A TALE OF THE TWO'S

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a column called "Clever Children" which criticized the Mayor for giving his "State of the City" address to the private Chamber of Commerce and not to the public at City Hall. The night before the Chamber of Commerce event, the Mayor actually did give a City Hall speech. Both of them were billed as "State of the City" addresses.

A reader emailed to criticize me for not having done my homework. A couple of others said that the Mayor must have relented after he read my column.

Neither is correct.

They Mayor’s decision to speak at Council chambers was made before the "Clever Children" column was published. How long before, I don’t know. None of my friends at City Council knew about the City Hall speech before it appeared on the Council agenda, the Friday before the column appeared. By the time I got the news a few days later, it was too late to change the item.

I suppose I could ask the Mayor’s office when the decision was made. But getting accurate information out of those folks is sometimes an adventure…

On the same night of the Mayor’s City Hall speech, the Council was discussing the city’s new community policing policy. And that reminded me of two stories.

My parents operated an East Oakland grocery store for forty years or so, and during that time, it was a gathering place for the community. Sometimes, on warm Friday afternoons, men from the surrounding factories would put out a grill on the sidewalk next to the store and cook barbecue and tell jokes until the sun went down. More often, neighborhood folk would pull out milk crates and eat potato chips and brown-bag their beer. These were mostly older men…the Budweiser boys, not the Old English crowd, if you know what I mean. Every once in a while there was an argument, but not often. Mostly it was old friends getting together to sit out in the sun and tell lies. There was an old jackleg preacher who’d come around and hook up an electric guitar and sing. He couldn’t sing a lick, and might not have saved any souls, but it was a nice diversion.

My mother tells me that in the late 90’s, an OPD officer got assigned to the area, and for some reason he took a disliking to the milk crate men. He’d roust them every time he saw them, threatening arrest. Once, he took the milk crates and tossed them, one by one, onto the roof of the store. The officer never stepped foot inside the store to ask the owners about the men outside. If he had, he would have found out that the men were old customers…some of them had been doing business with my family for the entire four decades…and among other things, they were considered a robbery deterrent. A store is less likely to be held up if there are witnesses outside. It’s also a cultural tradition…an Old World thing…old men spending the day at the marketplace to keep up with the news. But maybe the officer was from another culture.

My mother tells another story. There were a couple of Mexican-American families living near the store, and sometimes the kids would get out in the street and play football. One afternoon, my mother saw a police officer stop his patrol car, get out, and call for the ball. She ran outside to tell the officer to leave the kids alone, just in time to see him lofting a perfect pass down the street. He stayed out there fifteen minutes or so, grinning, sending the kids on route after route, until the sweat rolled down his face. Then he got back in his car, wiped off, and rode away.

One neighborhood. Two OPD officers. Two different ways of doing business.

I suspect that OPD’s relationship with our less-white and less-affluent communities has less to do with what type of community policing policy is adopted, and more to do with the type of police officers that hired and the attitude the commanders convey and demand. If OPD officers have the idea that they are in Kabul or Mogadishu, then that’s how they’re going to act.