Why Try So Hard to Maintain Order in Oakland, California?

From top left, clockwise: Oakland PD’s Officer John Hege, Sgt. Daniel Sakai, Sgt. Mark Dunakin, and Sgt. Ervin Romans died carrying out their duties as police officers in Oakland.

Update—Officer Hege has died.

I think by now anyone who has read my rantings knows I am a law-and-order type. I hold the utmost respect for the men and women who choose to devote their lives to the job of law enforcement in its many shapes and forms, but I have a special admiration for those out in the field, assigned with keeping the majority of the population safe from a small but increasingly vile group of evildoers who seem to enjoy inflicting their cruelty and chaos on all of us.

And for me, one of the most repulsive crimes is that of murdering a law-enforcement officer in the line of duty. Period.

On March 21, 2009, the worst of humankind reared its ugly head in Oakland, California. I’ve introduced you to Oakland in previous entries about the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) incident on January 1 of this year, when a BART police officer (I believe accidentally) killed a passenger who was being detained for fighting on one of the trains.

My father was born in Oakland in the 1920s. The Oakland of my father’s time—a city he described as beautiful, safe, culturally rich and vibrant—is long gone. Frankly, today it’s ‘da hood, and though city officials are working hard to gentrify the city, it seems to be a losing battle. Police are overworked investigating gang-related crimes, from graffiti to drug trafficking to assault and of course, the murder that no one knows anything about and ends up unsolved.

Yesterday three Oakland police officers were murdered during two separate incidents, but caused by one perp. Today three families are in mourning, another officer is in an Oakland hospital on life support, a fifth is home recovering from minor injuries.

Incident #1 started as a simple traffic stop at 1:15 p.m. Gunned down at that crime scene were Sgt. Mark Dunakin, age 40, who died later at Oakland’s Highland Hospital, and officer John Hege, age 41, who is clinging to life in grave condition. The suspect, Lovelle Mixon, age 26, who used an assault rifle (weapon #1) on the motorcycle officers, fled the scene.

Mixon was no Boy Scout. The convicted felon was on parole for an assault with a deadly weapon, and was also wanted on a no-bail warrant. Sad to say, the city of Oakland is chock full of his type.

Incident #2 occurred two hours later as 200 officers from Oakland PD, Alameda County Sheriff's Office, BART Police and the California Highway Patrol searched the area for Mixon. After locating the suspect thanks to an anonymous tipster, SWAT officers formed a perimeter around the building and went to work trying to contact the suspect. Eventually police entered the apartment, and Mixon jumped out of a closet with a second assault weapon (yes, that’s weapon #2), killing SWAT team members Sgt. Ervin Romans, age 43, and Sgt. Daniel Sakai, age 35, both of whom died at Highland Hospital. A fifth officer, yet unidentified, was grazed by bullets but was treated and released.

(An aside about Highland Hospital. If you suffer from a gunshot wound, it is the place to be. It is where all of the gunshot victims end up. The staff is highly skilled in the treatment and trauma surgery required after innocent citizens and hoodlums end up on the wrong side of a weapon.)

Mixon was killed by the officers who were obviously in fear of their lives.

Former Oakland mayor and current California Attorney General Jerry Brown (a Democrat who is also the former governor of California and wants the job yet again), said this incident “is bad because he’s [Mixon] a state ward, he’s a state parolee, they let him out. There are hundreds of shooters walking around the East Bay. Our parole system isn’t working.”

I am going to refrain from any political sniping though it pains me to do so.

As officers gathered outside Highland Hospital, waiting to hear any news about their fallen friends, a group of protesters organized and taunted the officers. It is theorized the group that taunted the police are individuals experienced in civil unrest, looking for any excuse to scream about police brutality in response to the BART shooting.

I encourage readers to click on the links below for detailed accounts of this senseless act.

I’m not sure what the answer is for Oakland. My late father told me the city started going down the tubes in the 1960s after President Johnson signed sweeping legislation creating plenty of “entitlement” programs, and that was the beginning of the end for many communities just like Oakland. Gang violence is epidemic, high school dropout rates are abysmal, and many children are raised by undereducated single women with absent baby daddies. Attorney General Brown’s remark about Mixon being a state ward leads me to believe he ended up in the foster care system for an unknown reason (unknown by me).

I also know Oakland isn’t a unique case. The city of Richmond, a short drive from Oakland on Interstate 80, is turning into a smaller-scale Oakland. San Francisco is no longer the picturesque city you remember from travel brochures. And how long has Detroit, Michigan, been an unsafe place?

Please join me in praying for strength for the families of Sgts. Dunakin, Romans and Sakai, who lost their lives trying to save Oakland from itself, and pray for a miracle for Officer Hege. Hopefully the fifth officer makes a full recovery and is able to overcome the horror of what he lived through.

And to the fools in Oakland who seem to think police are bad—you’d better hope that there are still police around to take care of your needs should you be unfortunate enough to need his or her services someday.

(There is also a photo available of the fine young felon who started this tragedy, but I chose not to include his photo.)

3 Oakland cops killed, 1 critically injured; parolee slain in gunbattles

3 Oakland officers killed, one critically hurt

Three police officers killed in Oakland shootings

Outrage in Oakland

The Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) cops were on edge the night of New Year’s Eve, 2008, into New Year’s Day 2009. There had already been two major incidents involving guns—one incident at the West Oakland Station and a second at the Embarcadero Station in San Francisco. So when BART officers responded to the Fruitvale Station at 2 a.m. following a report of two groups of riders were fighting on a train that had taken off from the West Oakland Station headed toward Dublin/Pleasanton, transit officers boarded the train at the Fruitvale Station in Oakland. They investigated and detained several people, including 22-year old Oscar Grant, a supermarket butcher from Hayward and baby daddy of a 4-year old daughter.

Grant was no Boy Scout. He had been sentenced to 16 months in state prison back in 2007 after running from a traffic stop while in possession of a loaded pistol. He tossed the weapon into the air and hid in a gas station near his home; San Leandro police shot him with a Taser during the arrest process. He’d also been convicted of drug dealing and had been released from prison on September 23, 2008.

But people do not wear their arrest or felony records and there was no way the BART officers could have known his history.

A brief aside about the Fruitvale BART Station in Oakland. In the late 1990s, a $100 million mixed-use development project was planned and built adjacent to this station. The Fruitvale region of Oakland is, frankly, the ‘hood. The development project consisted of housing, shops, offices, a library, a childcare facility, a pedestrian plaza and other community services. Sounds nice, doesn’t it. It didn’t work. It is still the ‘hood.

If it is at all possible, always avoid the Fruitvale Area of Oakland, California.

After a brief scuffle, police had the unarmed Grant restrained, on his belly, hands behind his back. Witnesses claim Grant asked the officers not to tase him. Grant briefly struggled while on the ground, and an officer restrained him with his knee. A second officer, Johannes Mehserle, appears to be trying to handcuff Grant.

What happens next is clear on video but not clear on reasoning. Officer Mehserle draws a duty weapon and shoots Grant in the low back, the bullet ricocheting off of the concrete and hitting him in the chest. Grant died a few hours later at Highland Hospital, a place that gets more than its fair share of gunshot wounds. (Oakland had 124 homicides and nearly 7,900 violent crimes reported in 2008; in 2007 it was ranked as the 5th most deadly U.S. city.)

In one of the better-quality videos of the incident, Mehserle, a 27-year old two-year veteran BART officer, looks somewhat stunned when the gun went off. Did he think he was grabbing a Taser? We have no way of knowing; Mehserle has not spoken to BART internal affairs or other authorities on the advice of his attorney, Christopher Miller.

On January 7, the day he was to face an internal investigation, Mehserle resigned from BART and took his family to Lake Tahoe to avoid the media pressure and death threats. His first child was born on January 2.

