Peg Hunter
On last night’s show, we checked in with Oakland Mayor Jean Quan about her decision to dismantle the Occupy Oakland camp in Frank Ogawa Plaza. And we checked in with KALW’s Ali Winston, who’s been covering the movement in Oakland. Transcript after the jump.
Ali Winston
Tear gas obscures the intersection of 14th & Broadway in Oakland
Over 2,500 people have been arrested across the United States as the Occupy Wall Street movement has spread from its genesis in Lower Manhattan to over 1,000 American cities and municipalities, where occupiers struggle with city officials for control of public spaces. But the previous scenes of mass arrests in places like Chicago’s Grant Park and on the Brooklyn Bridge paled in comparison with the chaos that broke out in Oakland this week.
The Occupy Oakland movement has run up against one of the country’s most troubled law enforcement agencies, and a community that has grown impatient waiting for its reform. The projectiles police fired in clashes with protesters seriously injured a young Iraq war vet, Scott Olsen, which helped draw national outrage over the scale of force that police used. That sort of violent over-reaction and the tactics associated with it are, however, all too familiar in Oakland, where police have repeatedly responded to public protest with violence and have faced intense scrutiny for shooting unarmed suspects in black neighborhoods, in some cases fatally.
Ali Winston
Last week, Oakland Police Chief Anthony Batts announced his resignation from the department, citing what he said was excessive bureaucracy.
ANTHONY BATTS: No chief wants to be in a position where he or she is being held accountable but doesn’t have the power to make a dramatic impact.
It was a move some people saw coming: Batts’ department has been taking legal heat lately forfailing to make court-ordered reforms. He’s also had some highly-publicized conflict with Oakland mayor Jean Quan. KALW’s Ali Winston has more on what’s next for the city’s police force.
Oakland’s Police Chief Anthony Batts announced today he’ll resign his post and leave the city sometime in November. Batts says he’s retiring, at least temporarily, from active law enforcement because Oakland has not allowed him the proper resources and independence to turn around a department that’s been struggling with budget cuts and federal oversight for years. Joined by Oakland Mayor Jean Quan and City Administrator Dianna Santana, Batts more fully explained his decision in a press conference this afternoon. Listen to the full press conference above.
Some of California's major cities have appointed city attorneys, others are elected. What's the difference?
People in the Bay Area who pay attention to local issues likely know the name of their city attorney–or at least, the name sounds familiar and conjures vague associations with city hall. That may be because San Francisco’s Dennis Herrera and Oakland’s John Russo make more headlines than a lot of their peers–and that may have something to do with how they got to office.
Herrera, now a candidate for mayor, has variously taken on and inserted himself in some of the major high-profile political issues of the day. In 2004, American Lawyer called his office “one of the most aggressive and talented city law departments in the nation.” When Proposition 8 passed, banning same-sex marriage in San Francisco, Herrera joined the lawsuit against it. Herrera also introduced San Francisco to gang injunctions. Using an interpretation of nuisance law pioneered in Los Angeles, Herrera has obtained civil injunctions that bar the movements of gang members in five zones throughout the city.
rezlab
The past few months have seen deteriorating relations between Oakland City Attorney John Russo, members of the City Council and Mayor Jean Quan over the city’s controversial plan to license marijuana production and implement gang injunctions to fight street crime.
In an interview yesterday with the Bay Citizen’s Aaron Glantz, Mayor Quan proposed one way of settling the dispute: revising Oakland’s charter to do away with elections for the City Attorney’s office and let the City Council appoint someone to the post.
Should Oakland go down this path, it would be in line with five of the largest cities in California. Below is a breakdown of how the Golden State’s ten largest cities fill the post:
Henderson Images
In years past, the Oakland Police Department has caught flack for heavy overtime expenditures. A decade ago, the annual bill for police overtime consistently ran several million dollars over budget. OPD and the Oakland Police Officer’s Association maintain that a lack of manpower and a high rate of calls for service justify the expenditures.
However, complaints by Oakland’s own city auditor over extra police hours led to an investigation into the matter by the Alameda County Civil Grand Jury in 2005. The grand jury’s report, which found no clear evidence of misconduct or manipulation of overtime assignments by individual officers, did reveal “massive expense overruns” due in part to “insufficient administrative controls.” Checks and balances to prevent abuse were not working, best exemplified by the grand jury’s findings that two officers with positions of importance with the police union were earning disproportionate amounts of overtime.
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