NSPR’s Andre Byik first connected with James Cook for a story he was researching about new allegations of excessive force at the Butte County Jail.
Cook is a civil rights attorney at the high-profile Law Offices Of John L. Burris out of Oakland, and he's representing an inmate at the jail who claims deputies assaulted him after he suffered from a seizure.
As they talked about the jail case, Byik learned that Cook grew up in Minneapolis and he was in the city at the time police killed George Floyd on Memorial Day. Byik and Cook recently caught up for a longer talk about race, policing and what he thinks can be done to effect change.
Here are highlights from part one of their conversation. You can also play audio from the interview at the top of the page.
Interview Highlights
Here's how Cook says he learned about the killing of George Floyd.
So I was here in Minneapolis. I heard about it, like most of our community did, on Facebook. And the news hadn't picked it up yet. So it's on Facebook. And it was kind of going around that way. I learned about it that night. That was a Monday night I believe. And then you know, by the next day, by the next morning, I went up to the area — 30th and Chicago where it took place. I'm not too far from there. I'm about a mile or two from 30th and Chicago. And I was able to go up there the next morning. And I was going up there just to kind of check things out. And even if any of the family members were up there just to, you know, sort of offer some advice, not for pay or anything, but just advice on what the next steps would be regarding the lawsuit, but none of the family members was around at the time, it was mostly just people from the community venting and talking and, you know, a few journalists. It hadn't become that big of a story yet.
I asked Cook for his opinion on why the story didn't immediately gain traction.
I think at the time, the officers said what they always said — they said that he resisted arrest. They always say, every single time, this person resisted arrest. It's always a decedent story versus the officer story. They almost always charge the person with whatever penal code constitutes resisting arrest. In California it's PC 148. I don't know what it is right off hand in Minnesota. But if Floyd had lived, and they just hurt him badly, they would have said that he resisted arrest, and charged him with that particular penal code.
So for about 12 hours, as usual, the media, probably most people hadn't really questioned it. But that video circulated, and the public was able to see it and question what the officers were saying, because you had visual information, you had visual confirmation. That girl, she took the video, she stayed on it the whole time. So you see nine minutes, basically. Most likely had his windpipe crushed. But you could see where he urinated, and that's one of those signs that somebody's dying or or close to dying. So I think that that video basically contradicted everything the officer said.
That video showing how Floyd was killed with an officer's knee to his neck has sparked nationwide unrest, with protests in all 50 states. I asked Cook why the response to this killing of a black person by police has captured the public's attention in ways other killings haven't. He says it's a convergence of things, including ongoing public debate and new awareness. And he didn't discount the activism of former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick.
I mean, you have black folks, right? Of course, we know this has been happening to us for 400 years. And then you have sort of progressives that aren't black, let's say progressive white people, you have progressive minorities, other minorities, other races that know that, in general, that yeah, these things have happened. You're Asian, definitely you're Japanese, you know damn good and well. You're Chinese, you know, as the country was founded and, you know, the Chinese Exclusion Act, what they did to your people out west. Filipinos, anyone, right? Or Latinos — you know that anything that happens to black people happens to you. And you also know that you have a president who has used you as a political football and has actively fomented discrimination against you. You have progressive white people that are, they're millennials or they're people in my generation, Generation X, who grew up, you know, especially Generation X, in sort of the first wave of integrated schools — they know that these things are happening. They know that there's inequalities. But you know, the larger group, they just didn't know.
Then you had a big, huge debate that was sparked by Colin Kaepernick kneeling, and huge debate because, you know, sports as a microcosm of everything that happens to society, that put it in people's face and people are like, yeah, we don't believe it. Probably the reason why [the response has been] so much bigger is because you see what happened — see what happened from beginning to end. And even though the police department tried to give us that redacted tape, I mean, even if you're a white person, an older white person who doesn't have those experiences, or a younger white person who just, you know, has never really been in an integrated environment or not in as modern of an environment, where you've had friends or you've known a person who's known a person that these things have happened to, or that has had to deal with racism that way. Now you've seen it. Now you have confirmation. Now you know, Colin Kaepernick was right. And now you're kind of like, damn, you know, all along. I, I didn't listen.
And then you see the riots and it’s kind of like they're saying, 'Do you believe us now?' They wrote that on the precinct as it was burning. 'Can you hear us now?"
Minneapolis is a different city than the city that I grew up in. Really diverse. The neighborhood is really diverse. Like, I speak Somali now. I mean a little bit. I can tell my neighbors, ‘Turn down the music. Throw away the garbage. I'm JB,’ you know, that type of thing. [...] And I can speak Spanish almost fluently. It's a different city. So you have a large group of racial minorities, you have the Somalis that are discriminated against, still based on 9/11, large Latino population, and I think that attitude too, as well as lots of progressive white people on the order of Seattle and San Francisco. You also have a large, that nobody talks about, large Hmong, Asian population. It's been marginalized. And then on top of that, there's still a large, huge, white population that lives below the poverty line.
In regard to the rioting that took place in the early days of the protests, he says he's torn.
On the one hand it's messed up, like people lost their jobs, I hate to see the businesses burn. You know, why do it in Midtown Minneapolis? Like go to Edina, go to [...], go to Minnetonka.
