The dirt bike thugs were out again yesterday afternoon, terrorizing Grand Avenue. (I keep waiting for one of them to topple over backwards and get run over by the others.) I always think, any society that can’t control this organized mayhem is on the way down.
I asked my source in the Oakland Police Department, whom I’ll call Officer Blue (OB). We met for coffee downtown, near OPD headquarters.
SH: Why can’t OPD crack down on sideshows and dirt bike parades?
OB: Policy doesn’t permit us to go after people who commit traffic violations. If we get behind [i.e., follow] them, they don’t stop, which can escalate into a chase. We cannot initiate a car chase on a traffic violation. We can only initiate based on a violent felony. Even if a violent felony, you have to be able to—we have 19 criteria you have to make sure you fulfill to make sure it is safe. There’s no car chase that is safe; it’s dangerous.
SH: What is the latest on pursuits?
OB: It’s going to the police commission tonight.
SH: This is the part about notifying a supervisor?
OB: It’s going to make zero changes; everything will stay the same. The only thing is that, you don’t have to [i.e. no longer have to] wait for an approval from a watch commander to go over 50 miles per hour. Because sometimes you only have one commander at a time on duty.
SH: I thought they did have to get permission.
OB: Yeah, from a supervisor. But that person may be on zoom, that person may be taking a phone call, that person may be somewhere—inside a basement—that the radio might not be working. So that gets presented tonight.
SH: So back to sideshows and dirt bikes. Is the only way to control them to pursue them? Can’t you drop something from a helicopter?
OB: Nope! [laughs]
SH: Why not?
OB: Because it’s just not practical.
SH: Why not?
OB: That would cause some injuries, potentially death.
SH: You can’t just drop a big net?
OB: The other thing is, resources. Because we have restricted policy, you have to have resources. Do you have enough resources to pick out this one [vehicle] to make a stop at this point? Or let’s follow him with the helicopter; if he lands somewhere, then we have him. But that could take a very lengthy amount of time, a lot of resources, utilizing a helicopter.
SH: It seems like San Francisco is doing a better job.
OB: San Francisco is doing an awesome job because they’re listening to what we can provide them. We provided them with that information. They have drones, they have resources to address that, they have policies that don’t restrict what they can do.
SH: You can’t throw, like, traffic spikes?
OB: No, because your stop stick [which deflates the tire], the bike does not weigh enough to puncture the tire. The other type of device we use would cause major accidents the moment they run over it.
SH: So what would happen—let’s say there’s 100 dirt bikes going down Grand Ave. to the west. Why can’t you get, say, eight police cars to establish a perimeter and say, whoever’s inside this—
OB: They’re going to ride through you. They’ve done that.
SH: Really?
OB: Yup. They know they can get away with it. They know they can ride in between you and close to you.
SH: So you’re pretty much saying the problem does not have a solution.
OB: It does have a solution, but it takes drastic measures to do so. Obviously, pursuit, right? And that would result in a loss of life. And people don’t have the appetite for that. You can surround people, if we bring in enough resources, probably about 50 cars to block them in. You need about that much, because you have to make sure you get enough and, like, have enough resources. Like, recently, I worked, we were down in Hegenberger, okay, let’s just stop one at a time and focus on making sure. So every time we made a stop, they would ride right up to our officer and try to run him over.
SH: Isn’t that attempted murder?
OB: You gotta be able to prove it. There’s a difference between trying to kill you and trying to scare you.
SH: Don’t the cops have body cams?
OB: Yeah, we do.
SH: Is that not proof?
OB: It’s not enough to use deadly force.
SH: So if I have a body cam and it shows you, Mr. Dirt Biker, aiming at me at 40 miles an hour—
OB: Did you make an attempt to get out of the way? Why didn’t you make an attempt to get out of the way, if they’re coming at you? That’s why you see people now are ramming police officers’ cars. The question now is, did you make an attempt to get out of the way? Did you make an attempt to get away from the vehicle to make sure people aren’t going to get run down? Did you put yourself in that situation that created this deadly force?
SH: So it’s your [i.e., the cop’s] fault.
OB: And that’s what it makes it very difficult, Back in the day, maybe I can try to cut him off, but nowadays, someone might say I tried to run him over or attempted to try to hit him. You’re risking losing your career and possibly being prosecuted. At the end of the day, people have got to have the appetite for what we have to do. People love eating sausages, but the moment they see how it’s made, now they’re disgusted. Anytime you have to hit someone with a baton, hit him in the face, it’s never good. And sometimes, it takes that for us to apprehend somebody. And that’s why society today is completely different than when you could have done this, you could have done that.
[This is me, Steve] If reading this infuriates you—as it does me—welcome. There are solutions to most forms of crime, but the overseers who regulate the police will not allow them. It’s theater of the absurd: how to kill a society by a thousand cuts. Inch by inch, the Police Commission, City Council and Federal Monitor, as well as ambulance-chasing lawyers like Burris and Chanin, are preventing cops from enforcing the law, plunging our city further into chaos. Incidentally, this relates to Oakland’s pursuit policy, which has been much in the news lately. I’ll have a lot more to say about it in the coming days, as well as identifying who the most dangerous people in Oakland are.
Steve Heimoff