Leighton Woodhouse

Leighton Akira Woodhouse is a documentary filmmaker and journalist whose work spans factory farming, animal rights, immigration, the alt-right, and pompous European social theory.

I first came across his work in The Intercept, but he’s written for Newsweek, The Nation, The New Republic and Gawker. (I try not to hold that last one against him.) Leighton also lives in East Oakland, where he’s been reporting on the movement to defund the police — and its passionate opposition.

So when Cori Bush, the Democratic congresswoman from Missouri, was roundly criticized for defending her private security detail and defunding the police in the span of a single minute, I was keen to find out what Leighton had to say about the matter. — BW

In February, a mile and a half from my house, at a park featuring an “I Can Do Anything” mural, a 38-year-old basketball coach named Reuben Lewis was gunned down in front of dozens of children. Two of his three sons, who he was picking up from football practice, watched him die.

In March, about four miles from that park, a 58-year-old man named Andre Weston got into an argument with a homeless man named William Vann. He doused Vann with an accelerant and lit him on fire.

In April, about two-and-a-half miles from where Vann was murdered, a house was burned to the ground in retaliation for a shooting that the people living there had nothing to do with. Esame Musleh, a refugee who had fled Yemen to escape the violence there, was burned alive. So was his one-year-old daughter.

Those are four of the 77 murders that have occurred so far this year in Oakland, California, where I live. Not one of them was at the hands of the police. But if you drive through the city, you’ll see the slogan “defund the police” on homemade placards in the windows of apartments and houses that boast “In This House We Believe In Science” lawn signs out front.

Last week, Cori Bush, a Democratic congresswoman from Missouri whose political career began as an anti-police activist in Ferguson, echoed that message in an interview with CBS News. Bush is a vocal proponent of the movement to defund the police. Yet her campaign expenditure filings show that over a two-and-a-half month period this year, she spent nearly $70,000 on a private security detail.

When asked about this apparent hypocrisy, her answer was sharp: “Would you rather see me die?”