and that was none of her children
would ever drop out of high school.
And if we did, we would be kicked out of the house.
All of her children graduated from high school.
And my older brother, five years older, who's deceased now, my older brother and I are the
only two high school graduates in our immediate family.
I mean, are the only two college graduates in our immediate family.
That was something my mother was extremely proud of.
When I got my college degree, I gave my mother a copy of it and she sat there and cried because
she could never conceive of the idea of being a college graduate, much less having a son,
in this case, two sons who were college graduates.
So I was always proud of my mother for being a strong, determined woman, a strong, determined
black woman on top of that, and for keeping us on that straight and narrow path.
Yeah.
And that's just something that I talk about a lot on the podcast is you can change a pattern.
You can change a cycle of, let's say, poverty or crime or whatever it is, addiction, just
by investing in your children and being a present parent.
It sounds exactly like that's what your mom understood.
Regardless of economic wealth, if you're present with your kids, you can set them up for success
in their journey.
That's very true.
But if I have any regrets today, it's the fact that my mother's not around to enjoy
the fact that I have achieved a level of success that she never could have conceived of.
Yeah.
I'm sure she's looking down and seeing every moment of it.
Well, with the childhood arena, what about athletics?
Were you a sportsman when you were young?
I played organized sports up until the eighth grade.
I was a running back in football and a defensive back.
I ran track.
I was a sprinter and a long jumper.
I played basketball.
When I got into high school, I chose not to be a participant in sports.
I recognized the limitations of my athletic talent, and I recognized that at the high
school level, I would not be as competitive and therefore chose not to sit on the bench.
So I chose not to play sports.
However I was, I started training in chococon karate when I was 14 years old, and I participated
in that for a number of years.
Got very good, very proficient, became the instructor at the University of Texas El Paso
Karate Club until I left El Paso in 1972.
Brilliant.
Actually, Chococon was the first martial arts I started with as well.
It's a great foundation for a martial artist.
Yeah.
Brilliant.
Well, then you kind of touch on it in the book.
When we get into the extremes of the racial bias, I guess, in the two groups that you
highlight in the book and in the film, you touch on the fact that in other areas of America,
it seemed like race was a lot more of an issue than where you grew up.
So tell me what the environment was like in El Paso for a young black man.
El Paso was a good city to grow up during the 60s because even though El Paso was a
southern city and a southern state, we did not have the racial tensions going on that
the Deep South did.
Everything that Martin Luther King and his nonviolent army were battling, that was the
reality show for us.
We watched it on the evening news.
We didn't have those activities taking place here in El Paso.
We tuned in at 5 to 6 o'clock and 10 o'clock and we saw the beatings that were happening
down south.
We saw the fires that were going on.
We saw all hell breaking loose with whites attacking nonviolent, innocent young black
children peacefully protesting.
And as I said, it was more or less a reality show for us.
And I was fortunate in that sense that we didn't have to deal directly with it, but
we were aware of everything that was going on.
Yeah, well, a question for you because I've asked this of a few guests and I still haven't
had an answer.
They haven't had an answer either.
What baffles me is in the 40s, like I said, I'm from England.
So we had the British army, obviously, a lot of them were young white men, but we had the
Gurkhas, we had the Indian army, we had all these different cultures that were fighting
side by side against fascism.
And we obviously had the same in the US.
You had the Buffalo Soldiers and these incredible airmen.
And what I don't understand is how you go from unifying a nation like that, fighting
a true evil, to then five years later, stringing black people up from trees again.
Have you ever had any kind of anyone explain how we transition from a united front of America
to that incredible racism again, just years after we were fighting the Nazis?
Because America has never been united.
That's a myth.
America has always been white dominated from our inception as a nation in the 1770s.
We have always been white dominated.
Our very constitution, our freedom documents, the constitution, the Declaration of Independence,
they were false, they were lies.
You got to remember, people like me with my skin color, we were not people.
We were cattle, we were animals.
We were three-fifths of a human being.
We weren't even one whole person.
We were three-fifths.
That's in the constitution.
So our nation was founded on a lie, on a whole bunch of lies.
Our founding fathers were liars.
They were rapists.
They were murderers.
They were killing and beating my ancestors because they were slaveholders.
So our nation has always been untrue to its ideals.
And that's the kind of environment that my ancestors exist in and that's the type of
environment that I had to grow up in.
A lot of my white colleagues in law enforcement don't like to face that reality.
They just want to believe in the red, white and blue.
But the red, white and blue has always been a false notion.
And people need to respect that truth.
Yeah.
Well, even, I mean, to put the British on trial for a second, my ancestry, we, I learned
very recently visiting the State Museum in Charleston, we were the ones actually that
were going to Africa and other European nations as well and buying the slaves and then selling
them to the US.
So it kind of looks like the UK's hands were kind of clean and they actually weren't at
all.
And then also, forgetting African nations for a moment, what we did to the indigenous
tribes here in America, what we did in Australia, that is an element of history that's very
downplayed.
And as an immigrant coming in, the comment I get a lot as well, England has a long history.
I'm like, well, so does the US.
If you incorporate the native tribes that were here before my fellow Europeans arrived
in this country.
That's true.
And I have colleagues, especially past colleagues in law enforcement, who like to point out,
white colleagues I might add, who like to point out that, well, my ancestors, they were
my ancestors.
They'll say, my ancestors didn't have slaves.
