It was the lead story on the news last night, and muckraking media like KTVU-TV made the most of it, hoping to drive up their declining ratings and turn the public against the Oakland Police Department again, as they have for years.
The channel made yesterday’s raid on a Black Panther building in East Oakland that is reportedly owned by the Black Panther’s former head, Elaine Brown, sound like the Manson murders. Henry Lee, KTVU’s crime reporter, rushed to get Brown in a sympathetic interview and Brown, desperate for attention in her declining years, was happy to comply. The raid, she implied, was illegal, horrible, evidence of a rogue police department. And, she added for good measure, she’s planning on suing the San Francisco Police Department, which conducted the raid, for violating her civil rights.
We know this game. Maybe Brown can get a nice, fat financial settlement, of the sort ambulance chasing lawyers like John Burris always manage to hustle, taking, of course, their 30% of the cut, or whatever the latest percent is.
What went down was simple enough. SFPD had a warrant for a guy suspected of two armed robberies. They drove across the Bridge to the Black Panther building and found the front door locked. They requested entrance from a building manager. She refused. They told her, repeatedly, that if she didn’t let them in, they’d break the door down. She did nothing but stand there and basically flip them off. Finally, in desperation, they did what they had warned her they were going to do, what they were entitled to do due to the manager’s resistance. They smashed through the glass door, eventually arresting the perp they were seeking.
Now here comes the Godmother of the Black Panthers, Barbara Lee, telling all who will listen that she is “deeply concerned” by SFPD’s actions. Of course she is. “Deeply concerned,” in Lee’s world, means “I don’t like the police and we’re going to find them guilty of something.” It’s no coincidence this is happening within 24 hours of the news that OPD is on the cusp of being released from the unjust, scandalous Negotiated Settlement Agreement, which has hobbled the department for a quarter-century. Although most of us thank God for that, rest assured there are powerful players in Oakland who are very, very upset. They are the same police haters who created the Defund the Police cult, the same ones that foisted Pamela Price and Carroll Fife on us, the same ones who see racism everywhere. They are not going to lightly take letting OPD go free, and it is entirely possible—and likely—that Barbara Lee is going to use this incident to manufacture a crisis in order to keep OPD in chains.
But wait, you say. If it was SFPD that did the raid, then how could OPD be implicated? Easily. Just let the cop haters make their allegations—which at this point amount as usual to smears and inuendoes—and then let the muckraking media mouths like Henry Lee repeat those allegations over and over. That’s how you influence public opinion these days. All that most people will know is that the cops smashed through the door of a building occupied mainly by Black people and Mayor Lee is “concerned.” They’ll see the video repeatedly as it goes viral. And then, at some point, the choreography plays out. Brown’s lawsuit goes forward (bringing more media coverage), her lawyers are given free publicity on TV, and the chant of “What did OPD know and when did they know it?” resounds from church pulpits to social media to barbershops. Lee will pretend to support OPD while insisting that “We cannot let illegal actions go unchecked, even when performed by the police,” and the same revolutionaries that comprised Occupy Oakland, Defund the Police, and Justice for George Floyd will see their chance to resuscitate a movement that had seemed on the brink of extinction. Then will come the newspaper editorials demanding a special investigation, and next thing you know, the Special Monitor will announce that, in view of recent developments that are “concerning,” he regrets not being able, at this point in time, to lift the NSA.
Steve Heimoff