City Government

Gallo Takes Heat for Backing Police Accountability Measure

Published

10 years ago

June 20, 2014

City Councilmember Noel Gallo is coming under a lot of pressure for backing a proposal by a community coalition that wants the City Council to put a charter amendment on the November ballot to create a Public Safety Oversight Commission in Oakland.

With the support of Gallo, who chairs the council’s Public Safety Committee, and Councilmember Dan Kalb, the resolution cleared the Rules Committee last week and is scheduled to be discussed next week at Public Safety.

< p>While Gallo says he has not heard directly from the Oakland Police Officers Association (OPOA), he is getting the message second hand.

“What I’ve been hearing from colleagues and other people is almost threatening, (saying) how do I dare do what the citizens asked me to do,” said Gallo in an interview with the Post.

He says people are advancing their own “personal agendas.”

“They’re not concerned about the overall direction of the city,” he said. “I’m disappointed about some of the comments I’m getting.”

If a version of the measure passes at Public Safety, it will go to the full council for a vote. But if the ballot measure is not approved by council by the time it breaks for its August recess, the proposed city charter amendment cannot be on the ballot until the next election in 2016.

The proposal is the product of nine months of work by a citywide coalition of police accountability activists, who want to create a public safety commission that would assume most of the authority over the police department, including discipline of officers, currently in the hands of the City Administrator’s office.

Barry Donelan, OPA President

The new commission would be combined of the staff members and budgets of several existing committees and therefore would not generate new expenses, according to the measure’s supporters.

Rashidah Grinage, a spokesperson for the Coalition for Police Accountability that is calling for the charter amendment, says she has heard that the OPOA is threatening not to back renewal of the city’s Measure Y public safety tax in November if the council puts the police accountability measure on the ballot.

Barry Donelan, president of the OPOA, considers the proposed police oversight would only create unnecessary bureaucracy.

“I think there’s no need for a layer of oversight on top of what we have already,” he said. “I think the city is better served using its meager financial resources to fight crime rather than to create another (committee).”

He said his organization is not part of the discussion over the wording of the new Measure Y but denied that this is saying anything negative about the ballot measure.

“We have not been part of it since day one,” he said, but “anything that puts more resources into high amount of crime in Oakland is a good thing,” he said.

Gallo said that because of the work of Grinage and the Coalition for Police Accountability, he now understands the need to strengthen the city’s oversight of the police department.

“I’m extremely grateful to Rashidah and all the people who have brought this (measure) forward,” he said, because they have forced him to examine what the city is doing to provide police oversight and to understand that at present the city is ineffective and failing to deliver on its promise, he said.

Post Publisher Paul Cobb says he has heard that OPOA is opposing the police

Lynette Gibson McElhaney

accountability measure by contacting community members who support it and letting them know of the OPOA’s displeasure.

Cobb said this is similar to the tactic used by former OPOA President Bob Valladon who threatened the late Post Editor Chauncey Bailey when he was investigating corruption at OPD, shortly before Bailey was assassinated in 2007.

Councilmember Lynette McElhney, who serves on the Public Safety Committee, says she

opposes putting a police accountability measure on the ballot at this time.

“We need a much more deliberative process than 35 days in examining it,” she said, adding that the community coalition may have been working on the proposal for nine months, but council members have had it only for a couple of weeks.

“I think it can be a diversion to the more important measure, which is the successor to (Measure) Y,” she said. “We should not be focused on anything but the successor to Y.”

“We need to be focused on the $22 million a year that Y brings to this community,” she said. “I don’t want to talk about any other measure. It would be a disaster if we lost that money.”

Councilmember Dan Kalb, who also sits on the Public Safety committee, likes the idea of having a police commission in Oakland. “I’m aware that they have police commissions in other cities, (and) I generally look favorably to having such an agency here in Oakland.”

He said that he is hearing around City Hall that there is not enough time to discuss the issue and modify it.

“To finish (that work) in time for the ballot may be very challenging,” Kalb said. “But if other council members support it and we can get the right final language, I would support it.

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Oakland Post: Week of October 30 – November 5, 2024

The printed Weekly Edition of the Oakland Post: Week of October 30 – November 5, 2024

Published

21 hours ago

November 1, 2024

Oakland Post

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Bay Area

Evidence Appears to Show Cover-Up of Previous Charges of Discrimination Against Jewish and Black Jurors, D.A. Says

Today, District Attorney Pamela Price announced that attorneys assigned to review the office’s death penalty cases found evidence revealing that instead of investigating claims of prosecutorial misconduct—excluding Jewish and Black residents from juries — a former senior Alameda County District Attorney’s Office prosecutor who is now a sitting judge in Alameda County, Morris Jacobson, and a team of investigators appeared to have taken part in covering it up.

Published

5 days ago

October 28, 2024

Oakland Post

A handwritten note by an employee under a previous administration appears to show plans for a cover-up of jury discrimination in a death penalty case. Courtesy image.

Special to The Post

During a press conference, Price presented a copy of a handwritten note by a former DA office employee who attended a meeting with employees from the office.

