Sarah Ravani is a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle. She writes a lot about the Oakland Police Department, and none of it is complimentary. In fact, every time Sarah writes about OPD it’s with a nasty, negative tone.
Journalists are supposed to be politically neutral in their reporting, but that ethical guardrail was abandoned long ago, at least in the case of people like Sarah. With her, any news about the cops is bad news; she keeps her eyes peeled for anything remotely critical about OPD, so she can add to the cacophony that exists in Oakland about how horrible the police are.
A good example of this bias is her retrospective of OPD’s recent past. She could have focused on how the City Council consistently and deliberately underfunds OPD, but she didn’t. She could have focused on our cops’ courageous struggle to do their job in the face of this underfunding, but she didn’t. She could have focused on individual officers doing outstanding work against impossible odds, but she didn’t. She could have reported on the main reason cops, including police chiefs, quit OPD so often—the outrageous interference with the department by meddlesome, left wing outsiders, like the Special Monitor—no fewer than seven different bureaucracies, comprising dozens of cop haters, oversee OPD--but she didn’t. So what did Ravani focus on?
“The department’s troubled past.” It’s right there in the headline, in case anyone fails to get the point. Ravani is like one of those deranged adolescents who loves to trap insects, like a praying mantis or a grasshopper, and then set them on fire, just to watch them suffer. She’s a sadist, in that sense: Someone who gets her jollies making others look bad.
She gets into the Riders “scandal”—now nearly a quarter of a century old—by her third sentence. Of course, this Riders episode has kept many careers alive for years, not only Ravani’s but Robert Warshaw’s. Never mind that not a single Oakland cop was every convicted of anything, despite having been charged with felonies. You’d hardly know that, what with the frequency Ravani and her co-conspirators trot out the Riders myth, implying that to this day Oakland cops are brutally attacking Black people. If anything, it’s the other way around.
Also on Ravani’s list: a 2005 case in which a man who had been arrested for drugs swallowed the contraband, packages of heroin, in order to prevent the cops from finding them. He died, rather predictably, from choking, but that wasn’t enough for Oakland’s cop haters, who argued the death was due to—you guessed it—“police brutality.” This is Ravani’s turf: it’s why this non-incident made her list.
Ravani then resurrects another old case, this one from 2006, in order to prove OPD’s alleged incompetence. This one involved a sexual predator whom OPD was investigating for child molestation. The perp then committed another assault while his case was pending: Ravani uses the time lacuna to suggest that cops were out eating donuts instead of actively pursuing the case. This is pure Ravani. Why pull this particular case from the vault? To smear OPD.
Then, of course, there’s the negotiated settlement agreement, brought to us and continued for all this time by Warshaw and his pet, Orrick (or is it the other way around?). For Ravani, it’s big news that they keep extending the NSA every time some cop fails to dot an “i” on a report. She loves the implication that Oakland cops are incompetent, unprofessional louts, rather than accepting the truth that Warshaw is a grifter who’s using the NSA to enrich himself because he knows he can get away with his shit forever.
But wait, there’s more! Sarah also unearthed a seventeen-year old case in which a cop groped more than a dozen Asian women. That’s bad, yes, but for Ravani, one bad apple spoils the entire Oakland Police Department. (I’m sure if she went through her employer’s files she’d find some scumbags who worked for the Chronicle.) She won’t report on OPD’s heroes, the men and women who save our lives every day. She won’t report on the department’s outstanding diversity. No, she has to go through the garbage to find one or two bad cops whom she delights in using to smear the entire department.
You can almost smell Ravani’s drool as she recites all the police chiefs who have come and gone in the last decade. She salivates at the thought of reporting on all that turmoil—turmoil she in part was responsible for creating through her biased “reporting.” This is called, in German, schadenfreude—taking delight in someone else’s misfortune. Ravani revels in this perverted state of mind. Why she harbors this sick grudge against the police is anyone’s guess.
Look, Sarah is entitled to her progressive point of view. A lot of people agree with her. As a firm supporter of the police, I’m ready to tolerate a certain amount of ideology in my reporters. But I’m not ready to accept Ravani’s venomous attitude toward the men and women of law enforcement. I think it’s disgraceful—and it’s a big part of why the San Francisco Chronicle has lost so many readers: when they hired Ravani and people like her, their reputation for independent journalism went down the toilet.
Steve Heimoff