The Informant

• Extended Interview with Oakland City Attorney John RussoTranscript follows.Download

Q: Who exactly are you trying to sue and why?

A:JOHN RUSSO: First and foremost, we’re going be working in conjunction with the district attorney’s office. They have the lead role in dealing with criminal matters. So, we’ve traded messages, we’re in agreement to work together on these things. Some of the folks who were arrested are being arraigned at 2 o’clock today. I know that the District Attorney intends to seek restitution for businesses that have suffered losses at the hands of vandals and other folks who were using legitimate public anger about the Mehserle verdict to trash Oakland.

Oakland City Attorney John Russo

So what we want to do here in this office is to work side by side with the District Attorney. The District Attorney handles criminal matters – we want to look at some civil lawsuits against some of the worst offenders to recover some of the city’s costs in dealing with the cleanup, in dealing with the policing, and I think as importantly, to get some type of prospective relief so that people who are from outside of town who are coming here to trash our city using, again, people’s legitimate upset as an excuse to do that kind of dirty business. We don’t want ‘em here.

Q: I see. So just out of curiosity, what kind of legal precedent is there for this kind of suit? This sounds kind of like a stay-away order.

A: It would be in the manner of a stay-away order. What we’re looking at is, we’re looking at the state nuisance laws right now, but more detail I can’t give you, not because I don’t want to, just because we’re researching it. We would definitely be trying something here, we would be not only using nuisance law, we will use whatever legal tools that we have available to us and I met with some of my staff this morning, and I anticipate in the next two weeks or so having some type of a legal action going.

Q: How has your office identified these individuals who would be named in the lawsuit? Are they among those who were arrested last Thursday, or has your office worked with other agencies to identify them, like the Oakland Police Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation or other state and local law enforcement agencies?

A: First things first, we’re looking at the arrests that were made. And we’re immediately putting to one side arrests based on failure to disperse or failure to obey a police order. Those type of things, we’re not interested in going after those civilly. Some of those are situations where people just get angry or they’re expressing civil…you know, a strong tradition of civil disobedience.

We’re not interested in dealing with protestors. What we’re interested in dealing with is stopping vandals, basically. Stopping people who want to trash Oakland. So first and foremost, we look at the arrest records, but we will also be investigating social networking sites and other online opportunities to identify people who came here and trashed our city.

Q: I understand that there’s been a lot of talk about anarchists…Has there been any sort of coordination with the Joint Terrorism Task Force or the FBI?

A: No, none. And honestly, I’ve seen in the paper people who use the term “anarchists.” I use the term “poseurs.” Anarchists have an ideology. You may not agree with the ideology, I may not agree with their ideology, but there’s a long tradition. Anarchism has a tradition behind it that goes back quite a long way. These guys aren’t anarchists. These guys are just people who want to take an opportunity to act out some type of personal psychodrama and who knows what they’re about. Because I can’t figure out how some white guy comes into Oakland, a city that’s more than two-thirds people of color, and just start smashing up the town to prove he’s against racism? I can’t follow that. There’s no logic to that. That’s not anarchism, that’s racism.

Q: I was out there last Thursday night until quite late and it seemed like there were a lot of people there from different backgrounds, including quite a few people of color.

A: No, we’re not debating that. We’re not debating who was out there. We’re debating who’s smashing up the stores, we’re debating who’s defacing property, we’re debating who’s trashing Oakland. We’re not talking about people being out there. People are more than entitled to be out there. In fact, on a personal level I would encourage being out there. A lot of us were unhappy with what happened. But that’s one thing. It’s quite another thing to use a tragedy like what happened to Oscar Grant as an excuse to go and start acting out…there’s nothing political about smashing up some African-American woman’s store windows.

Q: Even if it’s African-American youth doing it? I was in front of the jewelers on 17th and Broadway I did see a group of African-American youth going through the window.

A: I’m not debating that either. I’m not concerned with that. That’s unfortunate and that’s too bad and that contravened the express wishes of the Grant family. That’s just too bad that those people did what they did. What I’m concerned about specifically is what has become a pattern when people are upset and protesting and exercising their right to protest in Oakland, that we get groups of people who are not from Oakland, who are not about protesting at all but are just over here to vandalize our town. Let’s be really clear, this is not about trying to stifle political protest, this is about making it safe to protest politically and exercise civil disobedience.