759: A Couple Walks Into a House

Ira Glass

From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. So for months now, one of our producers, Ben Calhoun, has been working on one of those stories that starts small, and simple, and personal, and then kind of spins out till a whole town is involved. And I honestly don't want to say too much about this. We should just let it unfold. And so without further ado, here's Ben.

Ben Calhoun

Rob and Reyna Mathis were doing something unusual for parents whose kids had mostly grown up and left home. They were looking to upsize and get more space. Their house wasn't small-- five bedrooms on five acres. But Reyna and Rob have a dozen kids, plus grandkids. And even though most of their children are out of the house, they're the kind of parents adult kids want to spend time with. And they had a vision, a place with enough land that some of their children would build houses right by them.

By August 2019, they'd been house hunting for months with no luck. And then one day, their Realtor sent Reyna a listing that looked promising. So the Mathises drove out to see it in person on a sunny afternoon. It was pretty far out in the country. They went down a long dirt driveway, back into the woods, until they reached an enormous, sprawling lawn. And Rob looked around.

Ben Calhoun

As they got out of the car, Reyna looked up at the house, a huge, orange, brick colonial, 4,600 square feet, with two-story brick pillars out front.

Ben Calhoun

The group that day was six altogether. There was the Realtor, Rob and Reyna, also their youngest daughter, one of their sons, and the son's girlfriend. They walked in the front door, into a big, echoey foyer. And they started looking around. They noticed pretty quickly, the house wasn't really staged as much as it was kind of empty. Like, a lot of stuff had been removed.

So as the group walked into the dining room, there wasn't much in it-- a large cat scratching post in the corner, a dark wood dining room table. Rob looked at a little collection of stuff in the middle of the table, some salt and pepper shakers.

Ben Calhoun

The Mathises are an interracial couple. Rob's Black. Reyna's Mexican-American. The two of them convened a discreet, married couple, eye contact conversation. Seems to have gone sort of like, I see it. You see it? OK, we both see it.

Ben Calhoun

From there, the tour moved on to the living room, where Reyna spotted something else, a jacket hanging up from the Muskegon Police Department. They also spotted a photo of two police officers in uniform. This house, it was out in the country, but it was apparently owned by a police officer who worked in Muskegon, Michigan. That's where the Mathises live. Reyna gave Rob a nudge. Rob looked at the coat and turned to their 21-year-old son who'd come with them.

Ben Calhoun

This is kind of how Rob is, gruff, funny.

Ben Calhoun

From there, they all went down into the basement, and then into one of the house's two huge garages.

Ben Calhoun

Rob held up his hands, like 2 feet by 3 feet.

Ben Calhoun

Rob says he glanced over at his kids to see if they were catching on to any of this stuff, especially his youngest daughter, Asia, who was 12 at the time-- shy, sweet. Rob was kind of relieved to see that none of the kids were noticing any of this.

From there, everyone kind of split up. Rob went upstairs, into one of the bedrooms, with his son Monty, the 21-year-old. And hanging on the wall was a single wood picture frame.

Ben Calhoun

It was a framed application from the 1920s to join the KKK. Rob pulled out his phone and took a picture. In the top corners of the paper, there were illustrated white-robed Klansmen on rearing horses thrusting torches into the air. The application read, "I, the undersigned, a native-born, true, and loyal citizen of the United States of America, being a white male Gentile person of temperate habits, sound mind, and a believer in the tenets of the Christian religion, the maintenance of white supremacy, and the principles of pure Americanism, do most respectfully apply for membership." Rob was flustered.

Ben Calhoun

Rob was outside in a spiral of freaking out.

Ben Calhoun

After seeing the application for herself, Reyna came out to talk to Rob.

Ben Calhoun

The Realtor also came out with Reyna. She was apologizing over and over, saying she had no idea. This was her first time inside. Reyna found herself trying to make the Realtor feel better.

