By Dave Roberts

Oakland’s website prominently touts that it has been ranked by the New York Times as the fifth best place in the world to visit. It beat out every other North American city as well as Tokyo, Florence and Vienna. The Times praises Oakland’s sophisticated restaurants and upscale bars, which are “turning once-gritty Oakland into an increasingly appealing place to be after dark.”

Appealing, perhaps, if you’re a thrill seeker who agrees with Winston Churchill that “there is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at without result.”

Oakland is the most dangerous large city in California and one of the most dangerous large cities in the nation. There were nearly 17 violent crimes per 1,000 Oakland residents in 2011, more than triple the rate in Los Angeles, according to the FBI. Violent crime increased 23 percent last year over 2011. Last year 126 people were murdered in Oakland compared to 103 murders in 2011, according to police. This year could be worse. Four people were shot to death in Oakland in the space of just six hours on Jan. 11.

Police officers are finding themselves outmanned and outgunned. Last week two cops were shot in the line of duty, one in the arm and the other in the leg. Budget cuts have reduced the force to about 615 officers from a high of 837 officers in 2008, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

City officials have finally had enough and are determined to fight back. However, they have been forced not only to fight the criminals and gangs, but also a large contingent of their own citizens who fear and hate Oakland police officers more than they do criminals. 

Leftists and anarchists

They are radical leftists and anarchists, many of whom participated in Occupy Oakland, which took over the plaza in front of City Hall in 2011. Since then they have organized numerous demonstrations, shut down the Port of Oakland on several occasions, held sit-ins and disrupted City Council meetings. Their purpose, according to their website, is to “plan actions, mobilize real resistance, and defend ourselves from the economic and physical war that is being waged against our communities.” They are frequently joined by their comrades from Critical Resistance.

The latest battles have been waged over city officials’ plan to hire former New York and Los Angeles Police Chief Bill Bratton as a consultant, advising Oakland police on how to get a handle on crime, despite limited resources.

When the $250,000 contract came before the council’s Public Safety Committee on Jan. 15, activists did their best to replace democracy with mobocracy. Hundreds protested at a rally in front of City Hall before the meeting, then packed the council chambers where a councilman “struggled to hold back the crowd, who hissed, meowed, shouted and heckled city officials and supporters of Bratton,” according to the Chronicle.

Only the brave have dared to go against the mob. Such as the man who spoke at another rowdy Public Safety Committee meeting last year, saying, “It’s not fair to the public to have this kind of unruly behavior, which really borders on terrorism actually.” That sent the crowd into a frenzy and one guy got in his face and threatened, “Get your ass out of here. You can’t talk. You’re not going to make it home.”

As the crowd chanted “F— the police,” the chairman shut down the meeting. She and the brave man received a police escort out of the building.

City officials are starting to smarten up about crowd control. Before the Jan. 22 meeting in which the whole council considered Bratton’s contract, several council members sent out emails to supporters suggesting that they arrive early so that the protesters would not take up all of the seats in the council chamber. Many of those seats were instead filled by pastors and church members who support cracking down on crime. Most of the protesters were forced into four overflow rooms to watch the proceedings on TV. But hundreds still spoke, often shouting their opposition to Bratton in a nine-hour meeting that ended after 2 a.m. 

Stop-and-frisk

Their main beef with Bratton is that he champions a policy allowing police to stop, question and, if necessary, frisk someone if there’s a suspicion that he’s engaged in or about to commit a crime. Commonly known as “stop-and-frisk,” the practice has allowed police in New York City, where Bratton pioneered the technique, to become proactive, deterring crime rather than simply responding after the fact. Some supporters say it really should be called “stop-question-and-frisk,” because questioning usually is enough.

“Stop-and-frisk is not something that you can stop,” Bratton recently told the Wall Street Journal. “It is an absolutely basic tool of American policing. It would be like asking a doctor to give an examination to you without using his stethoscope.”

And it’s been effective. There were more than 2,200 murders in New York City before Bratton took over as top cop in 1994. Two years later, murders had fallen by 39 percent, robbery 31 percent, burglary 25 percent and car theft 36 percent, according to the Journal.

