The strange logic of Jean Quan

LISTENING TO Oakland city officials profess their heartfelt support for the Occupy Wall Street movement--just not the one in Oakland--might be funny if their actions weren't inflicting so much violence on our community.

Since police acting under the orders of Mayor Jean Quan and Police Chief Howard Jordan almost killed Iraq war veteran Scott Olsen in the October 25 assault on Occupy Oakland, Quan has repeated ad nauseum just how "proud" she is of her officers' "nonviolence."

That very morning, with tear gas still lingering in the streets, Quan released a statement expressing her enthusiasm for the Oakland police department: "I commend Chief Jordan for a generally peaceful resolution to a situation that deteriorated and concerned our community."

The next day, thousands of Oakland residents risked arrest and injury by marching to reoccupy the plaza in front of City Hall. Over the next couple weeks, Quan and other city officials worked closely with downtown business leaders to orchestrate a public and behind-the-scenes campaign to slander Occupy Oakland as "violent" and a "threat to public safety."

After the November 2 general strike, business leaders grew increasingly aggressive in their demands to raid the camp. They saw their chance after the tragic murder of 25-year-old Kayode Ola Foster nearby the camp on Thursday, November 10.

Unfortunately, those of us who live in Oakland know our city suffers from one of the highest murder rates in the country. In a city of just 440,000 people, there have been over 100 murders per year for the last several decades.

Kayode was the 101st murder victim so far this year, so no serious person ought to believe that Occupy Oakland was somehow responsible for creating the conditions that led to his death.

In fact, Occupy Oakland's encampment is named after Oscar Grant, the unarmed African American young man who Oakland transit police shot in the back and killed in the first hours of New Year's Day in 2009. Many of Occupy Oakland's leading activists have spent years trying to prevent police brutality and working with at-risk youth to reduce youth-on-youth violence, from social workers to paramedics to teachers.

Yet within 24 hours, the Oakland Police Officers' Association pounced, claiming: "Right now, Oakland is in a state of emergency...Our police officers are the 99 percent struggling in Oakland neighborhoods every day to contain the 1 percent who rob, steal, rape and murder our law-abiding citizens."

There has been some debate about whether the police are part of the 99 percent or not (although much less so after their rampages in Oakland), but the police's crude attempt to redefine the 1 percent as those caught up in the trap of inner-city poverty and gun violence in place of the financial oligarchs and captains of industry did not gain much traction here.

LESS THAN 72 hours after issuing their statement, around 4 a.m. on Monday, November 14, hundreds of police raided the encampment again. Far from distancing herself from the OPD's outrageous slanders against Occupy Oakland, Mayor Quan repeated them in a press conference the morning of the raid.

First, Quan unilaterally declared that she knew more about the Occupy movement than any of the thousands of people who organized the general strike only a week before. "We came to this point because, I think, Occupy Oakland began to take a different path from the original movement," she said. "It was no longer about the abuses of the financial system or foreclosures or the unemployed."

Next, she repeated the police claims that street violence, and not pressure from downtown businesses, motivated the raid:

The encampment became a place where we had repeated violence, and this week a murder. We had to bring the camp to an end before more people were hurt. The encampment has also been a tremendous strain on our city. During a recent demonstration, we had 179 public safety calls to 911 that didn't get answered because police were downtown monitoring a demonstration. The city cannot afford the violence, whether it is downtown or in the neighborhoods.

Of course, no one in Occupy Oakland asked the police to "monitor" the protests. In fact, throughout the day of the general strike, the police were nowhere to be seen. Marchers and strikers directed traffic, cooked a giant barbecue that fed thousands of people and ran the downtown area with absolutely no threat of violence at all...precisely because the police were ordered to stay away.

Throughout the press conference, Quan failed to even refer to the military veterans who the OPD had sent to the hospital during its "anti-violence" operations. As Scott Olsen wrote in a statement hours after Quan spoke:

I'm feeling a lot better, with a long road in front of me. After my freedom of speech was quite literally taken from me, my speech is coming back, but I've got a lot of work to do with rehab. Thank you for all your support, it has meant the world to me. You'll be hearing more from me in the near future and soon enough we'll see you in our streets!

Some liberal political figures in Oakland still defend Quan's actions and support her claim that you can take the "occupation" out of the Occupy movement. But Quan herself seems to understand how important the physical taking of public space has been for the visibility and mobilization of the movement. "We know that we may have to remove the encampments again," she states. "This is an international movement, this is their tactic, and we want the movement to move on, literally to something different than encampments."