Ben Calhoun

That was the owner of the house, Officer Charles Anderson, who, at the time, was a 21-year veteran of the Muskegon Police Department. I first read about this a couple years ago in the newspaper, the story with the attention-grabbing power of a bad joke. A couple walks into a police officer's house and sees a KKK application on the wall.

And from the beginning, I had so many questions, partly because Muskegon, where all this happened, I grew up across Lake Michigan in Milwaukee. And it kind of felt like a place I knew, Rust-Belty, segregated. And I wanted to find out what would happen to the police officer and to this couple who become linked in this awful way after this day in this house.

It would turn out to be this messy story about race and policing where people's certainty about what's right and wrong would collide with what happens in the real world.

Ben Calhoun

And the place that begins is in Rob and Reyna's house when they get home that night in Act 1-- The Decision.

Ben Calhoun

So the Mathises debated whether they should do something, specifically whether they should go public about what they saw, a KKK application hanging up in the home of working police officer. Rob and Reyna have had their share of experiences with police. Reyna isn't shy that she, in particular, was kind of wild when she was younger.

She's tough, no bull [BLEEP], likes to party. I'm not perfect, she told me. And she had a lot of run-ins with cops, some bad, one violent. But she and Rob both went out of their way to say they think most police officers go to work with good intentions. They do their jobs.

Rob's retired US Army, a straight arrow. I actually don't know if I've ever seen him without an Army baseball hat on.

Ben Calhoun

That just added to Rob's pileup of feelings about all this.

Ben Calhoun

Rob and Reyna found themselves on opposite sides of this question about whether to go public. In general, Rob and Reyna seem like a very close, affectionate couple. Like, at some point, I took a spin through Rob's Facebook photos, and they're basically three things-- Rob and Reyna taking selfies together, kissing each other on the cheek, or cracking each other up, pictures of Reyna where Rob's bragging about how beautiful she is, and then there's photos of Reyna's cooking, where he's bragging about how good it is.

Reyna got why Rob wanted to say something about this officer. But she worried, what about backlash? What if things got nasty?

Ben Calhoun

Rob and Reyna were deciding whether to stick their necks out. It was a version of what I think is a common experience when you aren't white. I say that as an Asian-American. And I know I don't speak for anybody else. But like, things will happen. Little things will happen. Big things will happen.

And you'll have to decide, what's going on here? Is it worth the trouble to say something? Is it worth the blowback? Maybe most of all, will speaking up do any good? Like, what will it accomplish?

Rob was arguing principle. Shouldn't we do something about this cop? Reyna was arguing practicality. What'll that mean for us? They go around and around. Eventually, Rob tells Reyna he's going to go pray about it. He goes down into the basement, to his office. After a while, he came to a thought that made up his mind.

Ben Calhoun

Rob just couldn't get past that image, this officer, at night, mistreating a young couple.

Ben Calhoun

So Rob Mathis drafted a Facebook post, and he showed it to Reyna. "I feel sick to my stomach," he wrote, knowing that he toured the home of, quote, "one of the most racist people in Muskegon, hiding behind his uniform, and possibly harassing people of color." He included a picture of the framed KKK application hanging on the wall.

Rob and Reyna talked about it, and they made a decision not to name the officer. They posted it. And then the Mathises went to sleep.

Ben Calhoun

Act 2-- It Begins.

By the time Rob and Reyna woke up, the comments on Rob's post had taken off, exploded actually, to a degree they hadn't expected. There were outraged people supporting them, outraged people criticizing them. Because of the societal disaster that is Facebook, everyone very quickly transposed their culture war baggage onto this situation-- Black lives, blue lives, people, no kidding, arguing about Colin Kaepernick in the comments.

There was racism, comments like, "lol, what a crybaby-ass Black guy. Probably couldn't afford the house anyways," which aggravated Rob, who was like, our house is worth more than that house. We were going to make money on this move.