I wasn't a slave holder.
So why should I feel anything about what happened to the slaves?
Why should I feel any guilt towards that?
And then they like to point out, well, there were blacks who participated in the slave
trade that cooperated with the slavers and don't blame it all on whites.
And there's an element of truth to that.
But that doesn't excuse the fact that whites dominated society.
They have always dominated society.
And whites were the ones that set the rules.
And one wrong does not, one right, I should say, does not correct all the wrongs.
And so just because you may not have been directly involved with it, because you weren't
around at the time, your ancestors probably were.
And even if they weren't, there were enough whites back in those days involved in that
trade to where it grew and grew and grew until it got out of control.
So you are not absolved of guilt of wrongdoing, simply because you were not an active participant.
Yeah.
I think that's the thing is acknowledging it, isn't it?
It's not like that individual themselves was responsible or would agree in any way, shape
or form with it.
But I think probably what's jarring the most is this refusal to acknowledge our dark history
and I say our by America, England, Portugal, all these countries that have a pretty sinister
past.
And then the perfect example is Nazi Germany.
I mean, it amazes me how I'm 45 now, so less than my lifespan ago before I was born is
when the Nazism was happening, when they were literally killing hundreds of thousands of
Jewish people and gypsies and blacks and every other person that didn't fit their so-called
Aryan image, which is laughable when I know my history of how many times my country was
conquered.
There is no such thing as a pure race.
We were Swedish and Roman and French and all these other cultures that dominated my country
before we for some reason miraculously became some Aryan nation.
Right.
A lot of truth to that.
Right.
Well, I'd love to steer you kind of into law enforcement.
So as a young man, regardless of skin color, how were the law enforcement perceived by
young men in El Paso taxes?
I couldn't say.
I'd never had any encounters with law enforcement.
I lived across the street from a black El Paso officer.
I grew up with his daughter who was one of my best friends in elementary school and he
was always decent with me.
He was a good man, good husband, good father, and that was my only encounter with police
growing up.
I never had any negative encounters with police.
For one thing, I feared my mother more than I feared police or anyone else.
That's the way it should be.
And I knew that if I did wrong, my mother would be there to set me on the right path
and I didn't want to be in her wake.
So I didn't have any involvement with police officers.
I couldn't say what it was like for blacks in El Paso.
I've heard stories but that's all I can attest to is the stories that I heard.
Yeah, yeah.
Because as a young white boy in a very rural town, I got not harassed, it's the wrong word,
but I wasn't a big fan of police because they kept thinking we were up to no good and I
wouldn't say pulling us over specifically, but guilty until proven innocent, I guess,
was the way we were viewed.
But again, that's just kind of young teen boys that are up to something.
So what about your personal journey then?
What made you decide that you wanted to join the law enforcement community?
I wanted to make enough money to put myself in college and become a high school PE teacher.
And what was it about PE specifically that drew you to that?
At the time, I was very physical.
I was an athlete and I wanted to be involved in athletics at some point and I wanted to
be in the teaching profession.
So I wanted to be a PE teacher.
But after a year of being and working for the police department in Colorado Springs,
I found out that A, I was making twice as much money as a recent college graduate in
the teaching profession and B, I was having too much fun working for the police department.
So I decided to stick it out and 32 years later, I retired from law enforcement.
Brilliant.
All right.
Well, then the first assignment that you kind of really talk about in the book is not the
KKK.
It's the kind of Black Power movement.
So tell me about that first undercover assignment.
My first undercover assignment was Stokely Carmichael, one of the leaders of the Black
Panther Party.
That was in 1975, about April of 75.
I was assigned to monitor a speech he was giving at a local black bar and to basically
gauge the audience reaction.
Judge his delivery, his rhetorical delivery, and basically make a determination as to how
we as a police agency should respond.
Stokely was a very dynamic, a very powerful speaker.
And my task was to determine whether we should be concerned as an agency to his powers of
persuasion and how we should go about responding to his rhetorical delivery and whether we
should be concerned about it.
That was my first undercover assignment.
Right.
And did you, and I'll begin to talk about the KKK, did you see any similarities between
the extremes of the Black Power group and the White Power group?
I'm not talking about the more moderate middle, but the extremes of each side?
No, I didn't.
Let me answer it this way.
Extremist groups are basically the same as far as I'm concerned.
They have their individual beliefs, but they're far on the edges.
And they're going to stick to the edges in terms of their belief patterns and not reside
in the middle.
Stokely was on one extreme.
The KKK people that I later came to deal with were on another extreme.
They both thought that their views were right and that the other groups were wrong, but
they were nowhere in the middle in terms of where America stood.
And in my opinion, such groups and their belief patterns are all screwed up.
Yeah, because that's something that I've talked about several times with guests, especially
that are in law enforcement military, is we see now in this generation's current climate
that what appears to be just a severe mental illness that results in a horrific bombing,
mass shooting, whatever it is, and there's always a clinging to some cause, but there's
no rhyme or reason to it.
It's not creating an improvement to whatever cause they're supposedly hailing from.
It's mental illness, it's desperation and a feeble attempt at trying to create some
sort of reason for their violence.
Right.
Well, then moving on then, so you mentioned the KKK.
I'd love to hear your take on how you initially found that connection and then just kind of,
yeah, obviously not tell the whole book, but just the cliff notes of your experiences entering
the KKK as a black man.
