Cop bashers are eating each other
Ordinarily you’d expect Cat Brooks and John Burris to be best friends. After all, for years, each has led one front of the war on the Oakland Police Department. Brooks, who runs the Anti Police-Terror Project, runs the division that smears cops as racists and thugs. Burris, one of the most famous cop-suing lawyers in America, has made a good living filing police brutality cases. Each, in his own way, has been chipping away at the morale and cohesiveness of police departments here in Oakland, and each is assured of worshipful coverage in the media.
But a funny thing happened last week, when it was widely reported that the notorious Negotiated Settlement Agreement (NSA) that resulted in federal oversight of OPD may be nearing its demise. Now in its 18th year (!!!), the NSA mandated scores of “reforms” OPD was obliged to enact; now, only five of those reforms remain to be implemented, many of which involve bureaucratic paperwork routines. So much progress has been made by OPD that even Burris, whose original lawsuit against OPD resulted in the NSA, praised the department for making significant progress. “After years of backsliding there is real momentum toward substantive compliance,” he said.
That was great news for OPD, for Chief LeRonne Armstrong and for the people of Oakland. John Burris, the very lawyer who brought OPD to its knees 18 years ago, today believes “It is now time to run through the finish line…”.
You might think all good citizens of Oakland would delight in the fact that OPD has done so well. But no! Cat Brooks is miserable. “How…Burris came to the conclusion that things have finally turned around is a mystery,” she wrote on Tuesday, in her regular column in the San Francisco Chronicle.
Although she’s often been on the same side as Burris, Brooks now is unbridled in her bitterness toward him, calling him “a high-paid” lawyer “whose finger [is] currently nowhere near the pulse” of “Black and brown [sic] Oaklanders.”
Burris, who has won millions upon millions of dollars for people of color in his lawsuits against cops, might be forgiven for thinking that no good deed goes unpunished.
We have to understand how profoundly important it is that Brooks has declared war on Burris. This is the kind of thing that happens when conspiracies begin to unravel and the conspirators turn on each other. (Think of the Watergate trials.) Two of the most important figures in the anti-cop movement have now fallen apart, allowing us to make the obvious inference that the anti-cop movement is disintegrating before our very eyes. Public opinion has rallied around support for OPD, especially after the City Council’s June 24 vote to defund it. Oakland’s out-of-control crime wave is rapidly leading people to understand that cops are necessary in a violent city. The City Council members who voted to defund OPD are running away from their vote, doing everything they can to avoid the topic, because they know how out-of-step they are with their constituents—including people of color.
Cat Brooks reminds me of those Japanese soldiers who refused to admit they had lost World War II, even after Japan formally surrendered on Sept. 2, 1945. Hiding in caves on remote Pacific atolls, they fought their fantasy war until they died, unable to recognize that the world had left them behind. This doesn’t mean that the war on cops in Oakland is over. It isn’t, and we have to remain vigilant. But we can take pleasure in watching the cop bashers turn their fury on each other, instead of on cops.
Steve Heimoff