Others, though, may think Quan and the OPD are caught in a damned-if-they-do-damned-if-they-don’t dilemma. San Francisco Chronicle reporter Demian Bulwa, who was covering the protests, said on today’s show that while police were hanging back and definitely did not have control of the situation, they have been criticized in the past for escalating confrontations with demonstrators. In fact, just two weeks ago, the City Council approved a $1.17 million settlement with 12 Occupy Oakland participants who were injured during two 2011 protests by beanbags or flash-bang grenades. A couple of weeks before that, both Oakland and Alameda County agreed to pay $1 million in damages to arrestees who were protesting the sentence of Johannes Mehserle in 2010 for the shooting death of Oscar Grant.
“Evidence in the case showed that the Oakland Police Department violated a 2004 court order concerning the handling of large numbers of protesters,” the East Bay Express wrote.
And of course, OPD is now overseen by an outsider, an appointment made as part of a deal to avoid an unprecedented federal takeover due to lack of compliance with reforms mandated in a settlement over the Riders police misconduct case.
Acting Police Chief Whent said on today’s show that the lawsuits had nothing to do with the department’s lack of aggressive action during the recent protests. “You try to not provoke and to not get hurt,” he said. “Our focus is safety over property. … We’re going to review what happened. I think we probably could do better.” He said the crowd was very dispersed and hitting a lot of different areas, thwarting an effective response. Whent acknowledged that staffing was inadequate on Saturday, after news of the verdict broke, but said that on Sunday, “we planned better.” Last night, he said, “we staffed similar to how we did on Sunday expecting the same type of crowd, but obviously it was a different type of crowd that showed up.”
Quan also said “we need to do better,” and that there would be a review of the police response. The mayor said the decision to devote more police resources to demonstrations is not an easy calculation. “When we do that, we have to take police out of our community. (That’s) something we need to weigh every day and every event.”
The mayor made a distinction between “real demonstrators” and the masked vandals who have been rearing their heads at the end of protests. “There are people who were peacefully and legitimately demonstrating and (the vandals) consistently hide within these crowds,” she said. “People who are from Oakland who do regular demonstrations actually have … as much security to keep people they don’t know out of their demonstrations as to actually doing the demonstration. These protests have been much more spontaneous and a lot less well organized. It’s frustrating to the organizers of the demonstrations, too.”
Quan characterized the violent protesters as coming from outside Oakland. “They obviously don’t know the city very well,” she said, citing the vandalism of two well-respected local nonprofits.
The Oakland Tribune held a live chat today with Paul Junge of the Oakland Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce, discussing how the local business community feels about the vandalism and the city’s response. He said, among other things, “There is frustration that the events happen again and again.”
Listen to the show …
