(dramatic music) - Police misconduct is one of the worst challenges for American society today.

And there's no accountability for that police misconduct.

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

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

What inspired that movement?

It was police brutality.

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

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

(soft music) - John Burris, just the word itself says, premier lawyer.

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

- I became interested in law, really, after having watched the civil rights movement unfold.

And there I could see that there were people who were marching and there were all that activity, but I was most intrigued by the lawyers.

Thurgood Marshall was somebody I read about a lot.

And so my interest always was the legal component of the civil rights movement.

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

And he said, I wanna be a star.

- Being here brings back a lot of memories of my childhood, both positive and negative, positive in the sense that it provided economically for our family.

My father had six kids to take care of and it's a government salary.

But the part that was painful to me as a little boy was hearing him talk about how he felt he was being discriminated against.

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

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

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

And that pain was manifested in ways that he would strike out, he would be unhappy.

And it affected us as children in our family.

But, to his credit, he persevered because he had to take it, eat it as they say.

And he did so because he had a family to take care of.

And he always took care of us in that sense.

He was never without a job.

- There were six kids.

There was no alternative.

You work and you do other things.

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

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

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

- John Burris was one of our stalwarts.

He was one of the young guys that we all cared a lot about.

And we really wanted him to be something.

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

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

And so then when I moved to San Francisco going to college, I was considering, I think, working as an accountant initially, but ultimately law school.

I had him, he wrote a letter for me for law school.

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

- I first met John when he was pledging Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity and he was a student at Golden Gate University at the time.

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

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

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

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

And we were all surprised.

- We got reacquainted when he made a wise decision.

That decision was to go to law school.

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

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

Henry Ramsey was a professor's professor.

- Henry was a no-nonsense person.

He believed in perfection.

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

- Henry Ramsey encouraged all of us to go into civil rights law.

And that's the type of stuff that resonated especially with John.

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

- The environment at UC Berkeley was incredibly unique.

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

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

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

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

And it was a time of black consciousness.

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

We're gonna do this ourselves.

- John stood out.

He became the president of the Black Law Students Association and actually led a strike during those days.

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

I decided that I would take an internship in a law firm in San Francisco.

John decided to take an internship in Chicago.

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

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

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

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

It was a real eye-opener.

My experience before that had really been watching TV and seeing what happened in the civil rights movement.

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

This was not an uncommon situation in Chicago.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I saw Oakland Police arrest a black man down there, 7th and Broadway, and this officer had his billy club out and he was beating this poor guy... - My uncles feared the police and oftentimes would come home after just running from the police and really would be explaining to my grandmother that they hadn't done anything.

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

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

And that's really what we were taught.

It was the home of the Black Panthers.

- [Protesters] Off the pigs!

No more pigs in our community.

Off the pigs!

No more pigs in our community.

Off the pigs!

- Well, we knew all the way back going to the Panthers days and what we were seeing going on in the black community and the protests and the individuals getting tired of it, I'll never forget, I saw on West Grand and on San Pablo Avenue a incident where the police beat the hell out of a black man.

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

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

And that we all understood, as my father used to say, they were the judge, they were the jury, they were the executioner.

It was the police.

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

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

And so when I got out of school, that was certainly my desire to be a criminal defense lawyer.

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

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

- And so I'm a rookie.

I probably think I know more than I did.

And so, because that's just the way I was in those days.

When I was in Chicago, for whatever reason I got cases that were high-visibility cases then rather than the state's attorney's office, and I understood that people were interested.

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

John Burris was one of those.

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

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

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

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

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

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

- And things came out of that, I said, no one's like Clint White, that's number one.

He's a beast of a man.

So I got to, I figured I can do that too.

So I became a very aggressive lawyer in that sense.

He taught me, you make sure they respect you, period, and don't let them define you.

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

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

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

- And he was also very well respected by the establishment, the district attorney's office, the public defender's office, the judges.

Everybody respected John because John was a quality lawyer.

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

He was a well-known lawyer at the time.

And so we started talking and he was telling me that he was getting ready to leave the DA's Office and go do private practice and sue police.

And he says, well, Burris, he said, man, you should do that too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- The killing of Melvin Black in this community was quite shocking.

When I lived on 49th between Shattuck and Telegraph and right around the corner, I heard about this case, where this young brother had been shot and killed.

And the police had tried to cover it up.

There was no need to kill him.

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

There was talk in the office, there was newspaper coverage.

It was widely known.