The problem, as far as the protesters are concerned, is that black and Latino males are the ones most likely to be stopped and frisked, which they consider racial profiling. What they’re unwilling to acknowledge is that minority males, especially blacks, are more likely to engage in crime than other groups. For example, blacks comprise 23 percent of New York’s population, but they committed 80 percent of the shootings in 2011, according to the Journal.

A Manhattan judge, according to BET.com, recently ruled that stop-and-frisk is unconstitutional. The judge said, “While it may be difficult to say where, precisely, to draw the line between constitutional and unconstitutional police encounters, such a line exists, and the NYPD has systematically crossed it when making trespass stops.” It’s likely that the issue will eventually be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, where Bratton predicts stop-and-frisk will be upheld. 

No racial profiling

Oakland officials support Bratton while insisting they adamantly oppose racial profiling.

In a Jan. 18 open letter to the City Council, Mayor Jean Quan praised Bratton “as among the best minds in modern policing. His record is clear: as a chief in New York City and Los Angeles, he oversaw record drops in crime that were consistent and sustained. … We’ve been hearing worries that Bratton’s past policies could be used in Oakland in a way that contributes to racial profiling. I want to address those concerns in the clearest words I can find: racial profiling will not be tolerated in the Oakland Police Department. Period.”

She noted that Bratton’s tenure as Los Angeles police chief from 2002-09 was so effective the Los Angeles ACLU director called his leaving “a terrible loss,” adding that complaints about the police had dropped from more than 10,000 per year to “a trickle.” Homicides dropped 41 percent and overall serious crime was down 33 percent during his time in Los Angeles, according to Bratton.

Oakland Police Chief Howard Jordan, who is black, in his presentation to the council also emphasized his opposition to racial profiling. “I do not support it and won’t condone it,” he said. “We will stop people based on reasonable suspicion.” He also stressed Bratton will only be making recommendations, and that the implementation of policy changes would have to go through him (Jordan) and the mayor.

Of course, one person’s “reasonable suspicion” may be another person’s “racial profiling.” Not surprisingly, the protesters were not mollified by the chief’s words.

“I’m sad and scared to be having a black boy in Oakland,” a pregnant Jessica Hollie told the council. “I was sitting outside a café after a rally. Two boys were walking past me. An OPD officer slams on his brakes and looks at these two boys. I said, ‘They didn’t do anything. They are just walking while black.’ All of a sudden the officers hit a U-turn and with their guns on them screamed for them to get on the ground. Because they were black and have a blue t-shirt on, that’s how they were treated. I don’t want the police to criminalize my son because they hate his father and tear gas him on May Day. We don’t trust the police.”

Police victim martyr

Also mistrustful is Adam Blueford, who is black and whose 18-year-old son Alan was shot and killed by an Oakland police officer last May. The officer was cleared in the shooting because Blueford had pointed a gun at him. The incident began when Blueford and two others were stopped by police on suspicion they were engaging in a drug deal. Blueford ran and was chased by an officer, which led to the shooting.

His father told the council that Alan “was racially profiled before he was murdered. This stop-and-frisk thing will blow up in your face. Our kids will be killed in the streets of Oakland [by the police]. Are we really here to sell our kids out? To ride up on someone for no reason at all, take their rights away from them, be able to harass them, is really wrong for Oakland. Oakland is a diverse crowd of people. Eighty percent of the people who get racially profiled are black and brown kids. Stop-and-frisk is a way to have more people killed and put in jail and a lot more problems for Oakland. Martin Luther King fought and marched for our rights. We can’t give away our rights for our kids. We are Americans, we are free. If you stop someone any time you want to, you have taken away their freedom.”

Alan Blueford has become a martyr for the activists, who cited him frequently throughout the evening. None of them mentioned the 125 other people who were killed last year in Oakland, many of them gang members or innocent people caught in the crossfire. The job of remembering them was left to a group of pastors who support hiring Bratton as a consultant.

