171: What if you saw inside the belly of the beast? 37:52

This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services. Today's episode marks the first of our new three-part happening series, This Is America, featuring Dr. Michael Datcher. One thing to note about today's episode, when this was recorded I had recently switched to using a new recording platform due to COVID, and the audio quality suffered slightly as a result. Not

Not too much, but please bear in mind as you listen. Also, next week will be the final new episode before a three-week winter break starting December 22nd, in which we will be rebroadcasting three standout episodes from the back catalog, all centering around stories of people involved in life-threatening chases. So stay tuned, and thank you for listening.

Looking down the barrel of a gun is devastating. I mean, I was shaken to my core. I was just very afraid. Although I was a kid, it's very clear that there was lots of hate. And I was kind of frozen. I kind of froze, actually. From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein. You're listening to This Is Actually Happening. Episode 171. Happenings Volume 3. This Is America.

Part 1: What if you saw inside the belly of the beast?

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To start listening, download the Amazon Music app for free or go to amazon.com slash ad-free podcasts. That's amazon.com slash ad-free podcasts to catch up on the latest episodes without the ads. Check out our recently completed six-part series, The 82% Modern Stories of Love and Family, ad-free with your Prime membership. My childhood was rooted in Long Beach, California.

My mother adopted me actually as an infant and raised our family in the early parts of my life in California from age 10 on. So she was a single mother raising three children of whom I was the youngest. There was no biological father to speak of, nor was there an adopted father. My mother was both mother and father.

So I didn't know my biological parents because my biological mother at the time when she was 16 was sexually assaulted. And as a result of that assault, became pregnant and gave birth to me when she turned 17 and then subsequently gave me up for adoption when I turned a month old to the woman who raised me. There was no biological father to speak of. I met my biological mother when I was around seven and spent a summer with her.

So my family upbringing was based in many ways on a Southern Black culture. My mother was from Alabama originally, so we were raised, although in California, raised with kind of a Southern ethos. Lots of yes ma'am, no ma'am. I respected my mother. There was discipline and lots of love and hugs. So very loving family. My mother, she already had two children. She was a before say at a young age.

So my entree into her home meant she had to take a second job. So all of my childhood, my mother, as far as I can remember, has always worked two jobs, a full-time job and some part-time job just to make all the ends meet as a single mom. So my home life was very loving, very close to my mother. She was essentially my hero as she was for my brother and my older sister.

My mother is an avid reader, so I began to really love reading. Then also, she was a great storyteller in that African-American vernacular sense of being from the South. I was raised around this woman who was very charismatic and just a great storyteller.

Long Beach has a very strong kind of sports tradition. So I grew up basically playing sports and excelling in school. So I played basketball, football, baseball. I ran track and cross country. I was a scholar athlete, essentially. So on the east side of Long Beach, where I'm from, there is a very unique kind of culture to Long Beach itself, in part because of its dynamic between the races.

In the 1970s and 80s, there was an influx of African-Americans and Latinos who were populated primarily on the east side by a school called Long Beach Poly, which became this really powerful sports and educational institution. So Poly High School has sent more players, for example, to the NFL than any high school in the country. Also dynamic basketball teams and baseball teams and track teams.

And so Long Beach had this really interesting sports culture, very, very competitive, which gave each neighborhood its own sense of identity.

At the same time, there was a very famous program at Polly called PACE, P-A-C-E, which was a magnet program for super smart kids. And so one of the most interesting parts of Long Beach is that this school, in a primarily black and brown neighborhood, because of PACE, white families would send their kids to Long Beach Polly. And so it gave it kind of a really interesting culture. I was raised across the street from Polly High School.

The other aspect of Long Beach culture on the East Side was that it was a very long-standing, both Latino, called Latinx now, but then Latino and African-American gang culture. So on the Latinx side, the major gang was called the East Side Longos, L-O-N-G-S. The Longos, these were probably pronounced kind of Mexican-American gangs.

The African-American gang set were the Crips. And there was a series, we called them sets or like subgroups of the Crips. So my neighborhood was known as the Insane Crips, which is the Crip set right by Long Beach Poly. There's also the Rolling 20s, meaning the streets that ran from 20th to 29th. That part of Long Beach's east side was really controlled by this gang set called the Rolling 20s.

Gang culture was really prominent in the neighborhood. And the rolling 20s in the NSA and Crips were very, very cool. They were, in fact, always modeled after like 1970s black exploitation pimps. If you think about Snoop Dogg,

That personality is the typical Long Beach gangster who's a roll of 20 or an SM crew. That's how the guys were. The guys were super, super, super cool, seemingly very laid back, but in a moment could switch that low-key laid back personality to being super violent.

