The Bay Area's police nemesis is not quite ready to quit

San Francisco Chronicle​

25-05-2025

Shagoofa Khan seethed as she walked into John Burris' law firm two years ago.
Days before, she'd learned that a police officer who'd arrested her during a protest had traded degrading, misogynistic texts about her with dozens of other Antioch officers. She wasn't the only one. In group chats, officers sent messages ridiculing the city's Black and Brown residents as 'water buffalos' and 'gorillas,' and casually joking about trying to knock suspects unconscious and lying on arrest paperwork.
When Khan read the texts — detailed in an investigation by the Contra Costa County District Attorney's Office — she was so appalled she dropped her phone.
'It was shocking to see it,' she said. 'It was disgusting.'
Khan, who dreamed of working in public service, worried that the scandal would endanger her future. She responded by taking the case to a Bay Area lawyer whose name had for years been synonymous with lawsuits against police departments: John Burris.
Burris was already clashing with Antioch over a fatal police shooting he viewed as unjustified. Within two weeks, he'd sued the city's police force in federal court, accusing officers of unlawful arrests, discrimination and malicious prosecution.
At the time, Burris was approaching 80, and hoping to wrap up a landmark civil rights lawsuit he had filed against Oakland police well over 20 years before to bookend a storied career. Instead, he seized on the Antioch case, launching into yet another protracted battle to reform a police department accused of fostering gross misconduct.
'You go out and you beat these people up, call people all kinds of names? Well, somebody has to do something about it,' he said. 'I guess it's my time to do it. I don't view it as work. It's a crusade.'
Burris has spent 40 years suing the police, cultivating a reputation as an unapologetic civil rights lawyer, equal parts brash, charming and erudite. His lawsuits have reshaped the Oakland Police Department, with one of them prompting the federal court oversight that has now stretched more than two decades, and have forced other departments to rethink how they search suspects, handle protesters and discipline officers.
Even Burris' fiercest courtroom opponents, such as police union attorney Harry Stern, acknowledge his impact.
'He and I are on different sides of a divide that runs deep in the U.S. And sometimes the important things he has to say are hard for me to hear,' Stern said. 'Overall, he's advanced the cause of police accountability.'
Now Burris — whose clients have included Rodney King and the families of Oscar Grant and Mario Woods — finds himself on shifting ground.
In Oakland and across the country, the fervent calls for police reform that exploded after the murder of George Floyd in 2020 have bled away as politicians have seized on concerns about crime and public safety. President Donald Trump, who has encouraged police officers to be rougher with criminal suspects, has upended the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division, suspending investigations of police abuse at several major departments around the country.
But Burris carries on. At the initial hearing in the Antioch lawsuit, Khan waited outside the courtroom, anxious. Then Burris emerged, gathering her and the other plaintiffs together. She recalled a sense of relief washing over her as the attorney told the group, 'We will be holding the police officers accountable.'
'Could that happen to me?'
Burris didn't always aspire to a career in law. He grew up in a working-class family in Vallejo, picking prunes and pears in orchards outside of Suisun City in the summer to pay for the school clothes his family couldn't afford.
His father worked at the Mare Island shipyards, and his mother was a psychiatric nursing assistant at Napa State Hospital. From an early age, he was aware of discrimination and inequality, fueled in part by the stories of racism that his uncles suffered working as stevedores at the shipyards, or the race riots that took place at his high school.
And then, in 1955, he listened in shock in his grandmother's home as his parents told him about the lynching of Emmett Till in Mississippi.
'We were all scared to death,' he recalled. 'Could that happen to me?'
He soon realized that he was on a different path than white children.
As a child and later in college, he studied and read voraciously. Though he came from a deeply religious family, learning about America's racist past made him an atheist. How could a loving God allow slavery and lynchings, he reasoned.
'From the very beginning, he was always trying to intellectualize why the world was in the state it was in,' said Courtney Burris, Burris' daughter, a prosecutor in Alameda County.
During a high school job fair, he recalled, he was told he'd never be a lawyer or doctor — but he was good with numbers, so he should consider accounting. But after just a few years as an accountant, Burris discovered he hated the job.
Then in the late '60s, Burris felt like the world was 'on fire.'
He enrolled at UC Berkeley and studied law. When he spent a summer interning at a corporate law office in Chicago, he ended up spending weekends interviewing victims of police brutality for a blue-ribbon panel that then-Rep. Ralph Metcalfe commissioned to investigate police abuses.
After graduating from law school, he returned to the Windy City, working first at a corporate law office and later as a prosecutor in Chicago, before moving back to the Bay Area and the Alameda County District Attorney's Office.
In one early case, he recalled talking to a police officer who, while preparing to testify, asked him, 'What do you want to happen?'
'That really fueled me toward this notion, you can't trust the police,' he said.
As one of the only Black prosecutors in the office, Burris saw racism by police and prosecutors alike that 'was much more flagrant, that was much more prevalent, much more excused' than it is today, Courtney Burris said. That experience, she said, made her father want to balance the scales.
By the late '70s, Burris had opened a private criminal defense practice in Alameda County. In 1979, Oakland police shot and killed Melvin Black, a 15-year-old who'd been shooting cars with a pellet gun.