“Black and brown boys are dying in the street,” said the Rev. Bob Jackson. “Gunshots every night. We know they don’t have enough police officers to protect and serve the community. 911 calls go unanswered. Automatic weapons are being used in our community. I have to go through this almost every day in the East Oakland area. Families with broken hearts. The mothers, siblings, they have such a hard time with their family members being gunned down senselessly in our streets. It’s just a war zone that’s going on. We need a strategist who can help us keep the public safe in the city. I’m for Bill Bratton coming in. It’s time for us to do something. Desperate times has to do with desperate measures.”

Another pastor told the council, “You should be in my place where a sobbing mother falls into your arms and all she can say is, ‘My baby, my baby, they killed my baby.’ It behooves us to come together as a city as we have never came together before. It behooves us from the hills to the flatlands to say we will no longer tolerate the level of violence in the city.”

The council agreed, voting 7-1 to authorize the contract for Bratton and his associates. After they took the vote, one woman shouted, “Shame on you!”

By Dave Roberts

“God bless them for their spontaneity. It’s independent … it’s young, it’s spontaneous, and it’s focused. And it’s going to be effective.”

            — Nancy Pelosi

The Oakland Museum is currently featuring “The 1968 Exhibit,” wherein you can experience “the peak of the Vietnam War, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, riots at the Democratic National Convention, Black Power demonstrations at the Summer Olympics, feminist demonstrations at the Miss America pageant, and much more.” In other words, a chance for the Bay Area’s graying hippies and leftover radicals to relive the good old days.

But the real thing is very much alive and well at Oakland City Hall where Occupiers are still practicing the ’60s art of bureaucratic intimidation described in Tom Wolfe’s “Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers.” Wolfe described San Francisco City Hall in 1969, where the game consisted of bureaucratic “lifers” catching flak from minorities seeking government handouts.

Forty-three years later, the game plays on. Recently a mob of Occupiers yelled, cursed, screamed, threatened and eventually shut down the Oakland City Council’s Public Safety Committee meeting. They were angry about a proposal to ban weapons at protests.

Oakland has been under siege by Occupy Oakland since Oct. 10, when 147 tents, kitchen and restroom facilities, childcare areas and banners were set up in Frank Ogawa Plaza Park in front of Oakland City Hall. This leftist city’s officials initially embraced the Occupiers. But after two weeks of stench, mayhem and violence on their front door step, even these progressive city officials had enough. On Oct. 25 at 5 a.m. 594 cops stormed into 14th and Broadway and evicted the Occupiers, lock, stock and bongs.

That evening, the Occupiers marched back to reoccupy the park and forcefully were met by police, resulting in burning, breaking windows, spray-painting, tear gas, arrests and injuries. The most notorious injury was to Scott Olsen, an Iraq War vet who received a fractured skull after being allegedly hit by a cop’s projectile, possibly a tear gas canister. It was a major black eye for the city’s progressive Mayor Jean Quan, who was out of town when the battle went down.

City Expenses

Since then, numerous marches and protests, including attempts to shut down the Port of Oakland, have taken place, resulting in millions of dollars in expenses to the city as well as considerable damage to downtown businesses, both physically and economically.

In response, Councilwoman Pat Kernighan proposed banning weapons during demonstrations. The ordinance targets weapons used in previous protests, such as pressurized paint sprayers, heavy sticks, hammers, fire accelerants, shields as large as three feet by six feet, large wrenches, clubs, paint-filled projectiles, large poles, sling shots and fireworks.

“Rather than a sweeping, all encompassing ban on items that peaceful protestors might happen to have at a demonstration, this ordinance targets only those tools of violence and vandalism that have actually been used to the detriment of Oakland taxpayers and peaceful demonstrators,” states City Attorney Barbara Parker’s report. The weapons ban is constitutional because it’s modeled on a similar ban in Los Angeles that was upheld by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and it accords with the city’s duty to protect its citizens, according to Parker.

The weapons ban proposal is not popular with the Occupiers, who see themselves under siege by Oakland police, whom they view as the real criminals. They verbally hammered, clubbed, spray-painted and wrenched Kernighan for two hours on May 22 as she chaired the Public Safety Committee meeting as it took up the weapons ban proposal. The meeting was out of control from the beginning and went downhill from there.