- In 1979, I was in high school.

I was at Oakland High School.

And one of my classmates, Melvin Black, was killed by the Oakland police.

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

We boycotted school.

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

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

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

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

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

- And surprisingly, surprisingly to everyone, I found that the police conduct was wrong and that there was poor judgment and poor tactics, and that resulted in a wrongful killing of this young boy.

The District Attorney's Office, the U.S.

Attorney's Office, the City Attorney's Office, and the police department, all issued views that were totally different from mine.

- It was understood that there was very much a potential for a cover-up.

The police did not, when they engaged in this kind of misconduct, particularly if they killed someone, they did not want the truth to come out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And in 1979, I was 15 years old.

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

- [John] And it wasn't happening because I could feel the racism that existed within the criminal justice system.

Not only from the police, probation departments, the defense lawyers, prosecutors... These people kept me in a state of anger all the time.

So I knew that I had to leave.

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

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

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

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

I had the privilege of getting to work for the Alameda County DA's Office.

And I was a trial junkie.

But I also wanted to watch good trial lawyers.

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

- Well, I first became aware of John Burris.

And I'll never forget the day because I was sitting in the jury box waiting for the court to call my case.

And suddenly John Burris walks into the courtroom.

And as he walks through, it was like the Red Sea parting.

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

And he was feared.

- And I saw that the judge was very impressed with John citing all of the evidence code sections to him.

You know, co-mingling the evidence code sections in with all of his arguments.

- There are certain people that have charisma in the courtroom.

They know their way around.

They own it.

And that's how John Burris is.

He knows how to reduce people to bubbling protoplasm on the stand.

So that when you see him on the other side, you're like, we got a problem.

- You know, I've been involved in the media a lot during, of course, my practice as a lawyer.

And I found it to be very helpful in terms of the clients that I represent.

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

You didn't have media.

Lawyers didn't do any of that.

But I always understood that the media was a powerful instrument and that it can move people to appreciate conduct and activities taking place.

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

They saw it as something that was unconventional.

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

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

And as such, many looked at it with disdain.

- I was a pretty well established police litigation lawyer.

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

- I met John Burris over in Alameda County and I was active in civil rights movement, the movement in those days.

And so was he, along with a lot of other people.

So I really got to know him when he was trying the Rodney King case.

Watching the brutality of the Los Angeles Police Department, I thought John had a lot of guts for taking it on.

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

That traumatized the entire country.

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

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

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

The police wouldn't have done that to them but for his own conduct.

So that was the attitude and the mindset.

White officers had basically been getting away with this for years and the white community had no idea.

The black community did because we knew in Oakland, it was clear, San Francisco, obviously Chicago, New York and Philadelphia, these were common occurrences that were happening.

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

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

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

He had the guts of a tiger and that's what I loved about him.

Nobody shouted him down.

Nobody mentally put him down.

He walked into that courtroom.

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

- Our fight at the time when representing Rodney King was to overcome this huge negativism that surrounded him that had great depths.

And so we kept fighting through it and ultimately we were able to get a very good verdict for him.

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

And that only happened because of the video camera.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ultimately they both left the force, which was important because my view on all this always is never just to do the individual case itself.

It's to make that case bigger and more significant than the four corners of the case.

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

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

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

- Now all that was further developed after the Rodney King trial and maybe during the Rodney King case because that case was such a high visibility case.

(camera shutter clicking) Every day you're in the media and you're trying a case in front of the media, everybody writes about it, talks about it, and so you become well known in that sense.

Then shortly thereafter then, of course, then OJ Simpson happened.

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

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

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

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

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

- Yeah, I would have put him on.

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

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

It was a bad decision on their part.

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

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

- John Burris sort of crept onto my radar slowly.

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

So he was known.

In TV, we call it coming through the glass.

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

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

- As a consequence, I've been involved in this.

Then I've become now a resource for the media on issues, whether it's police issues or employment issues or contemporary issues that have some civil rights issues.

I've become a resource.

(upbeat music) - In the 1990s, Oakland and Alameda County were in the grip of the war on drugs.

You know, crack cocaine was everywhere in Oakland.

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

- Things were turbulent in Oakland.

There was a lot of crime, a lot of violence.

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

- The Oakland Police Department had a reputation as being the most racist police department in the United States.

And given the problems of drugs and violence in the black community, they thought they were the specialists to deal with it.

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

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

- Now, this is still in the midst of the war on drugs.

