The Oakland Police are confused?

The Oakland Police are confused.  

That is according to themselves, as represented by their own police officers association. 

In their open letter to the public they said many things.  Many of them had some serious assumptions including about how “past protests have turned into riots” but the worst assumption of all came in one single line:

Is it the City’s intention to have City employees on both sides of a skirmish line?

This is supposing that there is a skirmish line and that the police are on only one side of it.  Here we may be getting closer to the root of the problem.  Have they totally lost perspective on the fact that protesting is one of our basic rights and that the police are supposed to protect us doing it?  If they have lost sight of that, if they were ever not confused on this part of their job, then let’s point it out to them right now.  The Oakland Police are our highest paid public workers and the Oakland Police Department is our most expensive City Hall expense outside of Redevelopment.  We pay a lot, trust a lot more, license them to carry guns in public in our name and we should expect better.  

Oakland has been ridiculed on national television for attacking a campsite with a full on riot squad.  In our city where we have a weekly tailgate party at the Raider’s games that displays all the problems Occupy Oakland is accused of.  The Daily Show made some excellent jokes at our expense and many people stood in city hall and made it clear that all the problems shown in the Plaza were in the plaza before the protest, at any Raider’s game and are in the neighborhoods on any day.  The comparison with our football tailgaters is a just one.  We expect the police to deal with the people getting out of hand.  We expect them to protect all the others, no matter how bizarre they may be.  We expect the police to treat people as gently and respectfully as possible.  We expect them to expect the obvious and be proactive.  We do not allow them to violently overreact to fans who have only committed minor infractions and are not a danger to others.  As professional police officers we expect them to understand this fine line and make it work.  They should know the difference, see the difference and act accordingly.  That is their job.  They are supposed to protect us doing what is legal.  

The police officer’s union has some legitimate complaints with management.  We all should have some complaints with both the political management and the police management of these situations.  

Start with the mayor.

I am among the people who are amazed at what she allowed to happen.  If you are going to order the plaza cleared, well you should at least be here to lead that, supervise that and take responsibility for that.   I have a lot of respect for Ms. Quan, but this was a lack of leadership and very poor judgment.  She should know better about handling protests and she should know better about how our local police do things.  She does know better.  She should tell us why she did what she did.  It is about the only thing that will save her from a recall at this point.  

But do not forget the City Administrator. 

Her description to the special session of Council on Thursday Nov. 4^th was full display of a CYA bureaucrat doing the CYA.  Like so many in our US public life, she gave us a college 5 part essay, poorly written, on how she had done everything the best that could be done and how it was all the protester’s fault.  She had a smug litany of excuses, the dog ate my lunch, the dog bit the journalist, there was nothing to be done but shoot the dog… never did we hear a word of regret or responsibly for the disastrous results of having ordered the police to disperse the camp by force.  

Missing, like a gaping broken window on Broadway, is the fact that they did not try to communicate WITH the protesters; they only wanted to dictate TO them.  At one point she sounded like a cynical lawyer stretching a point saying that City memos, were on the internet, which was good enough because so many of those young people are tech savvy.  At no point did they ever offer to dialog with the protestors really.  It was all about permits and compliance, nothing to do with earning some trust from the people in the square.  It was about her representative getting permission to speak and not about having the courage to stand out there and demand to be heard.  

That is what I did, and if I can do it, anybody could have done it.  

There were problems with the first camp.  Those problems were being addressed and addressed quickly.   They were also being played up and distorted in the press version of things.  That is the version that the city administrator has now adopted.   

If people like me, and I am nobody important, could demand to speak to the General Assembly and insist on dialog with the City and advocate non violence, why not the City officials?

That they were not welcome is a coward’s excuse and that they were not welcome after sending a riot squad against a campsite is their own damn fault.  

Thanks to her antics trust will be harder to earn for the next city administrator who will have to live down her legacy.  Ms. Quan should have taken her resignation the moment she stepped off the plane back from Washington. 

But why stop at the administrator’s office, there is the mayor’s staff to talk about.

At 5 PM the night before the morning raid on the campsite some chosen, invited, community leaders were called together to speak with Quan staffers.  These are the same staffers who never returned my calls and who did not so much as acknowledge the offer of Green Party folk to do whatever was necessary to prevent the violence that ending up taking place.  