To give you a quick sense of Muskegon, Michigan, it's 38,000 people. The city is blue-collar, Democratic, Rust-Belt, 32% Black. But it's surrounded by rural areas that are heavily White, heavily conservative, where it's not uncommon to see Confederate flags on trucks. The Black population is large enough that it doesn't have political control, but it isn't far from it. And that adds tension to politics, especially in situations about race. It's a divided place in our divided country.

On Rob's post, a bunch of people argue that having a KKK application in your home was about freedom of speech. "It's a free country," someone wrote. "Not saying I'm OK with the KKK or racism at all, but it's his personal choice to be an idiot. You can't change that." Someone wondered if it was part of a legitimate collection of historical memorabilia. Other people pushed back. "Memorabilia of what, exactly? Memorabilia of killing people of color?"

People debated about what this meant about the way this officer must be doing his job. Some called for Anderson to be fired. Others called for an investigation. People pleaded for Rob to name the officer, to expose who he was. And Rob did.

Ben Calhoun

The story was on TV news within hours of when Rob posted on Facebook. Reporters were inundating the Mathises and showing up at Anderson's house. One reporter who drove to Anderson's home caught up with his wife, Rachael, at the screen door.

Ben Calhoun

That'd be the last public word the Andersons said to the media about this. For this story, I reached out to Officer Anderson and his wife many times, called, wrote. Eventually I reached them. Officer Anderson declined to speak about any of this, saying the police unit advised him not to talk. His wife did agree to talk about one aspect of what happened. I'll get to that in a bit.

Ben Calhoun

Act 3-- The People in Charge.

There were two Muskegon city officials who were going to have to figure out what to do about this situation. There's a police chief, of course, but also this guy named Frank Peterson, Muskegon's city manager. He's the person in charge of running city government, and he'd be part of all the big decisions.

Frank's an energetic 41, a dad who drinks Mountain Dew on his way to work instead of coffee, an upbeat, let's get it done type. He says the morning after Rob Mathis posted on Facebook, he sat down with the police chief in a windowless conference room at City Hall, just the two of them. They're both White. They were wrestling with this.

Ben Calhoun

By Charles, he means the officer, Charles Anderson. Peterson admitted, at first, they weren't asking the question of what this officer believed or did on the job.

Ben Calhoun

The police chief, beholding that bonehead decision with Peterson that morning, sitting across the conference table, was a guy in his mid 60s named Jeff Lewis. Lewis looks like a baseball GM from the '80s-- floppy hair, mustache. A little context on Lewis-- he was hired as director of public safety in Muskegon 10 years ago. He was brought in as a reformer. He's a community policing guy.

During his 10 years as chief, he's added body cams, improved the department's dash cams, implemented tougher psychological screening for hiring, and significantly increased the number of non-White officers, though its still pretty low, about a tenth of the force. When this situation popped up with Officer Anderson's house, Lewis didn't dither.

Ben Calhoun

Chief Lewis pulled in his internal affairs team and ordered them to start an investigation. First thing he wanted was the basic facts. Was this Facebook thing true? Did Officer Anderson have this stuff up in his house, and why? That first day, the city released a short public statement, basically the standard, the officer's on leave. We're investigating. More later.

Ben Calhoun

Act 4-- We Know That Guy.

Turns out the officer involved here was already famous in Muskegon, for another controversial incident, even before the Mathises posted online. Though Rob and Reyna didn't realize that when they heard his name.

Ben Calhoun

What happened? This was in 2009. During a traffic stop, a young man, Julius Johnson, who people called JuJu, dropped a bag of drugs and ran. Anderson chased Johnson down a dark street, tackled him, fought with him. Anderson said Johnson started winning, and he shot him in self-defense.

Johnson's sister lived on that block. She said she saw everything, and Anderson was lying.

Ben Calhoun

The Muskegon County Prosecutor's office investigated the shooting and her allegations and turned up a security camera recording that backed up Anderson's version of the story. And so he was cleared. Prosecutors actually brought charges against Johnson's sister for lying, and she went to jail for that.

