The Informant

Ali Winston

Fruitvale injunction defendant Ruben Leal addresses the Oakland City Council on May 17, 2011

After six hours of heated, often rancorous debate over Oakland’s gang injunction strategy, the City Council moved to continue with the city’s controversial anti-crime strategy by one vote shortly after midnight Wednesday morning. Councilmembers Larry Reid, Ignacio De La Fuente, Libby Schaaf and Patricia Kernighan voted to continue funding the injunctions, with Nancy Nadel, Desley Brooks and Rebecca Kaplan in opposition. Councilmember Jane Brunner abstained from the vote.

Alameda County Superior Court Judge Robert Freedman is expected to decide soon whether or not to approve Oakland’s second gang injunction, which targets 40 alleged Norteños in the Fruitvale.

Around 300 people packed the council chambers and gallery for the meeting, a reflection of the high politicized environment surrounding the. One hundred and fifty-seven people spoke on the issue (224 had initially signed up). Some supporters of the injunction made their voices heard, but the majority of those present opposed the injunction.

Police Chief Anthony Batts and OPD’s entire command staff were present at last night’s hearing — a sharp contrast to the chief’s no-show at a council hearing earlier this month.

The Fruitvale injunctions, Batts told the chamber, are “not a panacea, it’s not the final solution. And it is not the thing that will end crime in the city of Oakland.” But, The chief said his department needed injunctions to keep a lid on violent crime. According to Batts, 58 percent of Oakland’s 39 murders to this year have been gang related and that the city has 940 entries in the statewide CalGang database, including 381 Nortenos and 253 Border Brothers.

Batts offered to have the North Side Oakland and Fruitvale gang injunctions evaluated independently and put a halt on any further injunctions — a proposal the council incorporated into their final decision, approved by Mayor Jean Quan.

“We should be held accountable, we should be monitored and questions should be asked of us,” Batts said. When serving as police chief in Long Beach, an investigation by the Long Beach Press-Telegram found the city’s gang injunctions had not reduced violence in targeted neighborhoods and the gang members targeted by the civil suits had continued to commit crimes after the injunctions were approved.

Outgoing City Attorney John Russo did not attend the meeting. Deputy District Attorney Rocio Fierro, one of the lawyers who is prosecuting the injunctions, told the Council that the true cost of the injunctions was around $100,000, since staff time is already billed. “If it’s intended to address public safety, then the costs are minimal,” Fierro said.

Councilmember Desley Brooks and Nancey Nadel countered with allegations that the city has spent around $1 million in pursuit of gang injunctions. Nadel characterized the City Attorney’s figures as “creative accounting,” while Brooks lamented the council’s decision to support policies she believes “are not remedies in the long run.”

Moreover, Brooks opined that the injunction is a damning statement about how some Oaklanders and the city’s police department view young people of our color, alleging that race was the elephant in the room and that Oakland’s high-crime reptuation was being used to ram through the injunctions.

“Fear is prevalent and is used so much in our society to try and get people to move in certain directions,” Brooks said. “I don’t care how my colleagues try to couch it- to pretend like we haven’t expended resources that would have been spent another way is not being honest.”

The public speakers against the injunction read like a who’s who of Bay Area police accountability activists. Among those present were Oscar Grant’s Uncle Cephus Johnson, Andrea Pritchett of Berkeley Copwatch, Rashidah Grinage of PUEBLO, Nation of Islam Minister Keith Muhammad, representatives from Youth Speaks, the Ella Baker Center as well as defense attorneys and defendants from the Fruitvale injunction.

Organizations turning out in support of the injunction included civic activist group Make Oakland Better Now, the Oakland Chamber of Commerce, and the heads of various Neighborhood Crime Prevention Councils from across the city (which were influential in pushing for the initial North Oakland injunction).

At-Large Councilmember Rebecca Kaplan unsuccessfully put forth a motion to limit legal expenditures by the City Attorney when cases reached a $100,000 mark. She also chastized “out of town” LGBT activists for trying to sway her vote and wondered why Oakland could not put an injunction on “out of town activists” who were blamed by City Attorney Russo and others for property destruction that took place after the involuntary manslaughter conviction of Johannes Mehserle last July. Both remarks drew jeers and outbursts from the crowd, visibly frazzling Kaplan.

Kernighan, who heads the Public Safety Committee, has long expressed her belief that Oakland law enforcement need the injunctions to keep crime down. She also took issue with the partisan atmosphere that has characterized public debate over the anti-gang strategy. “There really are people who are afraid to come here and be intimidated and booed – they just can’t take it,” Kernighan said, adding that some residents in the target neighborhoods have been pleading for injunctions. Almost on cue, she was booed.

As the council neared their vote, more than a dozen uniformed OPD officers spread out on both levels of the council chamber and outside the hall to ward off any potential disturbances. Following the 4-3 decision, the room was silent save for one blurted expletive. Injunction opponents then filed out quietly.

Speaking to reporters outside the chambers, Mayor Jean Quan expressed mixed feelings about the council’s decision. “I think it’s way too broad” Quan said of the Fruitvale injunction. She believes the best way forward would be to cut loose some of the defendants with non-violent histories or good records with their parole or probation agents. “Maybe we can try to conserve resources and get a mediated settlement,” she said of further court proceedings. “I want to get the costs down.”

The mayor also said the gang injunctions had caused serious harm to Oakland’s other violence prevention measures, remarking that the issue is “sucking up all the energy in this city.” Quan said that when she came into office, the city’s other anti-gang programs such as the call-ins had stalled because the North Oakland and Fruitvale gang injunctions had raised suspicions that the intervention and prevention programs were a stepping stone to the more restrictive court orders.

Quan also voiced concern that the “displacement effect” of gang injunctions (i.e. pushing crime from enjoined areas to those not covered by the civil lawsuits) had already occurred in Oakland. Defendants from the North Oakland injunction, Quan said, had been detained committing crimes in West Oakland, which saw a rise in crime following the passage of the North Oakland injunction. While Oakland will not pursue an additional gang injunction, Mayor Quan does believe in using “case-by-case” stay-away orders against violence criminals.