Do you think they were talking with these community members to ask them to mediate, moderate, mitigate or anything like that?  NO, they were being TOLD what was going to happen and that was that.  The administration had made up its mind.  The city was going straight to police action.  Some demonstrators had burned one of their memos in effigy and they could not think of any other way to get over the communication impasse.  

In their limited way they really thought that they had tried everything and now they were just ready to offer some 3 rate homeless service and were calling the police to clear the place out.  Ms Quan should offer them new work challenges outside of City Hall.    

Middle management at City Hall needs a wider view of what it means to “try everything”.
The results of how they dealt with the encampment made this clear. 

And now for the Police Management.

Between the bad leadership at the Mayor’s office, and the officer throwing a stun grenade is the police brass.  To start with our Chief Jorden sang a solo in the Not-My-Fault chorus along with some props of his war trophies.  Absent was a lot of explaining to do.  The first thing I would like to know is why after 2 weeks of Occupy Oakland they had not done the groundwork of having some credibility with the protestors?  

Of all the things they could have done to clear the plaza of tents, a frontal assault was exactly the wrong one to choose.  Who came up with this plan?  What was the urgent hurry?  Why was nothing else tried?  How did we go from a poorly written memo from the administration (without a deadline in it) to a frontal assault?

But my biggest question is:  What could be more important to the Oakland Police right now than public support?  Even if the protesters did not cooperate, there were better ways to stop illegal camping or to get a protest to move to somewhere else.  None of those methods were even tried.  Instead we are millions of dollars in expenses down the road with our city’s reputation tarnished again and the Oakland Police’s relationship with the community even further damaged.  

As a person who has had the job of carrying a gun and having to do what others have decided needs to be done, I still have a lot of sympathy for the police, but also some serious concerns about the quality of police work in Oakland.  

This is the same police force that:

• ·         Lost 4 of its own members to the same man and failed to take that suspect alive
• ·         HAS used teargas with Raider’s fans
• ·         Fired cork bullets at an anit-Iraq war protest
• ·         Failed to advert violence and protect the peaceful part of the Oscar Grant protests. 
• ·         Continues to be under court supervision stemming from the Rider’s case

If we had a police commission I would advocate some hearings on quality of their work. 
And I think police management needs to be reviewed on how they came to make these choices. 

We always knew that the police are going to beat a bunch of protesters in a fight. 
Why go out and prove it unless you only view the protest as a skirmish line.  

As the police union points out, this is not the first time we have had a protest like Occupy Oakland General Strike and it is not the first time some elements came with intent to throw bricks.  Everybody seemed to know it would happen.   

What we did not see was a police force ready to act in an intelligent, prepared way.  It felt more like the excuse that they were waiting for.  If City Council holds hearings on the police response, then they should ask some hard questions: 

• 1.       Why they could not be more proactive to cut the violent protesters off quickly?
• 2.       Why they did they not help the protesters who were trying to stop the violence?
• 3.       Why did they resort to teargas and mass arrests again and basically attack both groups? 

We need to ask ourselves if we are not all across some kind of “skirmish line”.

Exactly the wrong thing to do.

Using the police to clear out Occupy Oakland was exactly the wrong thing to do.  

Questions:

• 1.       Where was the emergency? 
• 2.       Is it better now?
• 3.       Was someone saved by this?
• 4.       Is it somehow the fault of the protestors that there is so little trust in government?
• 5.       Is there going to be better trust in government now? 
• 6.       Will the relations between Oakland and our police force improve now?  

What struck me most was the image of the police tearing up the signs and kicking the Occupy tent people’s stuff all over the plaza.  I thought that the Police job was to arrest people and let Public Works clean up the encampment, not to do a violent victory dance over the defeat of those whose politics they oppose.  

I stuck my neck out in person, in public and on line telling the protestors to engage, to accept dialog, to back away from any confrontation and to carry ourselves with dignity out of respect for our fellow citizens and out of respect for the righteousness of our cause.  

It seems that the same message was needed inside our city government this week.  No wonder that they never returned my calls.  And in the end, the police wracked more violence in a couple hours, destroyed more property and hurt more people that Occupy Oakland did in two weeks.  Keep in mind, there was no riot, no emergency, no move made by the protestors other than to refuse to leave.  It was the city of Oakland and the police that initiated the violence and chose its time.  