I talked to the head of the local NAACP about the JuJu Johnson shooting. He's a retired Muskegon police officer and a big police reform proponent. He said Anderson chasing Johnson, getting himself into that fight, that was questionable policing, noting Johnson was well-known. Would have been easy to track him down later and arrest him. But given the evidence, in terms of police policy, it was, quote, "a good shooting."

Still, even though Anderson was cleared, as soon as the Mathises posted about the KKK application in Anderson's house, people were calling him JuJu's killer in the comments. It was like these two things clicked together, like they explained each other. People were like, see, I knew it. That guy's racist.

City officials had to confront all of this in a new way not even a week after the Mathises posted. Muskegon was scheduled to have a city commission meeting, which usually are pretty sleepy, but not this one.

[GAVEL SOUNDING]

Ben Calhoun

People took turns talking, all of them concerned, upset. No one was there to support Anderson. What struck me the most watching it was that three out of the seven people who spoke about Anderson said that they had personally had bad experiences with him, they, themselves. Like, there was a woman named Ebony Davis, who's Black. She's one of Muskegon's leading activists around all kinds of issues, definitely race and policing.

Ebony brought a petition signed by a thousand people calling for Anderson to be fired. But she also said that just the other week, she, herself, had witnessed Anderson doing something messed up.

Ben Calhoun

Ebony told me later that she and another woman had actually gone to City Hall. And they were in the middle of filing an official complaint when they saw the Mathis' post about the KKK application. They were both like, wouldn't it be crazy if this was the same officer we're complaining about? It seemed so nuts, they both laughed.

After Ebony, a gentle-looking guy in glasses named Lowell Kirksey came to the mic.

Ben Calhoun

Now city officials knew Lowell Kirksey. He's a retired city employee, ran the city's youth rec programs for years. Lowell said he'd crossed paths with Anderson three times. Once, Anderson had come to his house over something minor, a construction permit, and was weirdly aggressive. He said his neighbor had a bad incident with him too. And then there was this thing at City Hall.

Ben Calhoun

Lowell later explained to me this thing happened around the time Barack Obama was elected. Anderson started driving around with a big Confederate flag all the way across the back window of his pickup truck, parking it like that at City Hall. Lowell and other Black employees complained about it. Then it stopped.

But Lowell's point was none of this was news. The signs were there, sitting out in the open. Like, maybe it shouldn't have required the Mathises finding a KKK application on his wall for someone to scrutinize this police officer.

In the room, listening to all this testimony, were the police chief, Jeff Lewis, and Muskegon city manager, Frank Peterson. Peterson was actually up on the dais. He told me he and Chief Lewis were texting back and forth while people spoke, and they were alarmed by what they were hearing.

Ben Calhoun

So the question now facing the city was the question that was kind of baked into this from the start, from the moment Rob and Reyna saw that stuff in Officer Anderson's house. Did that KKK application on Charles Anderson's wall correspond to 21 years of mistreating people on the job?

Ben Calhoun

That brings us to Act 5 of our story, Officer Anderson On the Job.

I heard a pile of stories of the way Officer Anderson did his job, and I'm going to tell you one of them. Because it's a great example of how he could be. This thing that happened, happened to a man named Hamid Stalling, who everyone calls Duke. These days, Duke's in real estate, a family guy, married with four kids that he dotes on. Duke and his family are Black.

Duke told me he remembers the day he saw the story about the Mathises, how they saw a KKK application in a Muskegon police officer's house. So Duke says he's reading that.

Ben Calhoun

Duke's run-in with Officer Anderson happened in the summer of 2010. At the time, Duke was 24. And he says life was good. He'd recently become the pastor at a small church, Zion Blue Lake Baptist, which he was really excited about. And he was working at an office furniture company on the assembly line. His bosses loved him, and they were on the verge of promoting him.

