Oakland Officials Fail to Recognize 19% Crime Drop During Occupy Encampment – Twitter Rant by @PunkBoyInSF

A collection of tweets put into blog form by @PunkBoyInSF

As I watched @jeanquan aka @QuanFace and @oaklandpoliceca’s chief Goodfella HoJo on the news this morning asking for the community’s help in helping the city with the spike in violent crime and murders, I couldn’t help but think.

Somehow, last year, I have a vague recollection of a relatively small amount of time in #Oakland when the community rallied together, set aside their differences and tried to do this. There was a place that rose as a community center, of sorts, that consisted of people coming together around a common purpose.

A place that empowered the residents to feel like they had a hand in their own future. A place where citizens felt, and rightly so, that they were having a positive impact on their lives and the lives of their neighbors. Part of a phenomena that was having impact on the very structure of our microcosm of society. Even by a firm hired by @oaklandpoliceca and @jeanquan’s office confirmed that, for the ONLY TIME in my memory, crime actually went down by 19% in just a few weeks. Something @jeanquan and @oaklandpoliceca should have been ecstatic about, and worked with to continue to foster. But what did Santana,  @jeanquan and @oaklandpoliceca decide was the best response to follow up this report with?

“Not sure how you want to share this good news,” he wrote. “It may be counter to our statement that the #Occupy movement is negatively impacting crime in Oakland.” Read the full article here.

@jeanquan also says something very telling to @ktvu in this story. Well not her but her mouthpiece.  ”In all of the emails there was not a single one written by @JeanQuan.  Her office told @KTVU she prefers face-to-face communication.”

Is that so Mrs. Mayor?  That sounds to me like the position of a city official who has a lot to hide.

So, that report that says that crime dropped while #OO’s encampment was in full swing, what did they do with it? They buried it.

Anyone who is familiar with #Oakland politics probably is not surprised by this. City officials have always tried to make sure that their residents live in fear. Their perpetual solution to this pervasive fear they endorse, has always been, more police to deal with it, while closing schools and cutting city services that used to be seen as crime prevention investments.

Since @oaklandpoliceca has been under the scrutiny of Judge Thelton Henderson, has the city even made any actual attempt to reform the police? Yes. Though not in the way you might think. It turns out that according to City Manager Deanna Santana, the easiest way to implement the court ordered reforms, is to attempt to have the findings by her own friend’s firm, Thomas Frazier, changed secretly.

The East Bay Express reported recently that Santana “wanted to redact portions of Frazier’s report that included strong criticisms of #OPD” and that she “also requested that Frazier send a draft of his report in Microsoft Word format to Santana to make it easier for city officials to alter the report’s contents.”

She tried to have them send this editable version to her private Comcast email so that there would be no record of the alteration. The firm declined. When confronted with this, Santana replied, “the report was riddled with errors, facts had to be cleared up.”

Yeah, facts are facts. Cleaning them is just another way of saying falsifying them to suit your agenda. Although I am sure it is completely plausible that EVERY consulting firm hired by the city to go over their own records is wrong.

But isn’t it more likely that @jeanquan, @oaklandpoliceca and the rest of the so called “City Leaders” of #Oakland care more about maintaining their corrupt, violent, status-quo of a government, and nothing about actually fixing the city’s obvious problems?

A city that, confronted with the fact that a ragtag bunch of disenfranchised citizens could actually be part of the solution to the ills of their society, they send in a corrupt, militarized police force to forcibly remove them in a blatant abuse of power, in an act of domestic terrorism that would give the world some of the most disturbingly graphic images of how our authoritarian corporatocracy will deal with the slightest attempt to dissent from the machine to be self-sustaining. The raids on that community set the globe ablaze with resistance.

this extended rant that will be lost in the Twitterverse soon. TAKE BACK THE #OaklandCommune ON #O25. Show the city that #Oakland lives!

— #pUNkEneMyOfTheState (@punkboyinsf) October 5, 2012

Follow @PunkBoyInSF on Twitter!

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