.

The rank and file cops represented by OPOA are pissed off that Quan's decisions or lack thereof have made and will continue to make them look like fascist pigs at the same time that Quan encourages other city employees to join the strike on Wed.

Quan wants to have her cake and eat it too, at the expense of the residents' trust in their own cops.

You are somewhat falling into Quan's trap by phrasing the question "whether police will allow them to march to the Port of Oakland" .

Unless Quan wants to say that neither she nor her new chief can control the cops (she is yet to make that claim, but i'm half expecting it), it is mostly a matter of whether Quan will exercise her authority to direct her chief to direct his cops to allow them to march to the Port of Oakland and under what conditions if for example some jerks take the opportunity to smash peoples' vehicles and stores along the way.

Quan doesn't get it that she's the one in charge. She's not back in 60's Berkeley fighting cops. She can't blame her cops' actions on the UC Regents, Big Corporations, rich white people. She's in charge.

If she can't control her own police force, she should resign immediately rather than put us through the trouble of recalling her.

-len raphael, temescal

Vote No on Quan's H,I,J

Recall Quan

Based on that reasoning, how many mayors should have resigned or will be told to resign due to an out-of-control police department run by its union which has openly defied more than one mayor (remember, it was Jerry's administration that gave us the Riders scandal and subsequent NSA)?

Pam, if Mayor Quan agrees with you that OPD is "out of control" she should immediately request Governor Brown to send in the National Guard or perhaps hand over control of OPD to Judge Henderson.

-len raphael, temescal

Vote No on Quan's H,I,J

Recall Quan

Maybe so, but I'm just askin, did you want Jerry and Ron to resign, too, the OPD lost it?

Len, Pam has a point.

if my faulty recall is correct,  JB  personally selected wayne newton to be opd chief from the number 2 position at Alameda County Sheriff's Dept.

He did it for two bad reasons:

a. in return the state wide Sheriffs' Assoc endorsed JB for Attorney General as "tough on crime"

b. Wayne was a paper pusher kinda guy who would implement cya "systems" that would make the monitors feel warm and cozy

The guy was clueless about urban crime and managing OPD in the Oakland political envoirment.

Would I have impeached JB for that? Nah, it was just typical JB delegate and depart, pay no attention to operating details style.  Do i regret voting for him? Yes.

---

Dellums we should have recalled because he and the City Council found it convenient for Wayne to blunder along for another few years while people killed each other on the streets.

Then his dumb 7Mill ? waste of Measure Y money to recruit cops.

Do I regret not working to recall him? Yes.

---------------------

it's "common" knowledge that Batt's lost control over the OPD somewhere in between the time Quan and Kaplan defied him at the Grant's riots and his failed attempt to split for SJ.

Did Quan care? No public signs of it other than her and the CC rejecting or "sending back for study" every suggestion he had for reducing crime.

My sense is that Quan only paid attention to cops when they shot someone or made her look bad to progressives.

Because she believes cops are useless at best for reducing crime, she only tried to manage the cost of cops  instead of seeing them a resource that could reduce crime. 

If she were going to manage and hire police properly she should have backed Batts, she should have put a charter amendment on the ballot to revoke binding arbititration for cops and fire contract disputes. Then she should have demanded permanent substantial compensation reductions. Then she could have afforded more community cops without the big OT.

Instead she went along with Council's pledge NOT to Revoke binding arbitration, only got a delayed 9pct pension contrib, and only got a two or three year delayed raise concession. 

Basically, she laid off a net of at least 40 young cops plus attritition, but protected the compensation and ridiculous OT of the older cops.

Senior cops came out fine, Quan looked tough on negotiations, residents got screwed with fewer but still unaffordably expensive cops.

Quan's interest lies in funding anti violence and other social programs. It's an interest both ideological and political, in that some of the ngo's are essential patronage jobs.  If the patronage aspect was not there, one would think she'd insist on rigorous evaluation of cost effectiveness of the programs so as to optimize the bang for the buck.

But no, the Measure Y evals are as self serving as OPD's NSA compliance internal documentation.

There is no question that there are some highly effective anti violence program models that Oakland only pays lip service to because they don't fit into the patronage framework here.

To cap it off, Quan finds what she thinks is a yes man to head the dept who turns out to have a bit of backbone, who is not cooperating on taking the fall for the tear gassing, bean bags and worse at OO.

-len raphael, temescal

Vote No on Quan's H, I, J

Recall Quan

.

Cops are human too. They don't "identify" with the 1%. 

They are really tired of getting demonized and caught
between incompetent officials with conflicted goals and electorates.

i'm tired of getting played by cops, officials, non profits in exaggerated guns vs butter type policy disputes.

len raphael, temescal

Vote No on Quan's H, I, J

Recall Quan

len, the police already have an organization which speaks for them. it's called OPOA. just saying.

erik, unlike you, I consider the cops for better or worse to be our cops.

We elected officials who hired supervisors who hire and fire cops. That makes the cops ours, not an "occupying army".  

if we don't like what the cops are ordered to do, we vote the officials out of office, recalling them if need be as it is for Quan.