So those were, these young men were like the celebrities in the neighborhood. And they almost all played sports. So Snoop Dogg played for, I think it was Polly High School for a second. So our neighborhood gangsters were these really superbly charismatic young men.

And they were super good at macking, but we call it macking or verbal dexterity was a major part of the Long Beach culture. And so as an impressionable, you know, 11, 12, 13 year old kid, that's what we saw and looked up to quite a bit in the neighborhood. Many of these black and brown kids who were smart black and brown kids from different schools were essentially bused to this magnet school, NUCCA, which is trying to diversify its population of students.

So I got bused to basically a white school between sixth grade and eighth grade. The difficulty of living and being raised on the east side of Long Beach, which was an almost all black and brown neighborhood, to being bused to a neighborhood called El Dorado Estates, a very affluent part of Long Beach, to a school called Nuka. The difficulty was the culture shock. So the first day of sixth grade, you

The bus came through all these neighborhoods, picked me up in my neighborhood, and we were transported to Newcomb. On that first day, when the bus pulls up to the school, literally the young white kids stood on the front of the school just kind of gawking at us and kind of pointing at us like, who are these kids? So initially it was very troubling and there was definitely some getting used to.

What I saw was how different people were living and how well resourced they were and the feeling of relative safety. You know, people leave their bikes out on the lawn. There was an overarching sense of just safety, which I really appreciated and found interesting.

And also there was an understanding that, wow, I'm poor. I don't really know I was poor because I was just living in the other case of my neighborhood. But I realized right away that, wow, I'm poor. I don't recall many conversations about it with my friends who were black and brown, who were bused as I was. What I recall was just how people were different, how they seemed safe and

You know, part of what happens in many urban environments is very intense when there is, you know, the prospect of violence is all around. And so you have to basically have your, be on your guard. So as a kid in Long Beach, in our neighborhood, everyone who I knew, I mean, all the men, men and boys, everyone walked around. This may sound weird, but everyone walked around with their fist balls.

right? Like, including me. It took a long time to break that habit. You walked around with your fist balled up just to, A, to be ready for any would-be confrontation, but also to signal that you were ready to throw an act. That's simply a manifestation of the type of intensity of East Side of Long Beach. It was very intense. A lot of hyper-masculine behavior.

In that context, although it was people walked around with their fistball and it was certainly very aggressive, it was also really, in many ways, really beautiful. And so to move to this white or to at least go to school in this white neighborhood, the people weren't as lively. They weren't as charismatic. They weren't as interested. The white culture wasn't as alive.

So Long Beach, along with having this really great sports tradition and this kind of gang culture, there was also this extremely aggressive and racist police force. The Long Beach Police Department is notorious, certainly in the 1970s, notorious for all types of abuse, especially as related to African-American men. I'm talking about lots of physical altercations, lots of bullying actually by the police.

The police would routinely call Black men and boys the N-word. I witnessed that many, many, many times, experienced it many times, even as a young boy. I also experienced the police routinely stopping Black boys in my neighborhood, oftentimes teenagers, and beating them, kicking them with billy clubs. I mean, complete beatdowns. That was super, super, super normal.

It was crazy. I mean, the amount of I'm trying to imagine these are these are public servants who are routinely calling citizens the inner world. I'm talking and the disrespect was extraordinary. What is not oftentimes spoken about is just the day to day, the routine disrespect that police officers spew at taxpaying citizens like myself.

Oftentimes, it was very clear that they were operating out of their own type of machismo culture, because there is such a strong gang culture in Long Beach. It seemed to me in particular that the police saw themselves as a kind of gang.

And because oftentimes black men are defined as the icons of both black masculinity and black sexuality, it seemed as if the police enjoyed being able to dominate, intimidate these tough black guys. It was their way to make themselves feel like

stronger, more masculine men. Of course, they had a gun with them and the law behind them as they beat these black boys up. But that seemed to be this really weird gang-like mentality of the Long Beach Police Department.

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Someone had apparently taken two or three of these machines and tried to break them open to get the change out of the machines. And we shook them. We still heard the change inside these machines. So we tried to get the change out ourselves. After four or five minutes, these three or four police cars rolled up like full speed. And the police closest to me jumped out of his car and pulled his gun out and pointed right at my face and said, freeze. Freeze.