In an effort to pacify Black's family and outraged community members, then-Mayor Lionel Wilson tapped Burris to conduct an independent investigation into the shooting. Burris didn't know it, but the assignment would change the trajectory of his life.
Burris spent five months interviewing witnesses, officers and experts, producing a 200-page report concluding that the shooting was the result of faulty judgment and poor tactics. Black's family hoped that might change things, recalled Marilyn Baker, Black's older sister.
The officers who shot her brother were never charged. But after the report's publication, Oakland created a citizen's review board in a bid to provide more oversight of the department. Five years later, Black's family sued, winning a $693,000 judgment against the city.
'The mayor just wanted it to go away,' Burris said of the case, while sitting in his office just off the Nimitz Freeway near the Oakland airport, beneath dozens of framed articles about his past legal victories. 'It let me know, fundamentally, that police did not care about necessarily getting to the truth of the matter, but having the public believe that what they did was the correct thing to do at the time.'
For Burris, though, the case was foundational to the civil rights litigation he would pursue over the rest of his career, said Dr. Ramona Tascoe, who was married to Burris for 17 years.
'It was a case in which he was able to prepare a report, analyze circumstances and propose solutions to a system that was failing the community for quite some time,' she said. 'It was really the launchpad.'
At the time, as a fledgling defense attorney, Burris crisscrossed the Bay Area, representing accused clients in courts from Monterey to Placer County. The work was draining, he recalled, and marked by constant fights with prosecutors and judges who looked through his clients like they didn't exist.
'The most despised person in the judicial system is a Black man with a criminal record,' he said. 'I hated it. I felt like I couldn't make a difference.'
'High-horse' cases
Burris didn't find the fight he was looking for until 1985, when he began to focus on police brutality. Civil rights work felt like a relief, the chance to finally practice law the way he wanted to, harnessing the outrage he felt witnessing injustice.
'John has never doubted himself,' Tascoe said. 'I don't say that to be facetious. He walks in authority of what he knows he's capable of.'
It didn't matter if some of his clients had criminal backgrounds, and many, he acknowledged, were not model citizens. But their backgrounds didn't excuse police overreach or street justice.
Burris looked for what he called the 'high-horse' cases against police: traffic stops motivated by racial bias, meritless beatings and unnecessary shootings. He relished getting an officer on the stand and laying into him.
'Those are the high-horse cases,' he said. 'You get on your high horse, ride to town, and f–– them up.'
In those early years of his practice, Burris said, many people didn't take him seriously, viewing his adversarial stance toward the police with disbelief, even anger. These people didn't recognize the patterns that Burris was describing.
'You have middle-class people that have never had a bad day with cops,' said Jim Chanin, a civil rights attorney who worked with Burris on the Oakland case that led to court oversight. 'It's hard for some people to believe that some police can do some of the things they do.'
But lawsuit after lawsuit sent a message, Burris said: 'Ultimately you gotta come to grips that Burris is serious.'
Over the next 15 years, Burris built his reputation and a lucrative practice handling such cases, perhaps most famously assisting in Rodney King's lawsuit against the Los Angeles Police Department after four police officers severely beat him with batons in 1991.
Tascoe recalled that she saw video of the violence on a morning newscast and called out to Burris, who emerged from the shower in a towel, asking why she was yelling.
'This is your case!' she said.
In a key moment in King's civil trial against the city of Los Angeles, Burris sparred with lawyers representing the officers who beat King over whether the video of the encounter — which sparked the riots and made the beating international news — had captured them yelling slurs at their victim.
An audio expert for the police, flown in from Germany, testified on behalf of the police that there was no racial slur. 'This was ludicrous,' Burris recalled. Armed with his own expert, Burris pushed back. The argument proved central to King's civil rights case, which concluded with a $3.8 million jury award.
Burris went on to build the latticework of a superstar lawyer, hosting a weekly show, 'Legally Speaking,' on a Bay Area radio station, and writing a book, 'Blue vs. Black,' in which he laid out a vision of how to overhaul the culture of police forces and improve relations between cops and minority communities.
While he preferred police misconduct cases, he took on high-profile criminal defendants, representing rapper Tupac Shakur, actor Delroy Lindo and baseball star Barry Bonds, after the Giants' left fielder was charged with perjury in 2007 amid the MLB's steroid scandal.
It was all a deliberate strategy, Burris acknowledged. Being at the forefront of big cases brought more visibility to his work and helped draw in the clients he wanted.
And he developed his persona: a vocal skeptic of police and a media-savvy litigator, at home both in the Oakland flatlands and on TV, where he preferred sharp blue suits. Ultimately, many of the strongest plaintiffs knew of him and came to him. And when they did, he would emerge with them on camera, letting the relatives of victims, or the victims themselves, tell their story — leveraging public fury in pursuit of payouts and reforms.
'I wanted to be front and center, to make people uncomfortable. I relished it,' he said. 'In the cases I'm involved in, they never have their side of the story told. The police immediately give a story that projects my client in the most negative light. Unless there's a trial, they would never be heard. I want them to be heard immediately.'