Mark Morodomi, a deputy attorney filling in for Parker, said:

“The city of Oakland supports and has had a long and proud history of supporting peaceful protests and demonstrations. In fact, just this month hundreds of men, women and children marched peacefully for immigrant and worker rights. Unfortunately, a small group of individuals have used the demonstrations in Oakland as cover to commit acts of violence, arson and vandalism.

“These individuals, sometimes clad in black and concealing their identity with masks, have brought tools of violence and vandalism to the demonstrations. They brought cans of fire accelerant, they brought slingshots and hammers. They brought shields, or as described by the perpetrators themselves, barricades. These barricades are as large as six feet wide and made out of corrugated steel, solid wood two-by-fours and metal handles. They brought clubs and poles about the size of baseball bats and longer. They brought fireworks, balloons filled with paint and pressurized paint sprayers. When these tools are brought to demonstrations, the demonstrations become dangerous.

“We hope that the passage of this ordinance will deter people from even bringing these tools of violence and vandalism to demonstrations. We hope that upon passage of the ordinance there will continue to be peaceful protests. And with the passage of the ordinance that all citizens of Oakland will be safer.”

Occupier resistance

The Occupiers were having none of it.

A woman who called herself only Jessa said that the ordinance

“language defining ‘club’ and ‘shield’ are so vague that protesters could face jail time or financial strangulation for being in possession of water bottles, tripods, skateboards, bikes, backpacks and strollers. The decision-making process on what constitutes a club or a shield should not be left to your racist, homophobic, violence-loving, meathead pigs. [Cheers] If you want to talk about safety, let’s talk about dissolving the Oakland Police Department and holding officers accountable for their crimes against humanity. F— the patriarchy and f— the pigs.” [Applause and cheers]

Jessica Hollie, who plans to run for City Council, said:

“If you take away our shields, the only thing we have left is our Second Amendment right. So when we shoot back … [Cheers]. The American flag, the Supreme Court said it is a perfectly protected form of self-expression to burn that piece of sh– that don’t represent nothing except imperialism and f—ing oppression. But guess what, it’s not made out of flammable material so you need an accelerant.”

Stephanie Demos said, “I want to tell you, Pat Kernighan, that I can walk up to you and kill you with a f—ing pencil. Are you going to outlaw pencils?”

When John Reiman came to the podium, he chose instead to face the crowd, saying:

“I want to address the people out here rather than this disgusting bunch of lying hypocrites who masquerade as the Public Safety Commission, when in actuality they are the Public Cover-Up Commission. They are covering up the continual police violence, covering up the daily violence of poverty and homelessness. There’s only one law that operates in this country: Might makes right. How can we get the might?”

Reiman suggested running Occupy candidates for the council, but with the caveat “to make sure that they stand completely outside this gang of criminal conspirators and are running to bring down this gang and the entire system and the corporate world that is destroying the lives of all of us. The only thing they respect is power.”

Conspiracy theories

“This is a fraud,” said Joshua Smith. “This is the militarization of local law enforcement and the criminalization of dissent.”

Smith launched into a litany of conspiracy theories involving the CIA, NSA, DHS, FBI, ICE, Coast Guard, the White House, the State Department, nationwide fusion centers, the ATF’s Project Gunrunner and Operation Fast and Furious, Mexican drug cartels and the Federal Reserve.

“The Occupy movement struggles against the 1 percent to bring to the people their police, their weapons, their private prisons, their corrupt freak show politics, their illegal and immoral global war for domination, their propaganda media, their warrantless wiretap surveillance, their corporate-sponsored military poverty draft, their poisonous food additives, their debt slavery and they sell out American manufacturing,” said Smith in perfect ’60s-speak. “The Occupy movement brings solidarity, defiance, insubordination, posters, fliers, civil disobedience, hacking, file-sharing and the occasional strike or mass gatherings for free speech.”