So my first time seeing or having a gun pointed at me was by the police as a 10-year-old kid. Looking down the barrel of a gun is devastating. I mean, I was shaken to my core. I was just very afraid. Although I was a kid, it's very clear that there was lots of hate. And I was kind of frozen. I kind of froze, actually.

I think I was too young to process the level of fear in a complicated way when the police pulled the gun on me. I was just terrified. I didn't think about, I could die. I was just completely, I was, I went into kind of like a stage of shock. It was like, whoa! You know, not surprising because that's how the police were in Long Beach, but terrifying nonetheless.

And they eventually arrested us on the 10th, put us in the back of the car all the way to the police station. One of the cops who was in the passenger seat told N-word jokes. What do you call it? N-word, who does this and this and that. The other cop was just trying to ignore him. He didn't want to participate in that type of language. He didn't stop the cop from saying those words. But that was the culture. We were children.

very obvious, aggressive, racist, maniacal, sick racism. I mean, really disturbing. And that was just typical. So I didn't view myself as a bad kid. I was good in school. I was an athlete. People respected me. I was just a kid, which is why I knew the police were on my side because they didn't see any of that. They just saw the person they wanted to call inward. And that's how they treated the black people in my neighborhood, very disrespectfully.

My experience as a kid, as a 10-year-old, 11-year-old kid, was, again, born out also as a young man. My most troubling experience in Cerritos, which, again, this is Southern California, small suburban neighborhood, very aggressive with Black people. In a one-mile trip to the mall, this is a true story, we were stopped by the police three times. Told to get out of the car, cylinder curb, inward, the whole thing. Three times.

We were so traumatized and so upset. We didn't go to the mall, but we just got back in the car. We just left, went back home. So that was the culture of the Long Beach police in the surrounding areas. And as a result, the young black man in particular really hated the police. And that hate was predicated on fear.

A part of that fear was predicated, or hatred, I should say, was predicated on the fear and the shame that was attached to it, meaning that we were powerless to stop that behavior because they were the police. They had guns and the law behind them. As you truly know, assault against a police officer is defined as any physical touching not wanted by a police officer. So if the boys were actually beat up and then arrested, they would be charged with assaulting a police officer.

At times, they would just beat the boys up and then leave them beat up right in front of me. I've seen it. Inward, this, beat down, some billy clubs. That was common. They called that, as I learned later on, when I became a young man, they called that blue fun, as in the color blue fun.

And that created a sense of shame because these really tough, bright, charismatic young boys, at times young men, were powerless to stop these state agents from beating us up.

Certainly, as I reflect back on it as a grown man, there was a lot of shame that we were unable to address the type of abuse that we were suffering under the police. I mean, you did not want to call the police. If you needed help, you did your best to solve the problem yourself. And as a last resort, you called the police. And when the police would come, as a child, what I saw, the few times I saw people calling the police for help, they were so disrespectful to those in need of help, but very insulting and demeaning.

So we have a phrase in the Black community, it's called one time. And one time is short for the phrase, you know, one time when the police did this, or one time the police. So we call these one time stories because people have so many anecdotal stories about being stopped by the police. I mean, those stories are so pervasive.

Black people, in my experience, aren't anti-police. We actually need the police in certain types of neighborhoods where people are more distressed and under greater pressure. So we actually at times need the police. We aren't anti-police. We're anti-bad police and bad police culture, racist police culture. The police do not have to act the way the police act. That needs to be addressed.

There's a program in California that the police began here in Los Angeles over a decade ago now. Because in certain neighborhoods, there's a no snitch culture where if you see a crime, people are encouraged not to tell the police. So the police see that as an impediment to getting crime solved. So there was an ad campaign that tried to address snitching.

At the same time, everyone knows, you know, anything about black neighborhoods and about how cops operate in black neighborhoods. The so-called blue wall of silence is an anti-snitch culture. In fact, every time that I've seen the police act unlawfully, there's been a witness cop there.

If the police took their oath seriously about upholding the law, seeing another federal officer engaging in racist or violent behavior towards a taxpaying citizen, if that police simply would tell their superiors and report on their coworkers, it would stop.

If a police officer beat up a random black kid and knew or was afraid their partner would tell, that behavior would stop overnight. But there's a no snitching policy among the police. They call it the blue wall of silence. So oftentimes, at least in Long Beach on the east side, the police were trying to intimidate and humiliate black men.

From my perspective as a Roman man, it seems predicated on the idea that because black men would be icons of masculinity, it made the officer feel more like, quote unquote, more masculine to intimidate or to humiliate a black man. It gave them a sense of extra power. If you can dominate another alpha male, it made you feel like more of an alpha male.