Over the years, Burris' wins in civil court showed other lawyers how to hold police departments accountable, said Adante Pointer, a civil rights attorney and Burris protégé.
'He casts a long shadow over police misconduct litigation,' Pointer said, 'and laid the legal framework on which we're still continuing to build.'
Unfinished business
The case that came to define Burris was not Rodney King but the Riders. In the summer of 2000, a newly sworn Oakland police officer resigned while accusing officers he was shadowing in West Oakland of beating and framing suspects and lying on police reports. The victims flocked to Burris and Chanin.
The lawsuit they filed resulted in a settlement of nearly $11 million, then the largest in Oakland history. More crucially, city officials agreed in 2003 to make dozens of reforms to the police department, changes that would be overseen by an independent monitor who, in turn, reported to a federal judge.
The agreement has since cost the city more than $20 million. Burris and Chanin continue work on the case, representing the plaintiffs by ensuring the department follows the agreement. In the first 13 years, Burris billed Oakland more than $200,000, but he said he later stopped billing for his work. 'I didn't feel it was necessary,' he said. 'It was not enough money for me to be worrying about.'
But the responsibility of the case, Burris said, forced him to sit down and talk to police as partners rather than adversaries. 'I developed respect for a lot of them and policing,' he said. 'I certainly understood more about their positions.'
It also gave Burris the chance to put into practice many of the suggestions he'd made in his book, years before.
The sweeping agreement targeted nearly every aspect of how the department trained, tracked and punished officers, requiring detailed accounting of traffic stops, more stringent internal affairs reports, better technology, closer supervision from superiors and a 24-hour, toll-free hotline for civilian complaints.
'How do you improve the department itself?' Burris said. 'You want to make the case bigger than the four corners of the lawsuit.'
Burris later used a similar playbook to attack Oakland's strip-searching of Black motorists— which he likened to a 'minstrel act' — as well as the city's crowd-control tactics and use of dogs on suspects.
Yet more than 20 years later, the Oakland Police Department remains under court control, the reforms mostly done but still incomplete, in what has become one of the longest oversight programs of a police department in U.S. history.
Some of Burris' critics said over the years that the settlement came to hobble the department while draining the city's budget, arguing the requirements were so strict that they were essentially impossible to meet. They claimed that the Riders case was riddled with conflicts of interest — and that Burris, Chanin and particularly the court-ordered monitor didn't want the settlement to end, because they could bill for their work.
'It's become an impediment to reform, because people see it as a sham,' said Sean Whent, Oakland's police chief from 2013 to 2016.
Chanin pushed back, saying, 'John and I would not let this go on if there was no reason to let it go on.' The critics, he said, 'need to look in the mirror rather than start blaming everybody else.'
Burris believes the Oakland force has made great strides under this pressure, and some officers agree. LeRonne Armstrong, who was chief from 2021 until his controversial firing in 2023, is an unlikely admirer of Burris' work. The Riders case 'has truly changed' the department, he said. Noting that payouts for police misconduct have plummeted in recent years, Armstrong said, 'The culture is completely different than it was.'
Change on the horizon
One Wednesday in April, Burris walked into federal court in San Francisco. After more than a year of legal wrangling, Antioch had agreed to negotiate. By then, many of the officers charged with crimes had been convicted, and the U.S. Department of Justice had closed its investigation into the department, requiring it to hire consultants to help implement a raft of changes.
Then last week, the Justice Department said it would step back from police reform, while dropping accountability agreements with Minneapolis and Louisville.
To Burris, the Trump administration's approach means federal intervention is likely out of the picture in many of his cases, at least for the foreseeable future. In Antioch, that's forced Burris and his attorneys to change tack. If they can't rely on the Justice Department, they'll have to find someone else to oversee the ultimate settlement with the city. Maybe a federal judge, perhaps California's attorney general.
Since Reconstruction, Burris notes, the fight for civil rights has ebbed and flowed. Foes of racism had to fight against political structures that actively opposed them, vilified them, oppressed them. In the South, Black lawyers had to fight for their rights in cities where the Klan killed their neighbors. And the fight went on.
'On balance, you still have to fight through,' Burris said, 'because the people before me, they fought. There's always been warriors. … And that will always be the case.'
For days, Burris' clients from Antioch filed into a courtroom on the 17th floor of the federal building. As U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria looked on, they described how the police had damaged their lives.
By the end of the hearings, Burris and Antioch had agreed to a tentative settlement to resolve the claims of Khan — the activist officers had denigrated in their texts — and many of the other plaintiffs in the case. Burris said he could not provide further details because the settlement was not official and the terms remained confidential.
This month, Burris turned 80. He knows he can't keep working forever, but he's not quite ready to quit.
'If something new comes and I see an egregious wrong, I'm inclined to go do it,' he said. 'I don't have to have a last case. I'm not looking for Moby Dick or anything. Whatever comes, comes.'
Three days after the Antioch settlement negotiations, Burris' phone rang. Police in Pocatello, Idaho, had shot and killed an autistic 17-year-old boy through a fence as he'd been playing with a knife in his parents' yard. The family wanted Burris' help.