The Informant

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Below is an email exchange between Oakland Police Captain David Downing, the head of OPD’s Support Operations Division, and OPD Officer Charles O’Connor. The May 8 communication is essentially a clarification for rules of engagement (ROE) for OPD officers preparing for the verdict in the trial of Johannes Mehserle. Former Mayor Ron Dellums and members of the city council had participated in previous demonstrations following Mehserle’s shooting of unarmed BART passenger Oscar Grant on New Year’s Day, 2009. In a telephone conversation earlier today, Capt. Downing said the participation of city officials had caused “operational difficulties.”

Also noted is the practice of confiscating video and photo equipment found on arrestees. Capt. Downing referred to this as standard practice for arrests because footage or pictures taken by suspects can be “fantastic evidence” if they happen to document someone committing a crime.

Downing did not comment on his remarks concerning Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O’Malley except for qualifying his words as “personal opinions, and certainly not those of the police department as a whole.” (Text after the jump.)

Charles,

To answer the first issue, I don’t think we will have a problem this time with council

members or the mayor. Earlier in the year I briefed the Mayor’s Office about New

Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day events. I advised that if city leaders join the

crowds in protest, that I would arrest them like everyone else. Dellum’s is lucky the

City did not get sued for what he did. His actions led directly towards additional

vandalism taking place to local businesses. I think they learned their lesson on the

last one. They have not been a problem since then. I will be ready to act if the

decision needs to be made.

Issue two, yes we can take telephones and video equipment as evidence and we

did that last year. Sometimes it works for us; sometimes it does not. Last year we

took their telephones and hardly anyone got charged. During the 4 Mar 10

education protest, we didn’t take any phones and they charged almost everyone.

However, it is an election year and Nancy O’Mally wants to get elected this

November, so she is going to do whatever we ask.

The problem with taking cell phones is that we do not have enough investigators to

process them all for evidence. You would have to run each one through a “cell

phone stripper” and review all the pictures and video from each one. It is a time

consuming process for misdemeanors and infractions; although, the greater benefit

is achieved by temporarily denying the opponent their communications. I will have

to weigh the option of taking telephones into evidence. Our ops tempo will dictate if

we have the time to recover and turn in the evidence.

Capt Downing