Well, that came about as the book and the movie point out.
I was working as an intelligence detective for Colorado Springs Police Department in
October of 1978.
I saw an ad in the newspaper in the Class 5 section.
It said Ku Klux Klan for information, and then there was a P.O. box.
So I wrote a letter to the P.O. box basically identifying myself as a white supremacist
who had similar beliefs as a KKK and wanted to join to stop the furtherance of blacks
and to promote the white supremacist notion.
So I wrote this letter, gave the undercover phone line, which at that time was an untraceable
line and signed my real name Ron Stallworth instead of my undercover name, which I should
have done, and put the letter in the mail and forgot about it.
About a week or two later, I got a response back in the form of a phone call to the office
on that undercover line, and the voice on the phone asked to speak to Ron Stallworth.
I immediately got suspicious because no one called Ron Stallworth on that line.
The voice identified itself as Ken O'Dell, the local chapter president of the KKK in
Colorado Springs.
He wanted to know why I wrote the letter requesting membership in the Klan.
That's when my investigation officially started because I had to immediately come up with
a plan.
I told him that I wanted to join the Klan because I hated niggers, bics, chinks, Jews,
blacks, and anybody else who wasn't pure area white like I was.
His response to me was, you're just the kind of guy we're looking for.
When can we meet?
That's when I saw that old shit.
So there you are on the end of the phone as a black man, and now you've got to figure
out how you can be physically present in front of this KKK member.
Like I said, that's when my investigation officially started.
I had to come up with a plan and my plan, obviously I had to think outside the box and
put something together and we were off and running.
Tell me about how you were able to find a colleague who could play you in real life,
if that makes sense.
In the book, I had identified my colleague as Chuck, not a real name.
In the movie, he was Adam Driver and his name was changed to Flip Zimmerman.
Chuck was a good undercover detective.
He worked narcotics at the time and he was about my height, my weight, and I wanted Chuck
to play me for that reason.
So I went to the lieutenant that he worked for, I worked for the same lieutenant in narcotics
about a year earlier and the lieutenant and I had a parting of the ways, it was a mutual
respect that parted our ways.
I asked the lieutenant for the use of Chuck to play me in this caper.
The lieutenant said, you can't have him.
I'm not going to waste a valuable undercover operative on a bunch of men wearing white
sheets, a bunch of nonsense, and the lieutenant said, besides, your plan won't work because
you've already talked to them on the phone and once Chuck walks in there, they'll recognize
the difference between his voice, a white man's voice, and your voice, a black man that
they've been talking to on the phone.
So I asked the lieutenant, I said, what does a black man sound like?
He just stared at me.
He couldn't answer me.
I asked him that several times and he never could answer.
Finally, he just said, you can't have him.
I said, okay.
I turned around and walked away, went to my sergeant, told the sergeant what he said.
The sergeant said, what do you want to do about it?
I said, I want to take it directly to the chief of police.
Now in Colorado Springs, we had a rank structure that consisted of patrolmen and detectives
were in the same plane and then you had sergeants, lieutenants, captains, deputy chief, and chief.
So I bypassed four people in the rank structure and went directly to the chief, top of the
rank.
It could have been a career ending move on my part.
At that point, I didn't care.
I wasn't going to let this lieutenant win.
So I went, me and the sergeant went to the chief's office.
I told the chief what I had done, my conversation on the phone, my conversation with the lieutenant
and told him my plan.
He said, what all do you need?
I said, I need two surveillance officers and Chuck to play me.
The lieutenant, I mean, the chief got on the phone to the lieutenant.
He told the lieutenant to give me anything I needed and my investigation was off and
running at that point.
Brilliant.
But I want to do a little backstory of the KKK if you wouldn't mind to educate us, the
audience because we're all familiar with the sheets.
We're all familiar with the burning cross.
Some people might have seen Mississippi burning but the history of it, I think, is almost
comical especially the reason why they're wearing the sheets.
So if you're able just to kind of educate us from the Confederacy, like how this group
was even born in the first place and the purpose of the sheets.
The Klan came about as a result of the end of the Civil War, Reconstruction.
They were trying to terrorize, the whole purpose was to terrorize blacks, the newly freed slaves,
to prevent them from gaining any traction in the new United States.
And they did not want these slaves to be able to vote or have any sense of franchisement
in the new America following the Civil War.
So what the KKK did, these veterans, these southerners, they put on sheets and in some
of them, in some cases, they covered their horses in sheets and they rode around at night
with torches and burning crosses on the property of slaves, their homes and farms and whatnot
and basically terrorized them.
And their story was they were the ghosts of the recently departed Civil War veterans.
And in doing this, the slaves, many of them who were still bound by their African traditions,
they believed in spirits, they believed in hauntings and they were frightened to the
core.
And so this was how the Klan operated back then, was to keep the newly freed slaves in
line and to keep them from exercising their franchisement as newly freed citizens with
power.
They wanted them to continue following the old ways of the South and not to use anything
newly established by the defeat of the South.
So that's how the Ku Klux Klan came into being and that was their sole purpose.
Right, well another thing you refer to and I also remember seeing it on a great documentary
13th, I don't know if you've seen that one and it's kind of like the history of how slavery
in a way transitioned into imprisonment in modern prison systems, but it's the movie
The Birth of the Nation.
So again, if you were able to kind of tell us a little bit about that and the accolades
that it got when it came out.