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

The problem was, they had no discretion.

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

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

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

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

I was working the night shift.

I was interacting with people that were from the community, and I had a connection.

But I oftentimes heard stories about the things that was happening in the streets that I didn't know about.

And soon I learned about the Riders.

And that really happened when the investigation broke out.

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

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

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

- The District Attorney's Office has looked at at least 50 cases.

We also know that there may be, and we know this from the conversation we've had in various departments, that there may be as many as 300 people that will be looked at and examined for purposes of having their cases thrown out.

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

You know, the Riders case was not a case that was initially investigated by the District Attorney's Office.

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

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

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

The District Attorney lowers the boom on four Oakland police officers accused of assault and kidnapping.

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

- Based on what I've learned and I've been told by my investigators, it appears to be isolated.

But we're continuing our probe, just as the DA's office is, to go back to see what other cases these officers have been involved in.

- It was, started when Jerry Brown was mayor of Oakland, but it didn't go reported and the police were abusing their authority.

Some say directly, some say indirectly on orders from then mayor Jerry Brown to clean up West Oakland.

- Four officers have been caught.

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

- They were planting drugs on people.

They were falsely arresting them.

They were breaking in and kidnapping them.

These were the charges against them.

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

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

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

- Well, what was unique about the Riders case was that you had a young, brand new officer who was going through his field training.

And that new officer happened to finish off number one in his academy class.

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

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

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

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

You just couldn't trust anything they said.

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

And so they would bust you.

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

And so after 20 years of John Burris being the leading advocate for police accountability, he was quite frankly adversarial with the police department.

And they were looking for any opportunity to get Burris, if you will.

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

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

- So Jim Chanin and I decided this is our opportunity.

Jim and I became real colleagues before the Riders case.

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

And so we did one or two cases together.

And I didn't wanna do just an individual case.

I had plenty of those.

I wanted to do a case that had a greater impact.

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

And I said, great.

Yeah, let's do it.

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

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

So the consent decree negotiations started almost immediately after the Riders case started.

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

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

So he filed it in federal court.

And I drew the case that they're assigned randomly.

And the case was assigned to me.

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

I would hear the screams from officers about, man, I just got (censored) served by John Burris.

You know, I'm getting sued by Burris and them.

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

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

I mean, all of this.

This was my goal.

- And John settled for almost $11 million.

This was a settlement.

It's important to realize that the city sat down with John and they said, here's what you've charged us with.

And they agreed to it.

It wasn't like there was a fight and we didn't do it.

They said, we're going to correct those things.

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

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

I mean, he was a judge and he himself had been a victim of racial prejudice when he worked for the Department of Justice.

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

What that is, is an agreement between the municipality, the city, and the plaintiffs in the case.

It might be the federal government.

Sometimes it might just be the group of people who we represent who have been directly victimized by the police.

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

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

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

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

- Aaron Goodwin has become almost like a nephew to me in many ways.

Obviously, he's had a lot of clients, so he's obviously a good agent.

Most notably, Gary Payton.

I think I represented Jason Kidd at one point in time.

And we've had different cases that I've been involved in.

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

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

And literally, my office was next to his office.

And strangely enough, right around the time of the Riders case in 2003, I was leaving my home to go pick up my daughters, and I was coming down Skyline and noticed I was being followed by a police officer.

And I wasn't sure if he was following me or just going the same direction.

(upbeat music) But he continued to follow me.

And I was going a shortcut from the Oakland Hills to Lakeshore.

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

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

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

There's a woman officer.

There's four white male officers and one white woman officer.

And she tells me to shut the (censored) up and get out of the car.

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

So right at that time I said, call John Burris.

And John answers and I tell John, hey, I'm surrounded by police officers.

They got their guns out.

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

So I get out the car.

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

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

And I said, what?

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

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

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

Take the time to come check my license and see who I am."

Right?

At this time, two of the officers come over and they grab me and they force me down.

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

And I'm like, hey, listen, take the gun off me.

Around the same time, John Burris shows up.

JB is talking to them, says, "Take the handcuffs off of him."

And they clear me.

And the way they clear me is by making me wait.

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

It was about a black man in a black truck.

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

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

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

- I'm fighting this battle.

I believe in my position.

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

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

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

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

And so my job has been to prove to them that what the police did was wrong.

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

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

It didn't have to happen.

Clear lines of guilt and innocence were wavering.

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

- When my nephew Oscar Grant was murdered, we knew that we needed the best civil rights attorney that we can find.

