MR. HENDERSON SWINGS, MR. BROWN DUCKS
Buddhist references to Oakland Mayor Jerry
Brown tend to get stale from overuse. Still, you just can't help saying that it's
karma when the man who sat on his hands and did nothing while the Oakland public
schools were being seized by the state is now in danger of having his upcoming state
attorney general candidacy put in some difficulty by a threatened federal court takeover
of the Oakland Police Department.
In early 2003, the City of Oakland settled with more than 100 residents who fielded
a lawsuit claiming they had suffered serious mistreatment by Oakland police. Among
the actions Oakland police were accused of were racially profiling African-American
and Latino citizens, beating folks without legal justification, lying on the witness
stand, and planting false evidence against suspects. The settlement is often mistakenly
called the "Riders settlement" by the local press, after four West Oakland
police officers who called themselves the "Oakland Riders," and who were
fired and faced criminal charges on some of these matters. But the Oakland police
misconduct lawsuit, filed by attorneys John Burris and James Chanin, involved many
more police than just the four Riders.
Part of the 2003 police misconduct settlement was that the Oakland Police Department
put systems in place to keep their officers from breaking the law. But OPD has been
a little slow in complying, leading to a severely-critical report by the court-ordered
Independent Monitoring Team last December. So this week, according to the Oakland
Tribune, U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson gave Oakland a stiff lecture,
warning police and city officials in his courtroom that "unless the Police Department
shows significant progress in the coming weeks, he will consider citing the city
or city officials for contempt of court. The most serious sanction the judge could
order [according to the Tribune] would be to strip the city of its power over the
department and put a caretaker in charge." Judge Henderson gave the city until
April 25 to come up with significant progress.
This is no idle threat. Henderson is the same judge who has been monitoring prison
guard misconduct at Pelican Bay State Prison for years through a Special Master,
forcing needed reforms, and recently warned Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger that he would
order the federal takeover of the entire California prison system if the state did
not stop mistreating its prisoners. The judge has a reputation for being serious
about making sure that law enforcement officials and officers don't go outside the
law.
Knowing what probably was going to happen in Judge Henderson's court this week may
be at least one possible reason why Mayor Brown so suddenly reversed himself in naming
an interim police chief.
When Chief Richard Word left the Oakland Police Department last November, Brown refused
to name a temporary replacement (a search for a permanent replacement is ongoing,
but it may be delayed until after a new mayor is elected next year). Anyway, instead
of immediately replacing Word, Brown chose to run the department himself through
City Manager Deborah Edgerly, a command-and-control nightmare that left nobody in
the ultimate decision-making position who had ever strapped on a gun and covered
a police beat.
One wonders why Jerry Brown would want to run the Oakland Police Department when,
after all, he has shown little interest in working in the job at which we are actually
paying him…running the City of Oakland. And, after the lessons of Oakland Parks chief
Harry Edwards or Assistant City Manager George Musgrove as school superintendent,
one would have thought he'd had his fill of the idea that just because a guy is smart
in one area, you can put him anywhere, to run anything.
(The sad experience of Harry Edwards is still fresh in Oaklanders' minds, but
people may have forgotten that in the days after Carol Quan was forced out as Superintendent
of the Oakland Unified School District, Mayor Brown had Mr. Musgrove moved over from
the city manager's office to run the school district, even though Mr. Musgrove had-um-no
experience running a school district. The results weren't pretty. Mr. Musgrove seemed
generally surprised one afternoon when he received a storm of protest from teachers
after he arbitrarily moved up the date for district-wide, state-mandated student
testing. Not having ever run a school district, it apparently never occurred to Mr.
Musgrove that thousands of people in the district might have been spending as much
as year of preparation pointing toward the original test date.)
Anyhow, none of those experiences seemed to faze Mr. Brown, who resisted-for two
months-sometimes heated calls from the public, the Oakland Police Department, and
Oakland City Councilmembers to appoint an interim police chief. Asked about his refusal
by the San Francisco Chronicle's Matier & Ross political columnists last
December, the mayor gave one of his typical smart-ass answers to serious issues he
wants to avoid, saying "Interim chief? What's does that mean? In between? Everyone
is interim–we're all in between something." (I'd put in a gratuitous Buddhist
comment here but, like I said, those things can get quickly worn out.)
One can only speculate that Mr. Brown–who has no experience as a practicing lawyer
since passing the California bar many, many, many years ago–needed to buck up his
qualifications for state attorney general by putting the "he's had hands-on
experience running a city police department" handle on his résumé.
But Mr. Brown suddenly switched gears, this month naming retired Alameda County Assistant
Sheriff Wayne G. Tucker as interim Oakland chief. And so it was Interim Chief Tucker
(and not Mr. Brown) who had to stand in the courtroom and listen to the scolding
from Judge Henderson, the judge stating "I haven't seen anything like this in
25 years. This is contemptuous. I'm so angry at the slap in the face, the ignoring
of this decree." It was Interim Chief Tucker (and not Mr. Brown) who had to
admit that the OPD suffered from a "failure of leadership" for not following
the orders of the misconduct consent decree. And it was Interim Chief Tucker (and
not Mr. Brown) who, according to the Tribune report, "promised it would
not continue under his watch."
City Manager Edgerly made the trip over to San Francisco, but if Mr. Brown was even
there–which is doubtful–it wasn't mentioned in either the Chronicle or the
Tribune reports. Not a good record for a man who wants to be able to tell
voters he was tough enough to send cops out every day and night in harm's way.