There's also a very strong connection between sexuality and racism. Again, because of the history of America,

There were a series of miscegenation laws, anti-racial mixing laws in terms of sexual behavior in the South. It was illegal for Black men to engage in sexual behavior with white women. Although, as we all know, because of the history of slavery, many, many white men were engaged in sexual behavior with Black women because they were raping their property. They were slaves, taking advantage of the power structure in America, which allowed white men to rape Black women with impunity.

It's really disturbing, but really, I think, insightful book called 100 Years of Lynching. This book has 80, 90 first-person accounts of lynchings. In almost every single case, they cut the man's penis off. And why do that during a lynching? So the tie between sexuality and race is longstanding, pervasive, and very troubling. So you have all of that coming into the mix

with cops trying to humiliate young black boys. So when I got to college, I went to UC Berkeley as an undergrad. I got to college as I was 18. And after these years of just craziness, we had our campus, we had UCPD, so the Berkeley Campus Cops.

And so when I would see these cops on campus, I would just, in not a smart way, I would, we call it mad dog. I would stare. I would stare at them as I walked by, you know, scowl at them and look at them all crazy. You can tell they were like, why is he doing that? I was being weird. I was being actually weird. You know, at times they would scowl back. That was really over the top. But I had such hatred by my experience as a young black man of the police.

I was getting older and was becoming conscious of what I experienced, how wrong that was. And when I got to college, I was, of course, older. I was a young man. I thought, wow, that's so wrong. I was a freshman. Of course, I began to have friends and colleagues who were not black, who were young white men. And I began to engage them.

I had met a couple of cats in class, probably in a study group. I liked these guys. They were cool guys. People got along great. And somehow our discussion turned to the police or something. I'm not sure how we got on this topic. And I just kind of got caught up in telling my story. So what I said to them was I told them a one-time story. I was like, yeah, you know how, man, one time, you know, the police stop you and, you know, and they beat you up and they, you know, and they're like, what?

Oh, yeah, you know how the police stop you, man, and they pull you out of the car and put you on the curb, man. They soak you. In my case, call you the N-word, man. They beat you up. They're like, what are you talking about? You know how the police stop you. You know how they stop you, right? Get you out of the car, beat you up. No, I don't know that. That's illegal, first of all, man. That's illegal. And I was like, what? And the police can't stop you. You should tell them to stop. They can't do that. And I was like, are you kidding? They're like, that's against the law. They can't beat you up.

You should have just said, stop. It's against the law. I mean, it was extraordinary to me that that's how I actually learned that it was against the law. It's the true story. I thought it was legal for the police to stop you and beat you up. I thought that was a part of policing.

I can tell that the story I was sharing about my police interaction with them was so far removed from their experience of the police where they can say, hey, stop. Officer, that's against the law. Stop that. It was so far removed from their white male experience that my black life experience vis-a-vis the police was literally unbelievable. My life was literally beyond belief.

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That really upset me, though. It kind of set me off a little bit. So I got even more crazy, I felt like, when I would see these cops. Because I learned that what they were doing was illegal. I mean, it's really like Mad Dog. So stare down, scout these cops on campus. I mean, it was a problem. And I couldn't really help myself. It was kind of weird, you know? I couldn't stop it.

And then one day, I recall this one day, I was somewhere and I was walking somewhere on campus. And I just totally like mad dog this cop, staring him down. He mad dogged me right back. Our eyes just locked. We had to stare down for like 10 seconds. It was ridiculous. And then it kind of scared me when I broke the stare and kept walking, probably going to class. I thought, I have a problem. I have an actual problem. This is dangerous. This guy's got a gun. This guy has a gun. I don't have a gun.

So we have an entity at Berkeley called a CSO, which is the acronym for a community service officer. And their main job is to be the students who provide the so-called walk service after dark. And they also, of course, will report crimes if they saw them. They were like junior cops.

I actually applied for a job as a CSO, as a community service officer. So the structure of the interview was that there was a sergeant, a regular officer, and then a CSO who was a student. So they called me in and the sergeant was speaking. He said, OK, Michael, thanks for coming out, for applying for the job. So tell me why you wanted to be a CSO.

I said, well, I was raised on the east side of Long Beach. And in my experience, the police were racist and beat up black people. And I want to see, is it true that all police are this way? Or are there different types of police? And the sergeant stopped me. He just stopped me. And I was like, wait, what? I'm not done talking. You know what I mean? No, no. So I want you to go outside. And I was like, oh, this is racist. I can't even tell my story. I'm not getting a fair chance to apply for a CSR.