And we felt that someone with some skills can help us get justice.

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

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

I went out to the scene that very first day that I got the case.

I got all the boys who were present, went out to the scene, reenacted the scene so I could see where everyone was at the time the shooting of Oscar taking place, what role each person played, and immediately I could see this is a flat out murder.

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

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

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

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

There was a train going east and there was a train going west, and those trains had each stopped.

(people shouting) - Get on the train!

They just shot him!

- Get on the train!

- [Person] They just shot that guy!

- So this was a situation with cell phones being clipped as this whole beating and shooting took place.

So there were a lot of witnesses to it, and that made it horrifying for everyone.

- And I remember being with the lawyers in my office the first time we got the video and we played it.

And everybody just looked, and we were just astonished.

Like, wow.

They just killed him.

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

- So that's how the case started.

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

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

I mean, it started there.

You know, though John wasn't representing us in the criminal aspect, he was representing us in the civil aspect, he was helping coaching us in understanding what was going on.

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

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

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

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

Some wanted to promote it as Black Lives this.

Others wanted to promote it as, you know, the world's coming to an end kind of thing.

Others wanted this as the most massive police misconduct in the world.

All these forces were there.

- I thought it was pretty impressive how he managed to weave himself through that and the case through that, never taking the eye off his two goals.

One was to seek changes from the policing, and two, and this is very important, to make sure that it was Oscar Grant's daughter who got the benefit of any sort of settlement.

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

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

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

People did not believe in the work that I was doing, and so it took a long time.

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

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

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

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

- I first became aware of John Burris when he represented the family of Oscar Grant, and he was a trailblazer because for somebody like me at the time, who was still in law school, you saw adequate, zealous representation of black people, the black community, the black culture.

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

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

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

I had to overcome that over a period of time, and so the case that I've been involved in, and some of which I've talked about before, the Rodney King case, even though Rodney King was the one that was beaten, the jurors' view and the public's view was he was the bad person, and then he got what he deserved.

But we had to fight through that.

- I represented people who had had negative experiences with law enforcement, I also represented law enforcement, and I understood that there's a standard of respect that law enforcement needs to demonstrate, and until we root that out of the culture, we're gonna continue to have problems.

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

There was no cell phone video footage and other tools that exist now to see some of the harms inflicted mostly in African American communities over the years, and there was only the hope and the prayer that someone like a John Burris would be around to help us combat it.

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

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

Often if you represent, if it's a civil rights case, you get paid only if you win.

It's a much harder practice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our recruitment process should not be limited to ex-military, and when that happens, we don't have to misinterpret conduct of people that leads to the opportunity for John Burris to sue you.

- John has always been a public person, and so when I started dating him, I knew that that came with the territory.

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

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

He helped me in so many ways in my trial practice course.

He would either give lectures on things like evidence and rules of evidentiary procedure, how to do an opening statement, how to do a closing statement.

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

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

- In order to make up confessions that there was no tape recorder.

So he undoubtedly is a person whose case has to be looked at.

Now, when we did the Riders case, we had to go back and look at over 100 convictions that had taken place by those officers to have them set aside because they were all bogus and fake.

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

- John has always been a mentor to law students and others, and so my situation was just perfect.

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

And so Rodney King and Tupac meant that they wanted to see this man, and then once they met him, they wanted to learn from him.

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

- Harry Daniels was a student in my first year property course and also my third year family law course.

And so I got to know him quite well.

And he always told me he wanted to be a civil rights lawyer.

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

- He told me he wanted to do the kind of work that I was doing.

And so after he finished his stint in the public defender's office, he started his own office in Atlanta, Georgia.

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

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

- What fuels John, what keeps him driving, what keeps him working as hard as he does, talking and training and being a mentor for others who want to be like John, is a passion, a burning passion for justice.

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

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

Of course everybody knows the renowned Benjamin Crump, who represents Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, on and on.

Tyre Nichols.

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

And Harry brought us all together for a case in Mississippi that we call the Civil Rights Lawyer Dream Team.

And so I'm very proud to be co-counselors with John and Harry and Lee.

And we go do justice in a place where black people don't often get justice, in the deep south.

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

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

King said, injustice anywhere is a threat of justice everywhere.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think you could call John the godfather of police litigation.

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

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

And I'm also running my own relay.

And when I finish this relay, I need for you to be running stride for stride with me.

So when I pass you the baton, you're not stopping.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues)