E-mails Between Oakland City Hall and Police Reveal Deception and Collusion About Crime and Violence to Justify Scandalous Crack-Down on Peaceful Constitutionally Protected Occupy Oakland

KTVU:

Ktvu obtained more than 1,000 internal emails between Oakland City Hall and police through a public records request that show just how stressful of a situation it was for leaders.

Before you devote too much energy empathizing with the "stress" created for Oakland's public servants by peaceful Constitutionally protected demonstrations among the citizens who voted them into their positions and in whose names they govern, presumably with some expectation that the fraught business of governing in a democracy will indeed be a stressful business -- which is why we tend to honor and respect such difficult service, after all -- I hope you will remember that the protestors were in the Plaza precisely because theirs, too, was a "stressful situation," a situation of deep and profound suffering, distress, exploitation in reaction to injustices far more profound.

In one message written Oct. 13, a sergeant said he'd been confronted by protesters camping at Frank Ogawa Plaza and that one implied they would remove officers by force if they entered the camp without permission. Five days later, Deputy Chief Jeffrey Israel told Chief Howard Jordan, "We can either wait for a riot, or order them to cease their night time occupation." Soon after, images of the protest began making national and international news.

You did notice, there, that the, er, "let's actually wait for a riot or something bad actually happening" option was disregarded.

In the days leading up to the Nov. 2 march on the Port of Oakland, city leaders warned about the drain on police resources. When Jordan received an update that crime was actually down 19 percent in the last week of October, he wrote an email to one of Mayor Jean Quan's advisers. "Not sure how you want to share this good news," he wrote. "It may be counter to our statement that the Occupy movement is negatively impacting crime in Oakland." Police and the city said Occupy has had an ongoing impact on their ability to respond to crime.

In other words, the surreal armed confrontation with peaceful protestors in the streets of my Oakland, images of which have been seared in the minds and memories of millions, introducing overwhelming force and destruction where there was none, simultaneously drained the resources and so undermined the capacity of the police to do their jobs elsewhere in the city where there were actual crimes and acts of violence to attend to. I do hope we are all clear, by the way, about the strategy the City adopted for "shar[ing the] good news" that crime was down considerably during the protests. They lied about it. They knew they were lying. They used the lies to justify their own criminal violence against their own citizens peacefully protesting in their own City about injustices that concern us all.