East Bay Yesterday

Journalists Ali Winston and Darwin Bondgraham have been investigating the Oakland Police Department for more than a decade. Their coverage of violent misconduct, corruption, and sexual abuse has led to multiple resignations and terminations within the department, but even more shocking is the relative lack of consequences for many of the officers responsible for this illegal behavior. Winston and Bondgraham’s new book “The Riders Come Out at Night: Brutality, Corruption, and Cover Up in Oakland” proves that this pattern of impunity has characterized the department since its very inception.  “The Riders Come Out at Night” compiles more than a century of OPD scandals in order to understand why the department has been unable to reform itself according to the demands of a court-ordered consent decree, despite two decades of federal oversight. History repeats itself in scandal after scandal as a toxic stew of racism, machismo, resentment, carelessness and lethal violence is brushed aside or even rewarded, while t