Many things could have been done instead, especially since there was no urgent problem.

For one they could have given the Oakland Greens (and others) offer to act as a go between a try.   

No calls returned. 

How was that any different from the folk at the General Assembly refusing to speak with the city?

For every protestor arrested this morning, you can figure there are at least 1,000 who supported that cause and at least 100 of their community who will know the person taken away.  You can add this number of people to the already existing resentment and distrust.  You can add this to the history of bad relations between Oakland Police and Oakland.  

We had cops from the suburbs arresting our protestors, destroying poor people’s property, and relishing tearing up our signs and kicking our stuff around.  No good will come of this. 

Maybe they could burn the books from the library tent and make a full show of it. 

Yesterday I was at the Snow Park part of the encampment and we donated a tarp and a big blue ball to the kid’s tent.  My son picked that ball out for those kids from his own toys.  This morning I told him what happened and that all people in the tents, the toys and the big blue ball are now gone, to be trashed by the police.  He felt sorry for one of the kids for whom those were most of the toys he had.  

A number of the people in both encampments were living there before the protests started. Most of the big problems sited in the city’s memos already existed.  Those people will now face jail, inadequate social services and all the situations that made them homeless and living in the Plaza in the first place.  Those 6 children who lived in the camp will be badly hurt by all of this in ways that will leave a lasting effect.  But in our city, some young people smoking dope in the park protesting banks is an urgent situation worthy of high spending and violence to quash.  The hundreds, maybe thousands of Oakland residents who reside nowhere is obviously not so urgent a problem.  Now the two have met the police.  

When my 8 year old overheard adults talking about where the protests go from here he said:  “what protests? now it is more like a war” and sure enough we have something of a war on the streets of Oakland tonight, a war provoked by unnecessary police intervention.

A beautiful thing has been lost.  Occupy Oakland had its problems, but it also had its promise.  There were workshops, books, a children’s zone and some very good community bridge building going on.  The place did not look or feel like a riot, it felt more like a festival.  To quote Zennie “it was bone headed to refuse to talk to the city”.  Zennie is also right on to say that efforts inside the protest were dealing with the problems that the city was complaining about.  All of them, even opening up and inviting the city to come and talk at the General Assembly.  Most of the stories in the press were gross exaggerations and half truths.  Members of the community were also coming out with everything from port-a-potties, protest marchers and just plane willingness to speak with the protesters and promote solidarity and harmony.  Also beautiful and totally justified is the anger expressed towards those who own our economy and the government that serves them and only them. 

A beautiful opportunity has also been lost.  This Occupy Wall Street movement is a watershed in American politics.  Oakland could have been the place where there could have been harmony and cooperation between our local government and this very justified protest movement.  

We have every reason in the world to be mad with Wall Street, the big Banks and the corrupt system of lobbyist based politics that Occupy Wall Street is pulling back the curtain on. 

Now we have every reason on earth to be mad at our local government. 

Have we already tried social programs to fight crime?

Been there? done that?  On social programs for at risk youth? NOT. 

A couple weeks back I had coffee with a person I respect a lot, who is in favor of the new gang injunction, the curfew and all that kind of stuff.  He truly believed that when it comes to social programs that would get to the roots of the problems “we have tried all that”.  I did not argue because I wanted to hear him out, but I think he could not be more wrong.   

Where we are and where we have been all my life, is in a vicious circle of mercilessness.  Tough on crime, war on drugs, three strikes, holding the families accountable, zero tolerance, yeah, we know the catch words.  For almost two generations now, we, as a culture, have been focused on blame and punishment and for those same two generations we have done little to nothing to promote a healthy society or economy, especially when it comes to providing real opportunity and support for urban poor of color.  Our overcrowded prisons devoid of rehabilitation and our failed parole system are two of many monuments to the disaster that this kind of thinking provides.  Our crime rates, especially our violent crime rates, as much as TEN TIMES the rate of Canada or Japan, should be reason for us all to leave our arrogance aside and be willing to learn and listen. 

We have had the politics of the hard line and we now live with the results that it produced.  

So why this belief that we have really tried it the other way?  Why would anyone believe that we have tried the social programs and now we need to get “hard nosed” and “practical” and “give the police the tools that they need”?  

Maybe it is because many elected officials have been saying that they have been successfully providing social services.  So have many non-profits.

