There were published reports, about two weeks ago, that former Oakland mayor Jean Quan was being seriously considered for appointment to the Oakland Police Commission. The reports emerged for about 24 hours, then quietly disappeared. It was never clear just who was advancing Quan’s name, or why. My own suspicion is that it was a trial balloon floated by Barbara Lee.
Then the reports vanished, as did a photo showing Quan, who was mayor from 2011 to 2015, leading an anti-police march. I know I saw that photo in the newspapers 14 or 15 years ago. The memory was seared into my brain, that’s how shocking it was: the mayor of a crime-plagued city like Oakland actually leading an anti-police demonstration. I’ve tried to find that photo online: it’s gone. Did someone take it down?
The important thing to remember is that Quan has been a police hater all her adult life. I don’t know if she did this out of personal pique at cops, or for the purpose of her political advancement: probably both. Either way, it was reprehensible.
As Mayor, Quan actively opposed the “stop and frisk” policy that had proven effective in fighting crime in cities as widespread as Los Angeles and New York. She argued that the policy was “racial profiling,” completely missing the point that by far the majority of violent crime in Oakland was committed by Black people. Her anti-police ideology probably stemmed from her membership, during the 1980s, in the Communist Workers Party, an affiliation the media never pressed her on, and which she never acknowledged. And then, of course, there was the humiliating incident, for her, of supporting the teaching of ebonics in Oakland schools when she was president of the Oakland School Board. Quan has, in short, always occupied the extreme left of the discredited woke movement.
The Oakland Police Commission was created by police haters and has been dominated by them for years. It’s an embarrassment for Oakland, akin to having the Ku Klux Klan run the NAACP. The Commission needs to be disbanded immediately. It won’t be, of course, because hatred of the police is still politically convenient here. But we can at least stop stuffing the Commission with delusional leftists like Jean Quan.
Steve Heimoff