I haven't noticed any greater political power that I hold because i'm a white male upper middle resident.

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Pam, are you still involved in Lakeshore BID?

Can you confirm or refute the report that the door locks on several Lakeshore retail stores, many locally owned, were glued shut on the morning of the strike?

Three employees of a store in the Oakland section of the Emeryville shopping center told me that was done to their store and to that of several other neighboring stores.

-len raphael,

Vote No on Quan's H,I,J

recallquan.com

"erik, unlike you, I consider the cops for better or worse to be our cops.

We elected officials who hired supervisors who hire and fire cops. That makes the cops ours, not an "occupying army"."

Len, it's ok if you want to post your own opinion on my articles -- although you do have a blog so perhaps your longer comments would be best reserved for that space, lest you be accused of thread-jacking. but please don't presume to assume that you can tell me what my opinion is, especially when you are making misleading statements which don't actually reflect my opinion. that's called plagiarism.

I'd like to take your comments at face value and have a civil discussion around the points you raise, and the greater question of public safety and who's accountable when things go awry.

But unfortunately, I can't follow your logic at all here. It just doesn't fit the facts, which are that officers in riot gear from 17 different agencies on Oakland streets do indeed constitute an occupying army and are not "our cops."

As for our actual cops, I am curious to know how the investigation into recent allegations of excessive force by OPD are proceeding. If they are indeed our cops, then we, the people, have a right to full accountability and full transparency with regard to police actions. That's it. it's really quite simple.

We don't get to elect our police chief. We also don't get to set policy around use of force at the ballot box. So right there, those are two big holes in your argument.

The competancy of elected officials is one thing, the accountability of law enforcement another. Muddling the two only leads to confusion.

This may seem obvious, but voting politicians out of office doesn't directly impact OPD. We've had three mayors since 2003, when the Negotiated Settlement Agreement was instituted in the wake of a federally-mandated call for reforms following the Riders situation. Despite those changes in leadership, OPD has yet to be in full compliance, despite receiving several extensions to the NSA and the looming threat of being placed under federal receivership, which could happen in 2012.

That ongoing lack of accountability from non-compliance with the NSA is an undercurrent to every subsequent incident involving police. not only that, but it impacts public safety because many community members are distrustful or mistrustful of OPD. If they're "our" cops, they need to earn our trust. If they could do this, they would be more effective at solving crimes in hotspot areas, where investigations are often compromised because witnesses don't come forth out of fear or unfavorable personal experiences.

See where this is going? Basically, more police accountability would result in less crime. In other words, there's a direct link between police accountability, public safety, and effectiveness of law enforcement tactics.

Eric, yow!! That was a long comment.  Len, we'd love to see you blog more, you know that.

as you know, context is everything, susan. ;)

len, this comment intrigues me: "the Measure Y evals are as self serving as OPD's NSA compliance internal documentation.

There is no question that there are some highly effective anti violence program models that Oakland only pays lip service to because they don't fit into the patronage framework here."

this is kind of off-topic for this article, which was about public safety concerns before the march (in retrospect, should have asked O/O organizers how they planned to deal with fringe elements) but i'd love to see more on the Measure Y meme. your last blog was pretty short.

eric, it's pretty safe to take my comments at face value. You might have noticed that subtlety is not my forte.

Thread jacking, another new blogging term for me. Curious, wouldn't you rather someone "threadjacked you" if it was on topic, than just get lurker silence?

Not to threadjack you, but one of the themes in Oakland politics is what i see as the false choices that our pols pose between cops and programs. 

In practice, the pols cave to the cops on pay and benefits and OT, as long as the cops accept reductions in total numbers so that the total budget line item doesn't change too much.

By caving to the pay demands, the pols can say we can't afford more community cops, who properly supervised could earn the trust of the residents.

We have spent i don't know how many millions on monitors for the NSA over the past 9 years or so. Apparently nothing to show for it except for mountains of paperwork filled out.

Hard to believe Judge Henderson is stupid. So I assume that the monitors in cooperation with OPD must have generated reports that made the Judge think we were progressing satisfactorily. Up until what 6 months ago when he said we weren't.

Go to the Measure Y site and read some of those independent evaluation reports. You will laugh when you read the ones that measure success based on questionaires filled out by program particpants asking questions like "after starting this program, how likely are you do something violent on a scale of 1 thru 10"   Yes, i'm exaggerating but not by much.

An acquaintence tonight told me of a presentation of another City program that does job training for youth and prison re-entry. They gave the backup for what they claimed was a 30% success rate. It was how many trainees held a job 6 months after placement.  6 months. Not 1 year. Not 18 months.

The use of underemployeed social science grads to produce monitoring reports of cops and evaluations of anti violence/job programs serves the interests of our elected officials to keep the status quo: inadequate, poorly managed policing, and inadequate, poorly managed social programs.

Was that threadjacking ;)

-len raphael, temescal

Vote No on Quan's H,I,J

recallquan.com

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len, threadjacking is when a comment strays off the original topic of the article and goes into another topic. i'm all for a detailed analysis of measure y, which can identify where it's effective and where it isn't. but that's not the topic of this article.