AND, SO, ANOTHER SET OF HIGH-SPEED POLICE CHASE (SIDESHOW) DEATHS
We didn’t do anything about it when
it happened the first time and so, perhaps, that is why it has happened again…a high-speed
police chase, supposedly from an East Oakland “sideshow,” ending in the death of
innocent bystanders. Saturday night, it happened on 90th and MacArthur Boulevard.
As always when the East Oakland “sideshows” are involved, it’s important—if you wish
to get to the truth—to save the articles and official statements, read the fine print
carefully, and check current “facts” against the “facts” as previously presented.
Official “facts” given out about Oakland’s sideshows are like houses built on the
Hayward fault—the ground tends to move under them and if you don’t pay attention,
some of it ends up disappearing altogether or changing so much you can hardly recognize
it.
Reporting on the first court appearance of 33 year old Oakland resident Amiri Bolten,
Oakland Tribune staff members Harry Harris and Kristin Bender write in Thursday’s
paper that “Bolten's 1988 Chevrolet van … first attracted the attention of police
near the intersection of 73rd and Ney avenues about 9:20 p.m. Saturday because it
was blaring loud music. Officers stopped the van and while walking up to it smelled
marijuana inside, said Traffic Officer Jeff Thomason.” Thomason, it should be noted,
was not one of the officers involved in the incident; he’s just the one who talked
with the reporters. The Tribune account goes on to say that after the officers
walk up to the van “without warning, the van sped off and officers pursued it, radioing
to other officers and supervisors that they were in a chase.” According to the the
Tribune account, Bolten sped up 73rd Avenue to MacArthur with the police following
some blocks behind, turned right, and then roared through a red light at 90th and
MacArthur, hitting a Nissan Sentra driven by 25 year old Jessica Castaneda-Rodriguez
of Oakland. Castenda-Rodriguez was killed in the crash, along with a passenger, 21
year old Salvador Nieves Jr., also of Oakland. A second passenger, a 24 year old
San Leandro woman, was hospitalized in critical condition.
The Thursday Tribune report said that Bolten was captured trying to run away
from the accident scene, and that officers “found marijuana in the van.” The paper
reported that Bolten has been charged by the Alameda County District Attorney’s office
with “vehicular manslaughter with gross negligence, one count of evading police causing
injury or death, hit and run, and a parole violation.”
But not DUI or possession of marijuana, even though that was the underlying offense
which was supposed to have triggered the pursuit in the first place? An interesting
omission, but perhaps that was an oversight, either by the DA’s office, or by the
reporters, to be corrected as we go on.
In any event, the Harris-Bender Thursday morning Tribune account of the chase
and accident were slightly different from those printed in the Tribune on
the previous Monday, this one attributed to Tribune “staff reports.”
In the Monday story, the Tribune said that “Strategic Area Command officers
were in the vicinity of 73rd and Ney avenues about 9:20 p.m. Saturday when they saw
a full-size 1988 Chevrolet van involved in ‘sideshow’ related activities, which can
include reckless driving, people hanging out of car doors and doing ‘donuts’ in the
street.”
This is an interesting way to characterize the initial circumstances, don’t you think?
The Tribune “staff reporters” don’t actually say that the Chevrolet van was
doing “reckless driving [with] people hanging out of car doors and doing ‘donuts’
in the street.” In fact, it doesn’t even say that such activity was going on in the
vicinity at the time the police stopped the Chevrolet van. Why, then, one wonders,
did the Tribune include the reckless driving, etc., in the original story?
Was it actually going on at the time at 73rd and Ney, or did they just add it, for
“color”? Perhaps the good folks at the Tribune will someday explain.
Three other items are notable in the original Tribune story. The article says
that “police said Bolten appeared under the influence of alcohol while driving,”
but does not mention any marijuana. It also says that “the names of the officers
chasing Bolten were not released,” although it doesn’t say why this should be.
Why is the marijuana important to this story, both its absence in the original
Tribune account, and its addition later?
Without the “smell of marijuana” from Bolten’s van, what we are left with is Strategic
Area Command officers riding through what the Oakland Police Department officially
calls the “sideshow zone,” stopping a car because of “blaring loud music,” and then
chasing it after the driver ran away. If this was the case, then two innocent young
people are dead, and another is in critical condition in the hospital, because the
City of Oakland has decided that “blaring loud music” is a serious offense. At least,
it is in the “sideshow zones” of East Oakland.
(A “sideshow zone,” by the way, is not the official police description of the location
where a sideshow is actually taking place. It is the Oakland police designation of
geographic areas—all in East Oakland—where they enforce traffic laws in a stepped-up
way. No sideshow has to be occurring—or ever have occurred in that location—for this
stepped-up enforcement to take place.)
The Castenda-Rodriguez/Nieves tragedy is agonizingly similar to the death of 22 year
old U’Kendra Johnson, who was killed on Seminary Avenue in the early morning hours
in February of 2002 by a driver, Eric Crawford, who was also being chased by Oakland
police.
Back in 2002, police said they’d seen Crawford spinning donuts on Foothill Boulevard
just before they started chasing him, and most newspaper and television accounts
at the time blamed Johnson’s death on the sideshows. Before Johnson’s death, there
had not been any deaths at or near a sideshow, and very little reported violence,
even though murders were rampant on the streets of Oakland. The Johnson death ushered
in the hysteria over the sideshows, and became an instant political platform, with
State Senator Don Perata naming an anti-sideshow bill after Johnson, and gruesome,
in-color accident-scene photos of the car Johnson died in appearing on the cover
of two candidates running for Oakland City Council to promote those candidates’ positions
of cracking down on the sideshows.
The fact that witnesses denied that a sideshow was taking place at the time that
police began chasing Crawford, or that the accident had more to do with a police
chase and Crawford’s drinking and driving, were lost in all the general uproar.
U’Kendra Johnson’s mother eventually filed a wrongful death action against the City
of Oakland, the Oakland Police Department, and the two officers involved in the high-speed
chase of Crawford, but she later quietly dropped it, without comment. And Oakland
police said that while the officers did chase Crawford, they never got close enough
to have any effect on the accident. (That’s the same position currently being taken
in the Castenda-Rodriguez/Nieves accident.)
U’Kendra Johnson’s death—and the official attribute of it to the sideshows—opened
the political floodgates against the sideshows, leading to Oakland City Council passing
Mayor Jerry Brown’s “arrest the sideshow spectators” law, and the setting up of the
so-called “sideshow zones” in East Oakland, where Oakland Police officials openly
admit that they enforce traffic laws different than in the rest of the city. Under
this policy, police crack down on minor traffic violations in East Oakland, not because
the drivers are involved in sideshows, but on the theory that doing so will prevent
sideshows from occurring. In any other city, that would be called both discriminatory
and unconstitutional. In Oakland, they are getting by with it.
The high-speed police chase over a “sideshow” incident that led to the death of U’Kendra
Johnson in 2002 got covered up, so that most Oakland citizens never knew that such
a high-speed police chase ever took place. Now we have another one, in which two
more innocent citizens have been killed.
This time, maybe, we should pay closer attention to what is being done on our streets
by the people we are paying to protect us.