And then on July 8, 2010, Duke's mom, Earline, had her 59th birthday party in her backyard. It was a family and friends kind of thing, her brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews, little boom box playing the OJ's and Teddy Pendergrass, a little bit of dancing.

Earline was a devout Christian, grew up in the Baptist church. She didn't drink, didn't smoke. It was tame. Around midnight, everything had wound down, maybe 15, 20 people left, mostly Duke's aunts and uncles. And Duke was on the front steps talking to a relative when an officer-- this was Officer Anderson-- pulled up in a police cruiser alone and started approaching the house.

Duke says he started towards the backyard to get his parents. But Anderson kind of stepped in front of him on the sidewalk next to the house. Duke asked, is everything OK?

Ben Calhoun

It was an odd thing to say, do you want to go down for what's about to happen? It startled Duke.

Ben Calhoun

Duke says he walked down the little sidewalk next to the house, towards the backyard, to get his parents. When he gets to the yard and goes to close the gate behind him, Anderson's right there and kicks the gate back open, hard. Like, there was a bang.

Ben Calhoun

Duke's mom passed away in 2014. Now he owns the house. So he took me outside to show me how things happened in the backyard that night.

Ben Calhoun

Duke could point to where everything was at that moment, the lights strung around the fence, the picnic tables, where the food was, where the cake was.

Ben Calhoun

In Anderson's police report, he says Duke slammed the gate on him to push him back, keep him out. He did that twice. Anderson would later have Duke charged with assault for this. Duke says he just wouldn't have done that to a police officer. He was worried. He was scared. He didn't want trouble.

After that, Duke and Anderson's stories mostly line up. Anderson writes in his report that he shoved his way into the yard, yelled that Duke was under arrest and going to jail. Duke says his aunts and uncles were like, whoa, whoa, whoa, what is going on? They put their arms in front of Duke to protect him from Anderson.

Ben Calhoun

In his report, Anderson describes the crowd as irate. Duke says people were just confused and upset.

Ben Calhoun

It was pepper spray. Duke remembers a few of his aunts, women in their late 50s, got the worst of it. And then it was chaos.

Ben Calhoun

They handcuffed Duke and took him away. Duke didn't have a record, didn't understand what he'd done. They booked him for non-aggravated assault. For months, it seemed like Duke might go to jail, until the charges were finally thrown out. It all kind of wrecked his life for a while. Duke stepped down as pastor of that church. He's convinced the company he was working for didn't renew his contract because they saw his mug shot in the paper.

As you make sense of what happened that night at Duke's mom's, consider what Officer Anderson was reportedly there for. It's listed in police records as a noise complaint. Consider how differently this could have gone if, for example, Anderson had told Duke in front of the house, there's been a noise complaint. I'm just here to ask you guys to keep it down, or when Duke said he was going to get his parents, if Anderson had waited and then told his mom.

His mom, Earline, she knew all her neighbors well. Duke's confident she would have told people, keep it down, and they would have just wrapped things up. When Anderson entered the yard and people wanted to know why he was there, if he'd said, this is not a big deal. I'm just here over a noise complaint, rather than shouting Duke was under arrest and going to jail. But instead, officer Anderson took this tiny complaint and, at so many points, he escalated it. And he ended up pepper spraying a 59-year-old woman's family birthday party.

Something else I want to point out about this story-- it might be the best example out there of how Muskegon city government might have taken a harder look at Anderson years before the KKK application was spotted in his house. Because Duke and four of his relatives filed formal complaints. They tried to raise the alarm about the kind of officer Anderson was.

The department ended up dismissing their complaints and clearing Anderson of any wrongdoing. It did that based on the word of two officers who'd shown up as backup and who hadn't seen a lot of what happened. Duke says no one from the police department ever reached out to him or his family. No one ever called to ask questions, Duke told me, nobody, never.

Duke says he felt stymied and powerless. And in his faith, he thought, God, I'm going to leave it in your hands. And something is going to come to light. And they're going to see who he really is. That was literally his prayer, he said. People don't believe me, so that's going to be my justice.