If they say it, can it be true?  Well how American would it be to make a token effort, to do a publicity stunt, to change the image and the name, but not really change much of everything important?  

I think we are constantly being told that the social programs are happening. 
But I do not believe that we have given the social solutions an honest try.  

There is the little, local picture.  We have Measure Y, right?  Some judge is doing restorative justice, good?  There are all these programs for youth, right? Don’t we have public housing?  The county has a public health system?  

Only sort of.  When it really comes to delivering services, there is a serious devil in the details. To quote the East Bay Express talking about the local version of the Cease Fire program:

The Oakland call-ins were run through the city's Department of Human Services and in conjunction with the Measure Y violence prevention initiative. According to a final progress report for the Cal-GRIP grant, it cost $828,217, half in city funds, half in state Cal-GRIP money. However, participation in the program was disappointing. Instead of the target of 216 participants, just 103 people took part in the call-ins, with 34 people receiving education services and 56 participants gaining unsubsidized employment.

http://www.eastbayexpress.com/ebx/oaklands-other-gang-program/Content?oid=3006398&cb=796ead685a4e0d5f015caa14402c636a&sort=desc#readerComments (this article spurred me to write this opinion, a shorter version is a comment on it)

Now, we have over 400 shootings a year in Oakland, about a quarter of the victims die.  Just count the numbers from this one grant that helped at most 200 people and ask yourself:  Does it measure up?  Considering the number of people in the justice system, it is only a scratch of the surface. At $800K there are some other questions one might ask too.  Programs like this get held up close to the cameras, while almost all of the offenders in Oakland are going through the revolving door prisons off screen. 

That is not the only place we hold up programs as great hopes and not the statistics that show how little effect we are having because of the sheer numbers.  

Want to look at restorative justice?  All we have are a few small programs around the edge and a lot of talk.  Go to the schools and you will find some very valid alternatives to school discipline and expulsions.   Go down to the court house and you will see young people going through prosecution mills on their way to jail.  The few attempts to get people into some other kind of track are almost volunteer, non profit led and minimal when compared to the number of people involved.  

But be assured that our liberal politicians and our nonprofit executive directors need to make themselves look good to keep getting votes and contributions.  So a lot is made of these efforts that are symbolic at best.  We get a lot of talk about what kind of an example they give.  Examples that the mainstream is not following, unfortunately.  In fact the main stream resists very well thank you.  

Even when Governor Govenator tried to make reforms at the California Department of Corrections he got stabbed in the back by the prison guard unions and others who are part of the “corrections industry”.  They even changed the name to California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitations. A very good former warden was given the top job and was undercut every day of her tenure.   

Ask anyone who has been recently released if they got rehabilitation in the CDCR.  Anyone. 

In the big picture of national and state politics we have never really ended the Reagan years.  With mandatory sentencing, posturing, the re-introduction of the death penalty, the emphasis on blame and punishment, the serious turn away from rehabilitation and all the other counterproductive tendencies in our society, how could a humane, healthy, healing, social solidarity thrive?  How could programs to help the poor survive?  Well, they did not.  The war on poverty got dropped in favor of a war on drugs and a war on the poor.  Not only has our society found ways to consider those of us most in need “undeserving” it has also found a way to blame the poor for their poverty.  

Every social program that the Democrats (and more than a few Republicans) have waived across our TV screens is an exception to the rule.  Reality is that our urban cores have become prisons of poverty and our prisons have become over crowed, racially segregate dungeons.  We have more people in prison as a percentage of our population than any other advanced nation. We have more of our people in poverty too.  As of last month the count was one American in six under the poverty line.  We have as many infant deaths in Oakland as we do murders and we wonder why we have high crime?  

In the last couple years we have had some visitors from other states and nations who have taken a look at our attempts at restorative justice, community policing and wrap around social services.  

One was diplomatic and said that:  “In order to make this policy work we had the full support of the community, the city council, the police, the [prosecutor’s office] and the social services” Doing so they were able to make a serious dent in crime, keeping offenders in the community and practicing some form of restitution, providing support to families in crisis and freeing up the police to focus on the hard core criminals for whom the heavy hand is appropriate.  

We in Oakland can do little about the big state and national picture.
And it does us no good to pretend that we are doing better than we really are. 

But we could practice the kind of unity our visitor described and do a better job with what we have.