Oakland's police mess

LAWSUITS SPARKED BY the April 7 police riot at the Port of Oakland are moving through the courts and will almost certainly end up costing the cash-strapped city a significant, perhaps multimillion-dollar, chunk of change. It was completely unnecessary and raises serious questions about the oversight of the Oakland Police Department that go far beyond this single incident.

For starters, the cops harshly and absurdly overreacted to a nonviolent blockade of the American Presidents Line terminal (the company ships military supplies for the Pentagon), unleashing a ton of "less-lethal" ammunition on the crowd.

As A.C. Thompson reports on page 12, the OPD also employed a technique known as "BUMP," or "Basic Use of Motorcycle Push." Put simply, the tactic, which is authorized in a special order obtained by the Bay Guardian, involves driving 1,000-plus-pound Harley-Davidson motorcycles directly into protesters. Before running into antiwar activists at the port, the cops had showcased the BUMP tactic by driving into a throng of school kids marching against the war in downtown Oakland March 5.

Running people over with motorcycles is such a dangerous and stupid tactic that other police departments, including San Francisco's, specifically forbid it. And the first thing the OPD ought to do is get in-line with modern police practices and immediately banish BUMP to the dustbin of law-enforcement history.

If Mayor Jerry Brown, who just ousted the city manager, wants to demonstrate that he's up to managing Oakland, the first thing he should do is conduct a full and public investigation into the April 7 incident and make it clear to Police Chief Richard Word that the department needs to clean up its crowd-control problems and cowboy cops – before police-misconduct cases bankrupt the city.