And so when the Mathises came forward about the stuff in Anderson's house, Duke thought, this is the day he was hoping for. I didn't want anything bad to happen to him, he told me. I wanted the light to be shown. And people would see who he was.

Ira Glass

Ben Calhoun. Coming up, Officer Anderson explains about the KKK application to other policemen and how taking a stand and speaking out works out for the Mathises. That's in a minute, from Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's program-- A Couple Walks Into a House. The story of the fallout in one town when a couple, the Mathises, spots some Confederate flags and a framed KKK application in a policeman's home. I just want to say before we go further, so much happens in this story. There are so many people and moments worth documenting, and also a few very weird plot twists to come, that we're going to tell this over two episodes starting today and finishing next time.

So one result of the Mathis' original Facebook post alerting people about the stuff in Officer Anderson's house, something they were glad to see, was that for the first time in this veteran cop's two-decade history on the force, city officials were now looking seriously into whether he was mistreating Black people on the job. So in terms of results for them, that is something.

Ira Glass

But there were other results too, which brings us to Act 6 of our story, Things Get Ugly. Again, here's Ben Calhoun.

Ben Calhoun

These weeks while the city's investigation unfolded were bad ones for Rob and Reyna Mathis. The backlash that Reyna had worried about when they posted about Officer Anderson, it came, and it was awful. Muskegon, at 38,000 people, is just large enough to have city problems, but also small enough that people are in your business and recognize you at the grocery store. It's a hard place to hide, especially if your face is all over the biggest news story in town.

Rob and Reyna say as soon as they went public, the threats started. Some of it was trolling and stuff they could shrug off, people they didn't know calling them on Facebook Messenger, randos in other parts of the country making threats. But some was ugly, racist, genuinely scary.

Ben Calhoun

One thing to know, the Mathis' house sits in the woods more than 500 feet off the road. To get that picture, whoever this person was had driven all the way back and taken a photo without Rob or Reyna noticing they were there. After that, they sent their daughter to stay with an aunt.

Soon, things started happening in person. Young White men in a car at a stoplight recognizing Rob and Reyna, shouting a bunch of threats, and then speeding off. A couple in a parking lot came up to Reyna, her youngest daughter, and her six-year-old grandson and started yelling, using the N-word. One morning, when Reyna left for work at 3:30 AM, a car was waiting for her. And it followed her the whole way there. She got on the phone with Rob, who was telling her, don't pull over. Just keep going. Car followed her the next day too.

Reyna says several of the Mathis' kids started having upsetting experiences too. An older daughter was working at a restaurant, and she overheard a group of people saying racist things about Rob and Reyna. She got into an argument with them, and the restaurant fired her. Reyna says most upsetting, though, was how everything changed for her youngest daughter, Asia, who was in middle school at the time.

Ben Calhoun

The impact of all of this on the Mathis' lives, they pulled their house off the market, because they didn't want any cars they didn't know pulling up. They were stressed. Rob and Reyna told me they were on edge and arguing, including about whether all this had been worth it. There was also another source of stress, particularly for Rob. And I want to tell you this part of the story because of how important it was to him, and of how important it was to how he saw all of this.

The night I first interviewed Rob and Reyna, this came up. After we'd spent several hours talking, I was getting ready to leave. And he was showing me some of the threats he'd gotten on Facebook. Then he referred a couple times to when I was attacked. I did not understand what he was talking about, so I asked him. Then he pulled down his shirt collar, and he showed me an enormous scar.

Ben Calhoun

From there, the scar continued down onto Rob's chest. It turned out, decades before all this, when Rob was 19, a young soldier in the Army, he went out to a club with a few other soldiers. In the parking lot, Rob passed a guy sitting on a car. And he said, what's up?

Ben Calhoun

This guy jumped Rob, and he cut his throat. He sliced both his carotid artery and his jugular vein. Rob got rushed to the hospital. When he woke up, he had burns on his chest from defibrillation. He'd had a stroke.