It was ridiculous. I was all mad. He said, just go in the hallway and don't leave them. So I went out to the hallway and I sat down. And about 10 minutes passed, that sergeant was going to come back in. And so I came back in. I sat down and I was a little perplexed. And they were like, you're hired. I was like, what? You're hired. That day I got hired.

So the transformation of working for the police department at UCPD was slow. I was like an undercover agent because I didn't go in with the intent of talking to people. And it was true of what I said in the interview. I was first high. I wanted to learn. I want to see who these cops were as people. That was my intention. So I was like an undercover agent.

But I use my access to ask lots of questions. So people, you know, people like to be asked questions like how they became officers, how they view this, how they view that, how they handle this situation, this conflict. Being a cop is very difficult. It is a very difficult job. That's one thing that I saw right away, that being a cop is super hard.

Your job is to solve people's problems that they cannot solve on their own because they're so complicated. They actually call you to solve your own grown-up problems.

And to do that, having your job be to solve problems that are oftentimes very complicated and at times involve violence, to have to do that job with your own insecurities, with your own fear, with your own problems in your own marriage, with your own problems with your own kids, having to deal with your own life, having to put that in a compartment and go solve someone else's problems. That's a tough job.

So I worked as a CSO, a community service officer for 13 months. I was inside the belly, literally, of the beast. Worked every day with police officers, got dressed with them. You know, we all dressed together. We were in the same area.

So I was talking about their lives, about how they became police officers, about their families. Pretty much all the cops who I came into contact with, I tried to interview them because I really was trying to deal with my own background and trying to learn about these officers, to be honest, because I had such a bad experience. I was around them all the time for 13 months. And so I talked to a lot of the cops

And it was true. I mean, some of the cops, clearly, you know, absolutely racist. You know, with me, they try to shroud it sound. But of course, you're around a lot. You hear the jokes, you hear the things they say. Certainly there were those cops. It's true. But oftentimes the cops are just regular guys. It's just a job. They're just trying to make money, take care of their family, get home safe, see their kids, you know, live their life, be a cop. All those cops were...

sons of cops. It was a family tradition. They wanted to be cops because they were cops. Some of the cops had gone to Berkeley, but wanted to be the chief. They were just guys with a job. And it helped me to really process a lot of my feelings about the police and to admit to myself that, listen, all cops are not bad. That helped me to really heal a lot. It really did.

And I kind of got over, yeah, I got over that, the anger that I felt, you know, I have much more nuanced perspectives.

The other thing that I saw in terms of a major kind of personality trend was almost all the cops who I talked to who come out in different ways were control freaks. They had issues with control and wanting to control themselves. Maybe they had been bullied. Maybe their parents were overbearing. That seemed to be a very common trait. Like they, the cops who I met, were into control.

In this job, we had two channels. We had our own CSO channel, and that was channel two. Channel one was a regular police line. So if there was a crime or we saw something that was untoward, we would switch channels. Channel one, hey, we would call in. So one day, for example, I saw a kid, I saw a person breaking into a building. He was committing a robbery. So I turned on the channel one and I called it in.

Police came, stopped the guy in progress. And cops were like, wow, good call, Dancer. Wow, good job. So I stopped the crime. One of my little highlights of my CSO life that gave me lots of respect because I stopped the crime in progress. These cops, they liked me. I worked hard. I was responsible. I was on top of my job. So they gave me entree into their lives, maybe in a way that other CSOs didn't have.

So, you know, learning information, acquiring information, the anger began to dissipate. And it was replaced by really a real curiosity, like who are these people were, you know? And the end result was that the cops were just people. Police culture is racist. It's predicated on a last-versus-them mentality. And if you're going to work in that racist culture, is it going to impact you? Certainly, yes. Does it mean that you're racist? No.

But is it hard to resist not at times going along or not co-signing that racism? Yes. Cops are definitely a game. That's what it's about. They're definitely a game. There definitely is the code of silence. That's a real thing. The code of silence, what I call the cop no snitching rule, that's certainly a real thing. It's a lot up close.

Folks in the military, very similar. When you go to the military and you're in basic training, so during times of war, in order to get someone to kill someone, the leadership has to get you to fire, shoot to kill. That's your job.

