Oakland Police Chief: Officers Stretched Thin

July 17, 2013
The Oakland Police Department has 629 sworn officers, down from 837 in December 2008.

After three nights of protests in Oakland that left many downtown businesses vandalized and a waiter recovering from a hammer attack, the police chief said Tuesday that an understaffed force and an effort to find a missing 21-month-old girl hampered officers' ability to control agitators.

Interim Chief Sean Whent said he would have liked to have had more officers on the streets Saturday night, when windows along Broadway and Telegraph Avenue were first smashed after a jury acquitted George Zimmerman in Florida. However, he said, the city did not have access to enough officers and did not realize the jury was deliberating that day.

Police increased staffing levels for a planned protest on Sunday night, Whent said, which allowed officers to walk alongside protesters and contain rogue individuals from splintering off into side streets, he said.

But staffing dropped on Monday, he said, in part because police did not expect several hundred demonstrators to show up again. After a mostly peaceful march, a small group of vandals smashed windows, lit small fires, and threw rocks and bottles at officers.

With fewer police on the street patrolling only the front and back of the march Monday, Whent said his officers faced greater risks heading into the crowd to make quick arrests. He also described the tenor of Monday's late-night marchers as "a crowd element intent on more lawlessness."

A growing force

"It's very difficult to march into a large crowd and arrest a few people breaking windows," Whent said. "Both for the safety of the citizens and police officers ... it all really comes down to resources."

Police ultimately arrested nine people on suspicion of crimes that included assault with a deadly weapon, resisting arrest and vandalism. But during the hammer attack on a waiter at Flora restaurant, police were blocks away.

Whent said the protests occurred at the end of a long week for the department, when intense resources and overtime hours were directed toward finding missing 21-month-old Daphne Viola Webb, who was last seen July 10.

The department has 629 sworn officers, officials said, down from 837 in December 2008, but up from a low of 612 this spring before an academy class was graduated.

The agency is set to increase its ranks by 30 after another class graduates this fall. With four police academies funded over two years, the department is expected to raise the force to nearly 700 officers.

It's the same story

As the city faced questions over its response to the vandals, the scars of the three nights were visible downtown in a series of boarded-up businesses. Merchants and residents -- many of whom believe Zimmerman should have been convicted of murdering unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin -- tried to make sense of what's become a familiar narrative of Oakland protests: peaceful by day, destructive by night.

Some of the masked vandals seemed to care little about whom they targeted. One of Oakland's most beloved nonprofit groups, Youth Radio, which for 20 years has trained poor and at-risk young people to become journalists, had three front windows destroyed.

"It hurts," Executive Director Richard Raya said Tuesday. "We moved down here five years ago to be part of Oakland's rejuvenation and to have our students be a part of this energy."

Raya said no one was in the studio when the windows were smashed. His students were out covering the impact of the Zimmerman verdict in Oakland's neighborhoods. He said the vandalism would not impact summer courses or the students' outlook on their location.

"The folks breaking the windows are not representative of who we are or people we know in this community," Raya said. "It's almost a shame we have to take time to talk about what they're trying to do. It detracts from the larger issue that we're all working on."

Hit with a hammer

The waiter in the hammer attack was recovering. Drew Cribley, 32, said he was in Flora Restaurant and Bar on Telegraph Avenue just after 11 p.m. Monday when he and co-workers went outside to stand in front of the building's windows as protesters passed by.

Cribley, who worked at the restaurant all weekend, said he noticed the lack of police Saturday -- when Flora's windows were first smashed -- and the increased patrols on Sunday, when the building was left undamaged.

On Monday, Cribley said, a black-masked attacker passed him on the sidewalk, then started pounding on windows with a hammer when Cribley turned and told him to stop.

"I kind of instinctively pushed him away," Cribley said. "That's when he turned back at me and cracked me in the cheekbone."

Cribley, a lifelong Oakland resident, said the interaction happened so quickly that he did not consider the assailant would swing the hammer at him.

"Looking back on it, it was a really stupid thing if you thought I was going to interfere," he said. "But I just couldn't picture another person looking a person in the eye and cracking him in the face with a hammer."

He suffered three cuts on his face, a black eye and swelling. But he plans to return to work Thursday.

Applying public pressure

One expert on protests and policing said the property damage and violence may seem irrational and random, but was meant to stir up public outcry and put stress on elected officials.

"There's a political tendency that exists that says this is the most effective way to gain publicity and put pressure on decision makers both in public and private sectors," said Alex Vitale, an associate professor of sociology at Brooklyn College.

For agitators, the intensive news coverage that follows violent protests is "what they want," Vitale said. "These kinds of stories that force the mayor and police chief to respond ... for some young people there's frustration with conventional methods of protests."

Whent said the department had increased staffing for Tuesday and would continue to monitor protesters' plans.

Copyright 2013 - San Francisco Chronicle

McClatchy-Tribune News Service

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