In other words, Quan would like the movement to return to mundane channels of lobbying and working through the city bureaucracies she so enthusiastically defends.

Quan, who spent years as a very liberal city councillor and sometimes community activist, seems to genuinely not understand that there is something new in the world. From inside her bunker in City Hall, she asked the movement to "respect what I think has now become an overwhelming sentiment in the city that you can divide the encampment from the movement, and that we start to work together on the issues that unite us and not divide us."

Yet in the next breath, she once against lavished praise on the police who are attacking and threatening the movement.

But don't take my word for it. Follow the money.

In the last five weeks, city officials estimate that they have now spent close to $2.5 million "monitoring" and policing Occupy Oakland. The bulk of the money has gone to the OPD and more than a dozen regional police agencies that Quan has contracted to provide riot police to seize Oscar Grant Plaza on two occasions. Quan authorized $500,000 in police overtime just for the November 14 raid, paying each officer roughly $1,000 for the day, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

All of this points to a political establishment that, rhetorical flourishes aside, is bowing to the pressure by Oakland's 1 percent to do what they have always done when faced with radical opposition: employ massive police force.

Yet as may become clear even to those ensconced in City Hall, their plans could backfire. As Scott Johnson wrote in the Occupied Oakland Tribune:

I cannot help but wonder if Quan was already so committed to the raid that by the time she realized how pointless the entire operation would be--that they could empty out the camp, but that they could not hold the Plaza--that it was already too late. The commitment had been made for the mutual aid with police from other cities, the police were being called up, the promises were being made, but there was little they could do but symbolically empty out the Plaza before allowing us back in again.

IN THE midst of all this, despite Quan's desire that the movement split up along pro- and anti-encampment factions, the most serious divisions seem to be taking shape in her own administration. In the wake of the November 14 raid, her long-time legal advisor Dan Siegel resigned, explaining, "The city sent police to evict this camp, arrest people and potentially hurt them. Obviously, we're not on the same page. It's an amazing show of force to move tents from a public place."

Soon after, Sharon Cornu, Quan's co-deputy mayor and former leader of the Alameda Central Labor Council, resigned. Her exact reasons are unclear, and Cornu's parting remarks seemed to indicate her support for Quan's decision to raid Oscar Grant Plaza. "The situation on the plaza was untenable," said Cornu.

Nevertheless, the chaos at City Hall only goes to show that Occupy Oakland's refusal to accept business as usual is striking a nerve.

Quan seems to hope that we will simply go away, or at least move to a less prominent location. She even appeared to half endorse the idea of taking over an abandoned or foreclosed property, stating:

My understanding is that about half the camp is now looking for a private location where they can camp, similar to Wall Street. The camp in Wall Street is privately owned, they are there because the owners of that park are allowing them to stay. I hear from my friend who's a city councilman on the Lower East Side that they are beginning to rent office space. So I think that the movement is trying to move on to organizing and not just fight about camping.

Aside from being ill-informed by her "friend" in New York that the owners of Zuccotti Park had been "allowing" Occupy Wall Street to stay out of the goodness of their hearts, Quan's half-thought-through idea that protesters might violate the sanctity of private property proved too much for City Administrator Deanna Santana and Chief Jordan.

Both rushed to the press conference podium to assure the press that "city has not played any role in trying to facilitate the move to private property" and "the police department has not been involved in any negotiations, nor will we be, about taking over any private property...that's just not our role."

The terrible irony of all this is that when Quan was elected mayor last year, she promised to work to improve public education in Oakland, which remains mired in a permanent crisis of budget cuts.

The same night that Occupy Oakland members retook Oscar Grant Plaza after the first police attack, the Oakland School Board voted to close five public elementary schools, supposedly to save--you guessed it--about $2 million.

If Quan had spent the city's money on our kids instead of police overtime, then those neighborhood schools could have remained open--and with just a fraction of the $500,000 left over, any supposed "health and safety" problems at the encampment could have been easily seen to, and our movement could have gone about the business of organizing protests to stop foreclosures, oppose budget cuts and demand increased taxes on the rich.

Instead, we have had to devote considerable time and energy to simply defending ourselves and our organizing spaces.

In the end, if the police attacks have helped to galvanize the movement, draw in ever greater numbers and provide object lessons about the role of the police as the defenders of the 1 percent, then perhaps, after all, it was money well spent--and we owe Mayor Quan some thanks.