Ian Briggs said he’s been assaulted three times by the police:

“Twice people with shields stepped in front of me to protect me during those assaults. It’s a sad commentary … when those who have been forced to stand between the forceful and violent and those that are unable to defend themselves are actually called Occupiers instead of police. The people are not going to stop. We have valid objections. We believe this is our constitutional right. If you take the shield from us, the only thing left is a sword. This will escalate the violence in Oakland.” [Cheers]

A female attorney said:

“Everyone is repeating we are so proud of our history of protest. It is not safe to protest in Oakland because over the past seven months protestors, including peaceful protestors, have been tear-gassed and shot at with rubber bullets and police projectiles and batons and beaten and seriously injured. And the Oakland Police Department has arrested almost 800 protesters in this city in the past six months. So clearly everyone agrees it’s not safe to politically protest in Oakland and to exercise your first amendments rights to do so.

“The anger you’re hearing in this room is the result of the fact that we feel the Oakland Police Department has attacked us with a military force that involves tanks and tear gas and riot gear. And the response of the Public Safety Committee of our city is to ban our shields.

“The deepest problem is that you will set a precedent on the pre-emptive policing of protesters. This ordinance makes it a crime to hold items that in and of themselves are not illegal. And no illegal act has to be committed. But a protestor having those items is automatically a criminal because of the potential that they could actually commit a crime. If the problem here is broken windows, arrest people who break windows. If the problem is property damage, arrest people who damage property.”

She said that charges have yet to be filed on 90 percent of the approximately 800 protesters who have been arrested.

Attack

Melvin Kelly said:

“When you take away the shields, when you take away our chance to, like, be on the defensive, all you leave us is, like, to attack.” [Cheers]

Dave Fierstein, an Oakland teacher, said:

“The violence you are trying to stop is the violence of the people. Which is the violence to overturn the state, to take care of your jobs, to seize the power that belongs to us that you have been misusing. That’s real violence. And that’s the violence you’re trying to stop by taking away shields. Because that’s the only violence a shield can do. It’s the violence that allows for change, what we call revolution. [Cheers] You see, that’s the violence that we are bringing. It doesn’t have to be violence with hammers or torches or pitchforks or spray cans or shields or whatever. No, our violence is that we are going to change the system to take away every one of your jobs.”

There was only one man – Vincent Suave, an ex-Marxist who has lived in downtown Oakland for 26 years – who dared speak a contrary word. “I’m not a supporter of the Occupy movement,” he said. “I think it’s awful that they are being so disrespectful of you people here.” The crowd started shouting him down. Kernighan, who had finally had enough, barked, “People, shut the hell up. We listened to you.”

Suave said:

“Maybe in the future you should make restrictions on disrespectful behavior. Because it’s not fair to the public to have this kind of unruly behavior, which really borders on terrorism actually.”

The crowd started going crazy.

Kernighan said:

“We are ending the meeting. Sir, I’m sorry that it’s out of hand. I apologize that you did not have the opportunity to speak in a democratic meeting when everybody else had an opportunity to be heard.”

A guy got in Suave’s face and said, “Get your ass out of here. You can’t talk.”

Suave responded, “You don’t know what democracy is if you can’t listen to somebody.”

The guy said to him, “You’re not going to make it home.”

The crowd chanted “F— the police” and other slogans as the committee members and staff packed up and left. Kernighan and Suave received a police escort out of the building, according to one report.

Mau mau

Three weeks later, Kernighan got the mau-mau treatment once again. About three dozen demonstrators marched to her home, followed by a half dozen police cars, according to the Contra Costa Times. Police and Kernighan’s neighbors witnessed the occupiers chanting, ringing her doorbell, and burning an American flag while singing “America, the Beautiful,” but with the words changed to “America, f— you, f— you, f— you.”

Days later, the Occupiers received vindication of sorts from an independent review that criticized Oakland police and administrators’ handling of the Oct. 25 protest. “The crowd control tactics used by OPD are outdated, dangerous, and ineffective,” concluded the report, which was overseen by a former Baltimore police commissioner.

Quan, whose image has taken a terrible beating for her ineffectiveness and incompetence during the siege, sought to do damage control with a statement, “This is not an easy report to release, but we are committed to confronting the truth and implementing meaningful reforms.”

But any PR gains Occupy might have realized by this were offset when Occupiers recently protested a conference combating child sex trafficking. Defending child sex trafficking is a tough sell, even in Oakland.