BART does issue Tasers to its officers, but does not have enough of the devices to give to each officer. It is not known if Mehserle was wearing a Taser that morning. Many police agencies order officers to wear the device opposite their dominant hand, forcing the officer to reach over his body to retrieve the weapon. A Taser has a safety device that must be unarmed, along with a trigger and a laser sighting—just like a duty handgun.

Attorney John Burris is already on the case, and has filed a $25 million claim against BART on behalf of Grant’s mother Wanda Johnson, and his daughter, Tatiana. Burris worked on the Rodney King civil case and has litigated several damage awards from local Bay Area police departments.

Thus far I have failed to mention what civil rights advocates are screaming most loudly about: Oscar Grant was black, Johannes Mehserle is white. So what is about to come makes “perfect” sense.

Grant was buried on January 6.

On January 7, a “peaceful” protest which began at the Fruitvale Station soon turned into a full-fledged riot, resulting in numerous burned, overturned or otherwise vandalized cars, 300 downtown businesses suffering broken windows and ultimately the arrest of 105 protesters (70 of those were booked and released). The next day Grant’s mother appeared for the first time at a news conference, asking for a stop to the violence. “I know it's a frustrating time, but Oscar would not want to see all the violence.”

Of course the riots were justified in the minds of the protestors because of the “white versus black” angle of the crime. Nevermind that many of the businesses vandalized in the riot belonged to enterprising African Americans.

Officer Mehserle was arrested on January 13 in Nevada, and returned to Alameda County the next day. He pled not guilty to a murder charge on January 15, waiving his right to a quick preliminary hearing. There will be a bail hearing on January 26 in Oakland.

Because Mehserle has refused to speak to anyone about the incident, the charge at this time is murder I. If and when he speaks to the authorities regarding his state of mind during the incident, charges could be dropped to murder II or manslaughter. Did he accidentally draw the Taser? Did he think he was removing handcuffs from his service belt? Was he going for a gun?

"When you basically have a situation of an unlawful, intentional killing of one individual by another, and that's all you know—and that's really all we know in this case—then that's a murder," said Alameda County District Attorney Tom Orloff.

A repeat of the January 7 riot occurred on a smaller scale on January 14 following what was a peaceful protest outside of Oakland’s City Hall. A small group of protesters broke away from the main group, and yet again innocent local businesses and cars parked along the street were vandalized.

On Thursday, January 15, 41-year old Ken Carrethers went to the local media and claimed that Officer Mehserle used excessive force on him on November 15, after what Carrethers describes as a derogatory remark about transit police, but what Mehserle reported as Carrethers using profanities and directing threats toward the officers.

Also on January 15 and again on January 17, Napa police responded to a report of a suspicious package at the home of Mehserle’s parents.

In an LA Times editorial, Joe R. Hicks correctly observes:

But the emotional reactions to Grant's death raise a related issue. Why have activists in Oakland, or in other urban communities plagued by criminality and gang warfare, consistently turned a blind eye to the "black on black" killings that have occurred all around them for decades?

A recent study by James A. Fox and Marc L. Swatt of Northeastern University in Boston found that "from 2002 to 2007, the number of homicides involving black male juveniles as victims rose by 31% and as perpetrators by 43%."

The typical response whenever a white police officer shoots or mistreats a black person—regardless of the circumstances—is for activists to hit the "go" button and organize protests against "racist cops." However, when a black thug pumps several slugs into another black person, it's just assumed to be the high cost of living in the 'hood.

There is so much we do not yet know about this crime. No doubt there will be a request for a change of venue (hello Southern California!). But Joe Hicks is correct: Oakland, where is your outrage at black-on-black violence? Your young men are killing each other! When will you go to bat for them? There will be justice for Oscar Grant, but what about the 16-year-old victim of a drive-by? Why is his (or her) life less precious than Grant’s?

Video 1

Video 2

A well-done summary article
Was shooting a fatal error?

Behind murder charge against ex-BART officer

BART calls meeting on killing, gets flak

BART appeals for calm as footage shows shooting

BART shooting victim's family decries violence

Man accuses Mehserle of excessive force

What Oakland should be protesting

BART shooting victim's family files claim

Fruitvale Transit Village Project