Sometimes You Just Need To Talk To A Cop

The city ended up agreeing to pay one protester $4.5 million for injuries suffered at the hands of police officers. Protesters walked along the 580 and 80 freeways and stopped BART for several hours by an ingenious human-chain strategy. [...] if you read the group’s website, it seems to be a little self-referential, with stories about its own demonstrations — including an appeal to drop all charges against what it is calling “the BART 14.” There too, the residents, primarily African American, were complaining about the police. [...] it wasn’t racism or brutality that concerned them; it was the fact that police couldn’t show up at the meeting because they were all needed to handle a protest. The heroin dealing has started up again at the corner of Harlot and Varlet; the noise coming from an abandoned warehouse is waking children up at night; stuff like that. There are lots of tensions in West Oakland right now; the condo owners have become a force in the neighborhood because of headlong gentrification. [...] there are the old-timey problems as well, crime and violence; people getting caught in various kinds of cross fire; hotline calls that are never answered. The Oakland administration vows to do more to help these folks, as other administrations have vowed. The prey like having people deputized to intervene in cases of bullying or extortion or of just making the streets more dangerous. [...] the daily effects of racism, the hunger and the fear and the inability to make their voices heard over the media din (we love to follow bright, shiny objects, and a nice irritating demonstration is just perfect), can definitely be mitigated.