On Hard Knock Radio, host Dave “Davey D” Cook sat down with Oakland-raised investigator and former CPRA executive director Mac Muir, co-author (with Greg Finch) of Cop Cop: Breaking the Fixed System of American Policing. The conversation moves from New York’s entrenched resistance to oversight to Oakland’s imperfect but real gains, and lands on practical reforms that could actually change outcomes on the street.
Muir frames the book’s premise plainly: the system is “fixed”—structured to over-police Black and Brown communities and to sour officers against the public they serve. Because much of what happens inside internal affairs never reaches daylight, Cop Cop tells the day-to-day stories of complaints, investigations, and the quiet harms that don’t make headlines but shape lives.
New York vs. Oakland. Running investigations in New York, Muir encountered “almost comprehensive hostility” to oversight inside a vast, insular NYPD. In Oakland, federal monitors and a stronger charter-based system created more leverage. It’s not the OPD of 2003, he notes, and he left “more optimistic” about the trajectory—while stressing that scandals persist and trust remains a multi-generational project tied to unaddressed history.
The airplane-crash standard. Davey D pushes a comparison: when planes crash, investigators reconstruct every factor to stop repeats. Police killings and abuses rarely get that prevention-first treatment. Muir agrees: settlements tally damage after the fact; the work should be to prevent the next incident—down to the “everyday” harms of stop-and-frisk that, in New York, correlated with lower test scores for young Black men.
Fear as policy—and PR. Muir walks through a lineage of fear campaigns: the 1960s fight against a civilian review board (fronted by a slick police-union ad warning that “your life” depends on officers never being second-guessed) and the 1970s “Fear City/Fair City” push that helped protect police budgets while schools and social services were slashed. Davey D recalls the fallout as a student—no after-school programs, more police, a cycle cemented by rhetoric.
Why DOJ consent decrees aren’t enough. Federal interventions can force short-term box-checking, but they leave. The durable fix is local, charter-level oversight with real power over discipline. Chicago’s recent model, Muir argues, bakes civilian control into the machinery rather than renting it from Washington.
Piercing the jargon. Investigations can’t accept magic words—“I feared for my safety,” “bulge,” “exigent circumstances”—as end-points. Muir’s method is to strip the lingo and reconstruct what an officer actually saw, heard, and did. If the facts don’t align with the claimed fear, the justification fails.
Concrete reforms Muir backs:
History, memory, repair. In Oakland, trust won’t be rebuilt without public reckoning: Panthers era violence, Bobby Hutton, 1980s killings—truth-telling forums matter for institutional legitimacy. Transparency under federal oversight helps, but acknowledgement is a community-level necessity.
On slogans and politics. Muir calls “more Black officers” an overrated fix—representation hasn’t reliably altered outcomes—and says the “defund” frame backfires by suggesting no one answers 911. The through-line is not ideology but incentives and structures that reliably prevent harm.
Asked where to start in Cop Cop, Muir points listeners to chapters 3–13—case-driven windows into the often invisible craft of civilian investigation. It’s there, he says, that readers can see how accountability is actually built: fact by fact, file by file, decision by decision.
Hard Knock Radio is a drive-time Hip-Hop talk show on KPFA (94.1fm @ 4-5 pm Monday-Friday), a community radio station without corporate underwriting, hosted by Davey D and Anita Johnson.
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