The Birth of the Nation came about around 1915 or so.
That was a rebirth period for the Ku Klux Klan.
They increased their membership exponentially.
That was their longest dominant period of existence in America.
And D.W. Griffiths, a major Hollywood producer, he produced blockbuster movies at the time
in the early film days of Hollywood, moving pictures.
And Birth of a Nation was one of the first blockbuster movies ever.
He produced this movie about the Klan and basically the Klan and the decadent destroyed
society in America and they came about and rescued that decadent destroyed society and
they were portrayed as heroes.
And it played very well.
It was shown in the White House to President Wilson, who was a racist, by the way, and
a Klan supporter.
And he gave a good publicity in his review.
And because of that film, the Klan's ranks grew even larger.
To this day, the Klan uses Birth of a Nation in their recruitment of new members.
Yeah, I'm watching it.
So just for everyone listening, you have a white guy in blackface pretending to be a
black slave who supposedly was accused of raping a white woman and there's a lynching
and then, like you said, the Klan's come in like the cavalry.
And it's an absolutely blatantly racist movie.
The black people are portrayed as, like you said, lesser than people.
And the fact that that was only 100 years ago being shown in the White House and hailed
as a Hollywood classic just blows me away.
But it illustrates the underlying cancer of hatred that we had in here.
And again, to be fair, I'm sure in many other countries, obviously, certainly in Germany,
but many other places around the world where one group is viewed as lesser than another.
Yes, that's very true.
And the propaganda appeal of Birth of a Nation is still very much active to this day.
Yeah.
Well, I want to take a tangent with you because, I mean, this would be a fascinating perspective
from you personally.
As a fireman, I've witnessed racism in several of the places I've worked.
Not overtly by any means, but individuals amongst those men and women, the white people,
black people, Hispanic heritage that are blatantly racist towards whites, towards blacks, towards
Hispanics, whatever, different religions.
Yet they wear a badge and when the tones go off, they go and do their job.
And I found that such a ridiculous paradox that you hold this.
And I don't think any of them had like an aggressive hatred, but certainly, you know,
a racist mind.
But then you would go and put your life at risk for the exact people you say you hold
disdain to.
You came across a firefighter in this particular KKK chapter.
So as a policeman yourself, what is your understanding of racism in some of these professions where
we're actually willing to die for the very people that some of these men and women are
racist towards?
I found it curious, say the least.
You're referring to Fred Wilkins, who was the grand dragon for the state of Colorado.
He was a fireman for the city, which is a Denver suburb.
They tried to fire Fred on several occasions, city of Lakewood did.
The problem was, by all indications, he was an exemplary fireman and they couldn't get
rid of him.
And Fred even gave articles of newspapers or interviews in which he said he feels that
blacks are inferior to whites and he believes in the KKK.
When it comes to his job, he puts all of that aside and he does his job to the best of his
ability.
He was never able to use the civil service rules and guidelines to terminate.
And to the best of my knowledge, he retired with a pension.
Yeah, and I just find that so strange.
I mean, that's the outward symptoms and obviously, there can be just an internal opinion that
never manifests into anything negative towards a group of people, internal monologue.
But obviously, with the clan, with the black panthers, with these extreme Muslim groups
that we're seeing, there's also a lot of violence with lynchings, perfect example.
And I just don't understand how you can volunteer to be a first responder and still be ignorant
enough to hold those kind of hateful prejudices.
I mean, I get it if you are working in a factory somewhere and you're just stewing on that,
but when you're putting your life on the line and prepare to die for someone, how can you
not look in the mirror and see the hypocrisy of this racial hatred that you've been raised
with?
It just doesn't make any sense to me.
No, it doesn't.
What if you happen to come across a black citizen or Jewish citizen in need of mouth
to mouth resuscitation?
What would you do?
And he said, I would give it to them because that's my job.
And I know that if I were in such a situation, I would have hated to have Fred, he's the
one to look down at me and be giving me mouth to mouth resuscitation.
Yeah, it's crazy.
And then again, I wonder what Fred's childhood was like, what his upbringing was like, where
he learned to hate because America now...
He grew up in Alabama.
Okay, so he was probably surrounded by the same kind of philosophy then.
So I want to bring us back to present day at the moment and get your perspective as
an officer from a couple of decades ago now and also a man of color in uniform.
At the moment, the current climate is being told a very polarizing story.
You've got the Black Lives Matter movement, you've got the Blue Lives Matter movement,
which again, they're two snapshots of two extremes where the reality is you've got men
and women of all colors and creeds putting a badge on their chest, willing to risk their
lives and of which I'm proud to serve next to 95% of all of them.
What is your view on the environment in law enforcement and in race in general of our
current climate in 2020?
I think Blue Lives Matter movement is basically a joke.
I'll tell you why.
No one was ever going around saying Blue Lives Matter until you heard the expression Black
Lives Matter.
No one was going around saying White Lives Matter until you heard the expression Black
Lives Matter.
These are people and in terms of Blue Lives Matter, these are people in my profession
that decided to jump on the bandwagon and counter protest those so-called radical extremes
that they feel were in the wrong.
I don't feel it's necessary.
The people at Black Lives Matter are not revolutionary terrorists.
They're people that are simply trying to live and survive in America, who are being treated
wrongfully, whose constitutional rights are being violated, and they're protesting that.
As part of their protest, the slogan Black Lives Matter was coined.
I've always said and I told Dave Dobbins this, if somebody's rights are being violated, if
the Constitution is not being adhered to, then the person violating those rights needs
to be booted out of the profession.
They're bad cops.
They're dirty cops.
I don't want to adhere to bad cops of any kind.
The concept of Blue Lives Matter, I think, is a false notion.
Yes, Blue Lives Matter.
I'm not saying that our lives don't, but I don't need to go around proclaiming Blue Lives
Matter and everything simply because there's a group called Black Lives Matter whose constitutional
rights are being violated by people in blue uniforms.
To play devil's advocate, well, not even that's the wrong even phrase.
That's the dirty cops, like you said, and I don't think of any sound mind is going to
argue that.
But then we've got a lot of gray area where the cops are truly defending themselves.
They're having to pull their weapon, which I think they're getting dragged into that
side as well where we're asking men and women of law enforcement to go out at night to work
these extra shifts.
They're sleep deprived.
They might be under trained and some of these gray areas may be a training issue, an overworking
issue, still horrendous, still tragic, whoever was on the receiving end.
But I feel like there's that polarizing thing like every shooting the cop was wrong is how
it's being told now, regardless again of the skin color of the cop and or the person that
was shot.
And I think it's a very dangerous thing to just say, oh, it's always race that's causing
this because it's not.
Because there's always underlying areas that we can improve on to stop our citizens of
all colors being as likely to commit crimes, whether it's drug policy, whether it's prison
reform and obviously train our men and women in law enforcement to be able to, for example,
go to go to hands rather than use their weapons, you know, the jujitsu, the strength training,
the tactical training, those kind of things.
So what's your view on that?
That you've got the dirty cops.
It's no question hands down that like the Rodney King's a perfect example.
That was a disgrace.
But what about the ones where you're seeing it where you as a law enforcement officer
would say, well, I might have actually done the same thing myself in that position.
Police officers have always had to get the issues of confrontation with the public.
How you contend with those issues that comes into question.
And when you are doing things that go against the grain of the constitution, as you have
been trained to do, that's when you get into trouble.
That's what I'm talking about.
But when you have a situation like Mr. Scott down in South Carolina a couple of years back,
where he was running away from that officer and it was clearly shown on video, that officer
pulled his gun and shot him in the back from about 13 feet away.
That is wrong.
There is no justification for that.
And yet my colleagues in law enforcement around the country defended that officer.
That is wrong.
There is no excuse for that.
I don't condone that in any way, shape or form.
You cannot, you cannot offset your way out of that.
That is a classic example of a bad cop and that is not a good example of blue lives matter.
That's an example of a dirty cop that needs to be put away for an extended period of time
and doesn't belong in the profession.
It's those type of situations that I'm talking about.
Yeah.
And I agree.
And I've had, you know, like so many police officers murdered here just in the Orlando
area that I either, you know, had worked with or were in my neighboring counties, you know,
so that's the other side is we're getting all these police officers murdered.
So my thing is this, you've got the criminals on the street who are a result of, you know,
several areas that I think we can improve.
You've got the police officers on the street who, you know, can be trained better and or
we create an environment where it's not as dangerous for them.
There are countries in the world where the police don't shoot people and don't get shot
them either, you know.
So, you know, a couple of areas that I've talked about a lot on this podcast, one is
the legalization of drugs.
So the addict becomes a patient, not a criminal.
You know, they're not locked away, which is a big thing about the 13th movie I was talking
about and that worked very well in Portugal.
I interviewed the guy that spearheaded that in Portugal.
And then prisons, again, right now we have a profit-based prison system.
We're not driven to stop, you know, reoffending because when our prisons are full, someone's
getting very, very rich.
So for me, fixing those social areas will not only make it safer for the citizens regardless
of color, but also, you know, our brothers and sisters in blue because now the streets
aren't going to be as dangerous and they're not going to be as apt to even pull their
weapon in the first place.
What I am talking about is simple.
Don't defend bad cops.
My colleagues in blue, I have been rejected by a lot of police officers, guys that I work
with since our spring, simply because I will not stand up and defend the police profession
right or wrong when incidents arise that garner public attention.
I judge each situation separately.
And you go back to the Scott situation down in South Carolina, there is no justification
for what happened down there.
That was clearly wrong.
And yet I've got colleagues that defend that officer that say he was wrongfully judged
that not have been condemned, he should not have been convicted, and will yell blue lives
matter.
And I say, fuck that, blue lives don't matter in that situation.
He's a dirty cop.
He needs to be condemned for what he did.
He murdered a man, it was caught on camera, end of discussion.
But these officers don't agree on that, then fuck them too.
Yeah, I think most people would absolutely agree with you, Ron, that's the thing.
And I think there was another one just released and I haven't heard people's take on it,
but again, from what I watched, it was two officers.
I think all three people were black if I remember rightly, the perpetrator criminal, whatever
you want to call the gentleman that was being detained and then a female and a male officer
and they're struggling with him.
I think they deployed a taser, it didn't work and the one black officer said, shoot him
and told his partner to shoot the guy.
Now they were laying on hands but very ineffectively.
So again, in that situation, had they been trained, like I mean, you did show it to Cam
when you were in law enforcement and being able to effectively restrain that gentleman,
then he wouldn't have need to be shot in the first place.
Now I believe he was in critical care but actually didn't die, so that's obviously a
good thing.
But going to the weapon, some of these ones that I see, it's a lack of training as well.
It's a lack of physical fitness, it's a lack of understanding of grappling and combatives
and I think that's another area that some agencies are doing it very well but some agencies
definitely need to do a lot better.
And I don't think anyone, no fireman is going to defend a shitty fireman.
I've had people on here who's one gentleman lost his son because of an awful series of
events with a couple of paramedics.
No one's going to stand behind them, a 14-year-old boy died.
So I think anyone stands behind a true bad cop is completely in the wrong.
So I think that most people listening would agree with you and it's trying to fix the
gray areas and trying to create an environment where there's just less crime in general,
where we do proactive initiatives that stop people getting to that point where they're
addicts, where they're in gangs, whatever it is that's creating this crime that we see
is so rife in America compared to a lot of other countries in the world.
I would agree with that but as I said earlier, each situation should be judged individually,
not collectively thrown together in a posture of blue lives matter.
Some situations are clearly visible as being wrong.
I will not defend a bad cop or his bad actions.
I will not stand by that.
I will not join that blue wall of silence and just direct a barrier for any outside
protest by saying blue lives matter.
But to me, that's bullshit and if I stand alone in that, I stand alone.
Yeah.
Well, and just you do a great example of doing the converse as well.
So just to throw the other side in, in the book, you talk about a young black boy who
murdered someone at a restaurant.
So tell me that story and again, your view of that and how it was almost like tarring
with the same brush on that side too.
Yeah, it was a 15-year-old kid, I believe, a white cook.
The cook was working in a 24-hour diner in Colorado Springs and the cook got out of work.
He had a young daughter, I believe.
He got out of work, was walking home and our pose alongside of him.
It's his attention and a gunshot rings out.
The detective pieced it all together.
The 15-year-old kid basically shot the man because he was curious to see what it would
like to kill somebody.
Now, he was arrested as far as with capital homicide, I believe it was, into the court
system as an adult with a death penalty or not the death penalty.
He was brought into the court system as an adult.
The black community in Colorado Springs put up their arms over the fact that he was not
treated as a juvenile and the prosecutor was accused of racial prejudice.
So the black community got together, one of the Baptist churches.
They managed to convince Dr. Abernathy to come into town and to take up the cause of
this young black kid.
And Dr. Abernathy came in and was helping to crusade on behalf of the kids.
I was assigned to be Dr. Abernathy's bodyguard because it was still during my Klan investigation
and they were protesting Dr. Abernathy's presence.
I sat down with Dr. Abernathy in his hotel room and I asked him if he knew the story
of this young black kid.
He said he knew what he had been told.
Well, to make a long story short, Dr. Abernathy had not been told the total story by the church
members in order to get him to come.
Here you have Dr. Abernathy, a venerable respected leader in the civil rights movement at the
time, and they managed to convince him to come into town.
And he's arguing, fighting on behalf of this murderer.
Dr. Abernathy, after he had been told the truth about this kid, that he had wrongfully
murdered the man just to see where it was like to kill somebody, that the man was a
husband, a father of a young daughter, Dr. Abernathy's whole opinion changed, but he
was trapped.
He had already committed himself in writing and broadcasts and in the pulpit.
Basically, he had been blackmailed.
I witnessed it all.
He didn't deserve that.
So the kid was convicted of the murder.
To the best of my knowledge, he spent something like 35, 40 years in prison.
I don't know what this became of him, where he's at to this day, but that's an example
of a wrongful situation that never should have happened.
Yeah, exactly.
So like you said, the bad cop should never have happened, that should never have happened,
and to tar all those cases with the same brush is wrong.
And we talk about even with nutrition, with fitness, with everything, no people are the
same and no incidences are the same.
And so I agree 100% and I thought it was very, very powerful to use that example as well,
that each of these individual things are their own case.
And if you have this knee jerk to every cop that's killed or every black person that's
killed, they're not the same.
There's all these different degrees.
And the sooner we treat these individuals as individual cases and stop having this huge
response, the more those individuals can actually get justice because one might be completely
wrong and the other one might be completely right.
So yeah, so I thank you for including that as well.
I want to just do one more kind of area wrap up and then do some wrap up questions.
But the closing of the movie specifically was heart-wrenching.
It really was.
And you have these two parallel stories, one of Jesse Washington who was basically lynched
in Waco, Texas and a friend of his who's now an elderly gentleman telling the story.
And then also the Charlottesville attack that we had just a few years ago, the neo-Nazi
drove into the protesters and ironically killed a white woman.
Obviously there's a subtext there to this is what happened 100 years ago and there's
still this element that we're seeing today.
I had a gentleman on whose brother, sister-in-law and her sister, Deah Yousor and Razan who
were Muslim were murdered by a white neighbor and it was absolutely a hate crime.
So what are you seeing now?
Obviously not everyone in the community is like that but what is the danger of white
supremacy in America in 2020?
The danger of white supremacy in America in 2020 lies in the White House.
Plain and simple, Donald Trump is the biggest danger representing America.
He and his administration, his followers, he is the titular leader of the white supremacist
movement and America did this to itself by putting him there.
And we have to ride out the storm right now.
Now I point this out a lot.
So the last two people that we had, I'm talking as individuals, this isn't a political thing
at all, I don't hail from left or right, I'm just me in my own personal opinion but I question
a lot why we ended up with those last two people.
Neither of those I would have ever in a million years wanted to select from let's say the
top 100,000 people that should have been in line for the presidency.
From your perspective now with obviously multiple decades behind you, what is your view on our
political system and how we're not seeming to get what I would view as true leaders that
we can really respect?
And I'm sure everyone can name 20 people they would be honored to have as our president,
male, female, whatever color, military service, that we just seem to have such a poor choice
when it comes to the end now.
If I've got friends who insist that Barack Obama was the devil incarnate when it comes
to American politics, that all he did was promote issues and things that appealed to
black people and when I asked them to be specific they can't.
They just say he was for the blacks.
Notice I said the blacks not black people because that's how they put it.
He was for the blacks which is a racist way of saying black people.
Why doesn't the same principle apply to George Bush II and to Ronald Reagan and all the other
white presidents appreciated Barack Obama?
They never have an answer for that.
In other words, it's about race, but they loved everything Trump is doing.
They called Barack Obama an imperial president because he was governing a lot by executive
orders simply because the Republicans were erecting a barrier from him governing because
they didn't want to cooperate with him.
They didn't want to give him any wins.
Well, Donald Trump is doing the same thing, not for the same reason.
He's doing the same thing simply because he's in the political process and he's changing
a lot of things through executive order, but they apply him.
They don't say he's governing by imperial decree like they did with Obama.
It's racist and it's racism oriented, but they believe in what they're championing.
They believe in Donald Trump and they're against everything that Obama stood for and when you
put the two side by side, there is no comparison.
Barack Obama was governing on behalf of the African people.
Donald Trump is doing things on behalf of Donald Trump and his empire.
I recognize the fact that America has slipped politically.
We've got this racist in the White House and until we get rid of him, by any means necessary,
you can take that any way you want.
I particularly don't care, but he needs to be gotten rid of and until we weather this
bad situation.
Yeah.
My view is this of coming from a different country is my hope is that we're going to
have a leader, someone who is intent on making our country better and I mean that for the
people.
So, it doesn't matter to me if that person happens to be black, white, Hindu, gay, straight,
whatever, just the best leader, the best person.
The person that's going to improve our schools, it's going to give healthcare so 80-year-olds
don't have to stand in Walmart.
Prison reform and drug reform so we don't have homelessness and addiction problems and
all this crime and I'm still waiting to see that.
It's been person after person that's wearing different color ties and may have short, maybe
this skin tone, that skin tone, whatever but it seems to be the same kind of person.
But I have to say, I'll be very blunt, when you start throwing out statements like Mexicans
are rapists and murderers, then yeah, you are definitely stepping over the line of decency
and diplomacy as well.
You're starting up to poke the bear as it were.
My yearning is to find an American and we are an immigrant culture.
Some like you said, historically we're forced here when you look far enough back but we're
a proud nation of men and women of all creeds and colors and we just need a good human being
to be proud of and to start overturning some of the things.
We are one of the most chronically ill nations on the planet yet we're one of the most affluent.
I mean, it's just such a disengagement of wealth and health and happiness and so I hope
that whoever we get next, left, right, independent, whoever it is, is someone who truly wants
to make this better and obviously with the racial tension address that side too because
that polarizing is not doing anything other than dividing this nation that we all adore.
But everything you just mentioned is supposed to be how the system works.
We're supposed to go for the best person that will bring the country together and work on
behalf of the people of this country.
I challenge anybody to show where Donald Trump has done any of that.
He hasn't.
Conversely, I challenge anybody to show where Barack Obama did just the opposite.
They can't show that, but we need to find somebody that will go back and do the right
thing.
Yeah, I couldn't agree more with that.
Absolutely.
I mean, that's it.
That's what the flag means.
It doesn't mean an individual.
It means the country and I think I've talked about this in many episodes, but it's making
our own community better and it's what you did in Colorado Springs Police Department
and it's what everyone that's listening to this podcast is doing, whether they're first
responders or in hospitals or corrections, whatever it is.
And I think all we ask is that the people in these government buildings do the same
as the men and women that are on the streets protecting them.
Yeah, but it's hard for the people in government buildings to do their job when you have somebody
at the head of the government who's forever attacking them for trying to do their job.
Yeah.
And the same down.
I mean, even internationally, my British brothers and sisters are constantly on strike.
I mean, they're being cut and the NHS is being attacked, which is their healthcare system
there, which I think is amazing.
So yeah, the people that are out there trying to make the world better are constantly fighting
an uphill battle and it should be the other way around.
They should be given the support of the infrastructure because they are the ones making the world
better.
They're the ones there running on people on their worst day.
So anyway, Ron, I want to go some wrap up questions so I can let you go.
I've been very generous with your time.
Your book is Black Klansmen.
I want to recommend it to everyone there.
You actually narrate the audio book as well, which is what I did.
I do want to do a warning though.
I was listening, I had my windows down and pulled into a gas station and then you start
reciting some of the things that some of the Klansmen said.
I'm like, oh shit, oh shit.
I'm raising up my windows and turning down the stereo.
So be careful when you listen to the audio book.
But yeah, it's an incredible book and I urge everyone to listen to that.
So firstly, where else can people find your book?
Barnes and Noble is the best place to find it.
Any book store in your community probably will have it and if not, you can get it on
Amazon and on Kindle.
Brilliant.