But on the other hand, the rioting was necessary, because they would have never arrested that cop. And we all know that. [...] They would not have arrested [Officer Derek] Chauvin if the third precinct hadn't burned down. And I can't say that I wasn't happy seeing that. sad to see that. I mean, I see the cops, I make my living doing it, and I know damn well, not all cops are bad. And we need police and we need the order, and I think it's really stupid that the Minneapolis City Council is voting to defund them. That's BS. You should vote just to make sure that the critical milestones and training and those types of things are met. I'll circle back around to that, but we need the police. We just don't need certain cops to kill black people or kill minorities, or kill poor white people and get away with it.
I asked Cook to take me through the work he's focused on these days. He says he's been giving interviews like the one he granted me. He's also still working on his cases, including cases of alleged police misconduct. He also noted a question people often pose to him.
People always ask that question, ‘but what can I do?’ Whether it's what can I do as a white person, or what can I do period, and I say the same thing. I always say, talk about it. Now that you've seen it, talk about it with people. And talk it out, because that's the problem is people don't want to talk, like basically they go into their political corners, into their political universe, their Fox News or MSNBC [...] Talk about it with people that don't agree with you and talk it out and try to talk civilly. That's number one.
Number two, I always tell people don't get out of jury duty. Serve on the jury. Now you've seen it. Now you know. Question. Question authority. If you're on a jury or in a grand jury, and you think that somebody's going to be wrongfully convicted, hang it. Exercise your own independent thought. You can hang the jury. You have that power.
If you're on a jury in a civil case, where, you know, someone wants to be compensated because they're racially discriminated against at work, or they were sexually harassed or they were wrongfully terminated and they're telling you that the underlying reason was based on race, don't just automatically assume that the person's playing the race card, Convince the other jurors to award this person. That's a way to make policy. Because the only thing that lawyers think about when they get into a case is what's the end game? What's the jury going to say in this case? That's what we think about. So hang the jury.
If you're in a civil case where the question is whether or not you're going to award officers, you're going to terminate them, and you want a policy decision made, award them, convince the other jurors or hang the jury. You have that power, like people have the power, but generally, the problem is the people on the juries still don't look like you and me. They aren't progressive white people. You know, they get stricken. They aren't black folks. They aren't Latinos. They aren't any of the other racial minorities. And if they are, the very few that go on the juries, they get stricken.
Cook also raised another way that he believes could influence police policies and practices nationwide — extensive data collection.
Bottom line, data collection would be a game changer. That would enable us to do what's called our Monell allegations, that there is a pattern in practice. We can establish a pattern in practice. And we can basically not only sue the officers that did wrongdoing, but we could sue the administrators that did wrongdoing. And that would change a lot of things, because we hit them financially and we'd also be able to dictate how to move forward with the pattern of practice.
But right now, every time we start litigation, the pattern and practice, the Monell argument, always gets stricken from the lawsuit because there's no way we can really establish a pattern and practice without doing discovery, and can't get in the case and do discovery until, you know, so on and so forth. So we aren't able to make those changes. But we would be able to — with just data collection, if we had that like nationwide, but you know, municipality to municipality, so forth and so forth.
I asked Cook about the type of data he'd like to see collected.
Anytime police make contact stops, use of force, race. And we collect data regarding charge, and then data regarding whether or not the charges were dropped, or stuck with them. Collect data based on the use of force and how much force was used on the continuum. I mean those things alone would spark huge reforms, I believe. No matter who's in the administration right now. And more so if we didn't just do it in just California, but if it was nationwide, part of the police post standards, police officers training standards. I mean, that would go a long way. Make it more transparent.
Because the big move was body cameras, and not all departments enacted body cameras across the country. And then look, let's face it, the body cameras, if you look at the general orders, that is the policies and procedures and the rules surrounding body cameras, you know, they're loose, and officers, for some reason, whenever the body camera footage doesn't benefit the officers, somehow the camera wasn't working or got turned off. Or you know, like in one of my recent cases, they claim, ah it wasn't turned off, but it just so happens two of the officers that make contact with my client, somehow their body camera footage got turned off at the same time, and all of a sudden did not start until after the ambulance came. That's the kind of BS that happens. But officers should be fired if their body cameras weren't working. That's the bottom line. And we can't just rely on body cameras footage, we gotta rely on data. So that's part of the policy.
Cook told me that issues related to police misconduct include race, but also class, government spending priorities and housing. He says all play a role in determining the type of police response a neighborhood can expect.
I'm a black attorney. As black attorneys, we always tell people like Mr. Burris says, we don't have the luxury of our white colleagues to say, ‘I'm specializing in one area of law.’ Yes, we're known for police misconduct, but we got to do every single type of law. Because black folks come to the unicorns, the one or two black attorneys. And so do Latinos. Latinos come to us, because as few black attorneys as there are, there's fewer Latino attorneys in the Bay Area. There's more Asian attorneys. But I mean, the Bay Area's got a huge Asian population. And again, there's subsets of the Asian community. So that's taken care of, but they still — poor Asian people always deal with police misconduct cases, and they come to us.
In a place like Chico, or you know, start going up further Butte County, all those places, you got a lot of poor white people. They come to us too. And again, like I keep saying, whether it's Chico, Redding, Anderson, going up the list of cities where I've done these cases, Eureka, you can tie the lack of housing, the underfunded education, to militarized police responses.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity. Click the “play” button to listen to the entire interview.