He couldn't speak. He couldn't feel his legs. He couldn't move them. He was paralyzed. It took years of rehab before he could regain his ability to speak, to walk, to use his hands.

Ben Calhoun

These two experiences sat on top of each other for Rob. They blurred together. What he'd seen that day in Anderson's house, it placed him back in that feeling from that parking lot, when he was attacked out of nowhere and nearly killed.

Ben Calhoun

Both of these experiences, four decades apart, came with the question, what would the institutions in charge do about it? In Kentucky, where Rob was stabbed, what the government did ultimately didn't amount to much. Police arrested Ron's attacker that night and recovered the switchblade he used at a parking lot full of witnesses. But the man seems to have served only two months for assault under extreme emotional disturbance before he was released on probation.

Flash forward 40 years to Muskegon, Michigan. How will the city handle a police officer accused of mistreating people of color and who's discovered to have racist memorabilia in his house?

Ben Calhoun

We get to that in our next act, Act 7-- The Investigation.

The one time in this whole process that we get a chance to hear Charles Anderson's side of this is when the police department's investigators brought him in for questioning. I don't have audio of this. I just have a transcript. It indicates Anderson sat down with a high-ranking officer working on the investigation, Captain Shawn Bride, six days after the Mathis' Facebook post. Anderson brought a police union representative to the meeting.

Right in the early questioning, Captain Bride asks Anderson to explain the KKK application. Anderson says, quote, "What it is is this is an antique room. Nobody-- nobody ever used it. That item was on the wall because I didn't take the items off the wall, just because I thought it would look better for selling. And I didn't even realize it was on there. I mean, yes, it's mine. Yes, I collect. But I didn't know that specific item was on the wall. I didn't really pay attention."

Anderson then tells the investigator he bought the application at a flea market for $20 or $30. The investigator asks, why? What possessed you to buy something that looks like that and contains that information? Anderson replies, it's part of history, and I love history. And I have thousands of antiques, and I could show them to you. I have thousands.

Next, they talk about the Confederate flags. Anderson tells the investigator, if you go downstairs, I have a very, very large collection of Dukes of Hazzard. You probably know, but The Dukes of Hazzard was a TV show in the '80s which featured a muscle car named the General Lee, which had a Confederate flag painted on the top. And Anderson's love of the show does seem real. Muskegon's city manager told me, at one point, Anderson was bringing his lunch to work in a Dukes of Hazzard lunch box.

Anyway, Anderson goes on here about the TV series, how he's gone a few times to a fan event called Dukesfest down South. Quote, "I have an original script signed by Cougar. My wife bought it for me. I actually owned a car that was painted like the General Lee. I have all their videos. I watch them all the time. I love The Dukes of Hazzard, and that's the reason for the Confederate flags. They mean nothing other than it was part of that collection."

Captain Bride, the investigator, seems to try to help Anderson with this point he's building. Bride says, "So would I be safe in summarizing, as some folks are big fans of college football, people are fans of sailing, you're a fan of The Dukes of Hazzard?" "Yes," says Anderson, "I love them."

As they continue, Anderson flatly denies being a member of the KKK and says he didn't leave these items up to discourage people of color from buying the house. The investigator asks, so a Black Jew from Ethiopia would be welcome if they met your asking price? Yes, they would, says Anderson. Then there's a string of moments like that one, where it feels like the investigator, Captain Bride, is trying to throw Anderson life preservers, like a long stretch where they talk through things that Anderson was commended for, including how he stopped two men, in separate incidents, from killing themselves.

Investigators ask about each man's race. One was White. The other, who Anderson pulled off a bridge, was Black. Later, when Anderson mentions doing community work with someone whose name is blacked out, the detective responds, "Interesting. It's my understanding that one of the tenants of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan is that they're strongly against anyone who is-- I guess the most correct way to say it these days is that LBGTQ community. Would it be fair to say that so-and-so is a strong proponent of that community, and maybe even a member?"