So another question I'd like to ask, is there another book, like someone else's book that
you love to recommend to people?
It can be about what we've discussed today or something completely different.
Yeah, if you want to read about the Ku Klux Klan, a good book about their rise to political
power and the parallels that's going on in America today is a book by Linda Gordon, G-O-R-D
and David O-N called The Second Coming of the KKK.
Brilliant, thank you.
Now again, with the movie, so Black Klansman is the movie and very well done.
And it's funny because there's some, when you listen to the book or read the book, you
realize there's some fictional elements in there as well but aside from the little frills
they put on to make it more attractive, I guess, to a filmgoer, it pretty much stays
true to your story.
I highly recommend people reading it and seeing the film.
Are there any movies that you love?
Malcolm X by Lee, I think it's probably his best movie, at least in my opinion, I think
it's his best movie, excluding Black Klansman.
I like a lot of movies and Malcolm X is probably one of the better ones that have ever been
made.
Yeah, that's an observation I've talked about a couple times on here as well with award
ceremonies is that Denzel Washington won an award for Training Day and for some reason,
the academy that year wanted to make it like a black actor year but it was crazy because
if you've ever seen Cry Freedom that he did about Steve Biko in South Africa and then
Malcolm X, to me, are far more powerful performances than Training Day.
So it's a shame that he didn't win an Academy for, in my opinion, much better performances.
Well, one thing I learned about my year in the Hollywood scene is that the Academy Award
does not necessarily go to the best movie.
It goes to the studio that puts up the best political barrage promoting their movie.
So the people that win, movies that win, are basically the ones that pump the most money
into promoting their movie.
So not too dissimilar from politics then.
I'll give you an example.
The movie Roma that was leading went into the movies.
A lot of people were saying it was going to win the movie.
It didn't, but it won all the awards leading up to the Academy.
Roma was spending 30 million on their ad campaign for, I mean, the studio was spending 30 million
on their ad campaign for Roma.
Black Plasmon wasn't spending probably half of that.
That's a huge amount of money.
That sounds like the budget for the movie itself.
In some cases, it is.
Well, then on the movie theme, what about documentaries?
Are there any documentaries that you love?
I recently saw Kobe Bryant's Dear Basketball.
I loved it.
Brilliant.
Yeah.
Rest in peace.
All right.
Well, I've got one to suggest to you then.
I think you would love 13th, 13th.
It's Ava DuVernay on our legal system here.
They talk about Birth of a Nation in that documentary, but it's extremely well done
and very, very powerful.
It talks a lot about slavery into the prisons.
I think you'd probably love that one.
All right.
So the next question, and I asked Jay this and you were one of the people that he told
me about.
Is there a person that you would recommend to come on this podcast as a guest to speak
to the first responders of military of the world?
Jerry Flowers.
Flowers?
Flowers.
Jerry, what's his background?
Jerry was an Oklahoma City inspector detective.
He was one of the first responders at the Oklahoma City bombing and he worked gangs with me,
a good friend of mine.
And he retired from the Oklahoma City Police Department and became head of the Oklahoma
Bureau of Agriculture investigators, they call them the cattle cops.
And he retired from there and became a marshal in Oklahoma.
And he recently retired from there.
And to be honest with you, I don't know what he's doing right now, but Jerry's got over
40 years in law enforcement and he's still going strong.
Wow.
Hopefully he's resting now after all that.
My God.
Yeah, I would love to connect with him if you were able to connect us up.
It sounds like an incredible story.
And I had Chris Fields on the show who was, when you think about the Oklahoma bombing,
there was that one very tragically iconic picture of a fireman holding a baby who had
passed.
That was Chris and he came on the show about a year ago.
Was it the headless baby?
Wasn't headless though, but she had passed away.
They pulled her from the rubble, but she didn't make it.
So it's a very, very sad story.
Jerry tells the story of going through the rubble and the first responder picking up
a baby and carrying him.
And when they finally got safety, looking at the baby and looked down and there was
no head.
Oh, God.
Yeah, because there was a whole kindergarten on the, or daycare on the ground floor.
Yeah.
It was awful.
Awful.
All right.
Well, one more question before we make sure everyone knows where to find you.
What do you do to decompress when you want to relax these days?
I read a lot and I write.
I'm working on a follow-up to my book, about 50 pages into it.
And it keeps me grounded.
Excellent.
Well, please let me know when it's ready.
I will definitely let everyone listening know that the new one is out.
All right.
Well, I want to thank you so much.
Where can people find you online if they want to reach out?
Do you have social media or website?
Oh, not really.
You can contact me at Ron at AOL.com.
All right.
Well, Ron, I want to thank you so much.
I know this weird Englishman kind of came out of nowhere and asked you if you do an
hour and a half conversation with him.
But your story is so powerful.
Your perspective is unique and very raw and honest.
But it needs to be heard.
We hear so much about certain groups that are creating a huge amount of death and destruction
in our country at the moment.
But this is an area where we don't hear as much.
But I mean, when you read the paper closely, it does happen a lot.
So it is a topic that needs to be talked about.
And then the irony is the story through your perspective, there's an amount of humor to
it as well, like the ridiculousness of the Aeolian of the clan too.
But I just want to thank you so much for being so generous with your time and allowing me
to kind of hear your journey from your perspective.
No worries.
Thanks a lot.
No worries.
Thanks a lot.