And as part of that indoctrination, what they do, they break you down first. They shave your head, you're a recruit, they insult you, yes sir, no sir, they break you down, they build you up to a soldier, which means to a killing machine. And a killing machine can't be thinking about the person they're about to shoot has a family, has a child at home, and simply is trying to fight for their own human rights. So they, at times, they will give the enemy a pejorative nickname. It was Japs in the

in the Second World War. In the Iraq War, they called the Arab people, the folks who were Iraqi, they called them San N-words. They used language to demonize the people. And when people are demonized, it's easier to kill them. And so what the cops do is that they demonize Black people or brown people. And the N-word is the assembly part of the language, or they're animals. And they humiliate and demonize because that makes it easier to rob Black people of their rights.

And so that culture, that's a problem. Absolutely. Individually, I've been able to do a better job at seeing cops as individuals while also recognizing that they're a part of a culture that is absolutely racist. And frankly, they're more inclined to be impacted by it because it's hard not to be impacted.

So as a grown man who has two daughters, who has many Black people in my life, and brown people in my life, ultimately, my perspective has evolved. So I live in Los Angeles County. I've been heavily involved in the Black Lives Matter movement, writing about it, certainly take to the streets, protesting against post-brutality.

And at the same time, I try to balance it out with not demonizing anyone, including me. So I'm a runner. So this morning I run, you know, six days a week I run in my neighborhood. And when I see a cop, I wave at him. Because the cops in my neighborhood, they want them to know who I am. So I wave at them. And what do the cops do? They wave back at me. So now, this guy who's been harassed by the police most of my life, I now wave at the cops.

And that was a decision. At first, it felt really weird. I felt uncomfortable doing it. But you know what? I'm going to do this because especially I've been going to these protests and I've been protesting literally at the police station. I want to balance it out so that even though I am against racism, I'm against cops who kill people, I'm against cops who kill unarmed black men, I

I don't want to slip back into demonizing all the police. So when I wave at the police, that's a physical gesture of my evolution of how I feel now. That's my way. It's a very small thing, but it reminds me not to demonize. Also, I'll talk to the police. I'll make myself ask them questions. In Venice, we have the police have horses here. So my youngest daughter, and she likes animals.

So I make it a point to take my daughter over there, have her talk to the police. Because my daughter, both my kids, but my baby, you know, she's aware of what's happening. She knows that the police kill white people, but also wants to be able to, you know, be able to engage the police, see those individuals, you know, my oldest daughter as well. And, you know, we try to not demonize people in our family.

As an adult who has children and is concerned about how they're also watching my example, that's where I stand. I try to aggressively attack policing that doesn't involve police killing Black people or disrespecting Black people or anyone else. It's do your job. We know it's a tough job. At the same time, I aggressively try to work on myself not to demonize. Today's episode featured scholar and novelist Dr. Michael Datcher.

You can find out more about him and his work at MichaelDatcher.com. That's Datcher, D-A-T-C-H-E-R, dot com. ♪

From Wondery, you're listening to This Is Actually Happening. If you love what we do, please rate and review the show. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, the Wondery app, or wherever you're listening right now. You can also join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app to listen ad-free. In the episode notes, you'll find some links and offers from our sponsors. By supporting them, you help us bring you our shows for free.

I'm your host, Witt Misseldein. Today's episode was produced by me, with special thanks to the This Is Actually Happening team, including Andrew Waits and Ellen Westberg. The intro music features the song Illabi by Tipper. You can join the This Is Actually Happening community on the discussion group on Facebook, or at Actually Happening on Instagram. And as always, you can support the show by going to patreon.com slash happening, or by visiting the shop at actuallyhappeningstore.com. Wondering.

If you like This Is Actually Happening, you can listen to every episode ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey. She struck him with her motor vehicle. She had been under the influence and then she left him there.

In January 2022, local woman Karen Reid was implicated in the mysterious death of her boyfriend, Boston police officer John O'Keefe. It was alleged that after an innocent night out for drinks with friends, Karen and John got into a lover's quarrel en route to the next location. What happens next depends on who you ask.

Was it a crime of passion? If you believe the prosecution, it's because the evidence was so compelling. This was clearly an intentional act. And his cause of death was blunt force trauma with hypothermia. Or a corrupt police cover-up. If you believe the defense theory, however, this was all a cover-up to prevent one of their own from going down. Everyone had an opinion.

And after the 10-week trial, the jury could not come to a unanimous decision. To end in a mistrial, it's just a confirmation of just how complicated this case is. Law and Crime presents the most in-depth analysis to date of the sensational case in Karen. You can listen to Karen exclusively with Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.