Jacobson, a deputy district attorney at the time, led the meeting in preparation for an evidentiary hearing ordered in the Fred Freeman case.

That hearing was ordered after former capital trial prosecutor Jack Quatman, the prosecutor in People v. Freeman, signed a declaration revealing that he and other capital case prosecutors routinely struck Black women and Jewish jurors in death penalty cases.

Jacobson was assigned by former district attorneys Tom Orloff and Nancy O’Malley to coordinate the ACDAO’s response during the evidentiary hearing.

In that capacity, he and others assigned to the capital case team went to great lengths to distract the courts from the substantive legal allegations by besmirching the whistleblower Quatman’s character and credibility—a strategy that succeeded.

Key sections of the note include, “left it w/ Morris saying he would give us direction. Wants to find dirt on Quatman,” and “How good are your memories? His point was he doesn’t want any documentation of what we do unless it is agreed upon???”

“This note provides the public some of the missing clues regarding who appeared to be involved during previous administrations in covering up prosecutorial misconduct at the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office,” said Price. “The note from this meeting in 2004 gives insight into why prosecutors’ notes containing evidence of discrimination against potential Jewish and Black jurors may not have been subjected to a comprehensive review and were not disclosed to the Court in most of the cases until my office was ordered by Honorable Judge Vince Chhabria to review death penalty cases.

“What the public should know is that prosecutors have special duties as ministers of justice to uphold the Constitution, which guarantees the right to a fair trial and to be judged by a jury of one’s peers, regardless of race, religion, or sexual orientation,” she said.

United States District Court Judge Chhabria determined earlier this year that there was “strong evidence that, in prior decades, prosecutors from the office were … excluding Jewish and African American jurors in death penalty cases.”

He subsequently issued an order directing ACDAO to disclose jury selection files in all Alameda County cases which resulted in a death sentence.

The Alameda County District Attorney’s Office is the source of this story.

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Bay Area

In the City Attorney Race, Ryan Richardson Is Better for Oakland

It’s been two years since negotiations broke down between the City of Oakland and a developer who wants to build a coal terminal here, and the issue has reappeared, quietly, in the upcoming race for Oakland City attorney. Two candidates are running for the position of Oakland City Attorney in November: current Assistant Chief City Attorney Ryan Richardson and retired judge Brenda Harbin-Forte.

Published

5 days ago

October 28, 2024

Oakland Post

Members of Oaklanders Defending Democracy political action committee with Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao, center. Courtesy photo.

By Margaret Rossoff

Special to The Post

OPINION

Two candidates are running for the position of Oakland City Attorney in November: current Assistant Chief City Attorney Ryan Richardson and retired judge Brenda Harbin-Forte.

Richardson has worked in the Office of the City Attorney since 2014 and is likely to continue current City Attorney Barbara Parker’s policies managing the department. He has committed not to accept campaign contributions from developers who want to store and handle coal at a proposed marine terminal in Oakland.

Retired Judge Harbin-Forte launched and has played a leading role in the campaign to recall Mayor Sheng Thao, which is also on the November ballot. She has stepped back from the recall campaign to focus on her candidacy. The East Bay Times noted, “Harbin-Forte’s decision to lead the recall campaign against a potential future client is … troubling — and is likely to undermine her ability, if she were to win, to work effectively.”

Harbin-Forte has refused to rule out accepting campaign support from coal terminal interests or their agents. Coal terminal lobbyist Greg McConnell’s Independent Expenditure Committee “SOS Oakland” is backing her campaign.

In the 2022 mayor’s race, parties hoping to build a coal terminal made $600,000 in contributions to another of McConnell’s Independent Expenditure Committees.

In a recent interview, Harbin-Forte said she is open to “listening to both sides” and will be “fair.” However, the City Attorney’s job is not to judge fairly between the City and its legal opponents – it is to represent the City against its opponents.

She thought that the 2022 settlement negotiations ended because the City “rejected a ‘no coal’ settlement.” This is lobbyist McConnell’s narrative, in contrast to the report by City Attorney Barbara Parker. Parker has explained that the City continued to negotiate in good faith for a settlement with no “loopholes” that could have allowed coal to ship through Oakland – until would-be coal developer Phil Tagami broke off negotiations.

One of Harbin-Forte’s main priorities, listed on her website, is “reducing reliance on outside law firms,” and instead use the lawyers working in the City Attorney’s office.

However, sometimes this office doesn’t have the extensive expertise available that outside firms can provide in major litigation. In the ongoing, high stakes coal litigation, the City has benefited from collaborating with experienced, specialized attorneys who could take on the nationally prominent firms representing the City’s opponents.

The City will continue to need this expertise as it pursues an appeal of the judge’s decision that restored the developer’s lease and defends against a billion-dollar lawsuit brought by the hedge fund operator who holds the sublease on the property.

Harbin-Forte’s unwillingness to refuse campaign contributions from coal terminal interests, her opposition to using outside resources when needed, as well as her uncritical repetition of coal lobbyist McConnell’s claim that the City sabotaged the settlement talks of 2022 all raise serious concerns about how well she would represent the best interests of Oakland and Oaklanders if she is elected City Attorney.