Mayor Jean Quan and Interim Chief Howard Jordan held a press conference yesterday at which they addressed the use of force against Occupy Oakland protesters by Oakland police and other agencies. KTVU has raw video of a portion of the press conference.
At the briefing, Jordan said that to his knowledge, no Oakland police officer used rubber bullets, wooden dowels, or flash-bang grenades. He said the gas balls rolled at people's feet to disperse them may have been mistaken for the grenades. When asked, Jordan said it was possible that other departments had used types of non-lethal force that OPD doesn't have in its arsenal. Quan said a mutual aid agreement requires other agencies to abide by Oakland rules.
Quan, who was out of town on official business in Washington D.C. when the raid occurred, said she had asked the chief "to do just one thing...to conduct the raid when it was the safest for both the police and the demonstrators." She said she was informed by City Administrator Deanna Santana when the raid was in progress and watched it on TV. She said "it seemed like the [morning raid] had met its goals. It seemed that was done as peacefully as possible...But I'm now hearing that maybe there was one or two incidents. But I don't know. We've asked the police department to investigate, we've asked the Inspector General to do that. I'm very likely going to ask, when this is all over, the community policing review board to take this on as an issue...so we can learn from this and change any mistakes that were made."
Yesterday news emerged that an Iraq War vet had sustained a skull fracture during a series of clashes between police and protesters Tuesday night. Scott Olsen is recuperating at Highland Hospital in Oakland after his condition was upgraded from critical to fair.
Quan is taking a huge hit -- at least on her Facebook page. Nearly 11,000 comments have been posted so far -- none of them, at first blush, expressing the sentiment "nice job."