"Yes," says Anderson. "You consider him an associate or a friend?" "I consider him a friend," says Anderson, confirming, yes, he has a gay or trans friend. I asked to talk to Captain Bride about this and other parts of the investigation, but the Muskegon Police. Department said no.

There are lots of things Anderson is not questioned about, nothing about the complaints Duke Stalling and his family filed against him after they were pepper sprayed, nothing about any other specific incidents on the job or about how he treated Black people in general, other than a few broad and very generic questions-- if he's ever allowed implicit bias to affect his work. No, Anderson says. Has he treated people unfairly? No. Has he had diversity training? Yes, he has.

Just to be clear, investigators don't get into the details of Anderson's behavior on the job, because Chief Lewis didn't order them to. His instructions were to figure out whether this thing online was accurate. Did Anderson have the flags and the KKK application up in his house, and if so, why? So that's what they confined themselves to.

Most telling and relevant to our story is the way they wrap up. In the final pages of the transcript, Captain Bride literally invites Anderson to explain away the things he had up in his house. Quote, "For me, Chuck, if you would-- and the pieces have come together for you to do this-- what could you do to explain this away and allow the members of our community to accept you and place their trust in you to be fair and impartial in policing them?"

Here's how Anderson responds. "I would explain as exactly what I already explained to you, why it was there and that it meant no intent. And I apologize if it did, why it created this mess. I mean, I didn't even know it was up there. And it was a mistake. And I meant no harm against anyone. And I've been an officer for 22 years, and this is the first time something like this has ever came out, you know, like this. And I think I've done well. I've treated everyone fairly. I've never had a problem before like this."

Ben Calhoun

One person who did not think Officer Anderson was doing a good job explaining this away was the person who ordered the investigation, Muskegon police chief Jeff Lewis. Lewis told me, at first, sure, the Dukes of Hazzard, American history collector thing seemed possible to him. But he says they asked Anderson to produce evidence of that, pictures of the collection, receipts and stuff. But even with Anderson's job on the line, Lewis says he never did.

Ben Calhoun

For Lewis, the stuff in Anderson's house seemed pretty damning.

Ben Calhoun

George Wallace, famous southern segregationist.

Ben Calhoun

After reading Anderson's transcript and talking to the chief, I still didn't really understand what these items meant to him. Was the KKK application some random thing he picked up like he said, or was this something important to him? Rachael Anderson, Officer Anderson's wife, agreed to tell me more if I kept all my questions to the subject of their collecting and how the KKK application fit into it.

Ben Calhoun

Rachel told me she and her husband have collected all kinds of old stuff for decades. They're not history buffs collecting artifacts from the Civil War, or World War II, or anything like that. They're people who stop at flea markets and antique shops and buy stuff randomly.

Ben Calhoun

As for the Confederate flags and the KKK application, like her husband told investigators, Rachael said the Confederate flags were part of a big Dukes of Hazzard collection.

Ben Calhoun

I ended up feeling like Officer Anderson's account to investigators had mostly been true. He and Rachael didn't seem like card-carrying members of a White supremacist organization. I can see them buying that KKK application without ever expecting to offend anyone. But it said a lot that even two years later, she didn't seem to understand the fear and concern people had about this thing she thought was cool. And she wasn't really interested in understanding that.

So the city's investigation is going. The Mathises are being harassed. And people are waiting. They're waiting to find out what the city is going to do and say about all this. And this did not play out the way I expected it to. Next time, what the city decides to do about Charles Anderson.

Ira Glass

Ben Calhoun-- he's one of the editors of our program. One of the things that he did not expect that we get into next time, the tour of Officer Anderson's house. Rob and Reyna had thought this was some random police officer. And they were shocked to learn that they'd crossed paths with him years before, an incident that they did remember very vividly.

Ira Glass

That's next time, on our show.

[MUSIC - "O ME O MY" BY SON LITTLE]

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Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life.