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Oakland's Incompetent Mayor
Oct. 30th, 2011 06:36 pmSadly, I have increasingly come to the conclusion that Oakland's newest mayor, Jean Quan, is an incompetent.
I wrote last year that I thought that her ideas of community policing were naive in the face of Oakland's actual problems. Then a few weeks ago, I was aghast when I learned that she was fighting against the gang injunctions which are one of the newest and most promising tools that the police were using to try and curb Oakland's massive and long-term problems of crime and violence. It shouldn't have been a surprise that she ended up driving her police chief out of his job, leaving the city without a top law man as of a couple of weeks ago.
Then, this last week, while she frittered away her time in Washington DC, her incompetence really came on full display. I can't fault her decision to clean the Occupy encampment out of Oakland. Nor can I fault the police for tear gassing some of those demonstrators when they began to throw things at the police. But Quan's decision to cave in when the Occupy Oakland controversy hit the mainstream: that's truly reprehensible. As of Saturday when I went to Endgame, the Occupation was back in full force. Tents filled the little area that marks the Oakland civic center. Doubtless we'll be reading about more sexual assaults and other attacks in the coming days--the exact sort of things which caused Oakland to gather together a multi-jurisdiction task force to clean up the occupation in the first place--an expensive multi-jurisdiction task force, whose work has now been entirely frittered away.
Because the Occupation is back, the economy of downtown Oakland continues to suffer. Merchants very near it are reporting that their receipts are down 80% while even those blocks away are reporting a downturn, because people are now afraid to come to Oakland. (The reality of the Occupation is--as far as I can tell, and I've biked by it and walked through it--that it offers no danger except to those people in the encampment, but with typically lazy press continuing, that's not what other folks see, and so they unfairly fear the city.)
So, in the last month Mayor Quan has managed to undermine both the policing and the economics of Oakland, which are probably the city's two biggest challenges. It makes you start to wonder if allegedly corrupt career politician Don Perata would have been worse after all.
One of the sad things about Quan peter-principling herself is that people are now blaming instant runoff voting. I personally think it was amazing that Quan was able to win against such an entrenched politician as Perata and that it offers a dim ray of hope for a country that is sinking into the morass of political radicalization because of its two similarly entrenched political parties. It's a shame that one of IRV's first poster politicians turned out to be such an idiot, but there are plenty of elected idiots who were voted into office via regular voting methods.
Just look at the tea baggers who managed to make it into congress in 2010.
I wrote last year that I thought that her ideas of community policing were naive in the face of Oakland's actual problems. Then a few weeks ago, I was aghast when I learned that she was fighting against the gang injunctions which are one of the newest and most promising tools that the police were using to try and curb Oakland's massive and long-term problems of crime and violence. It shouldn't have been a surprise that she ended up driving her police chief out of his job, leaving the city without a top law man as of a couple of weeks ago.
Then, this last week, while she frittered away her time in Washington DC, her incompetence really came on full display. I can't fault her decision to clean the Occupy encampment out of Oakland. Nor can I fault the police for tear gassing some of those demonstrators when they began to throw things at the police. But Quan's decision to cave in when the Occupy Oakland controversy hit the mainstream: that's truly reprehensible. As of Saturday when I went to Endgame, the Occupation was back in full force. Tents filled the little area that marks the Oakland civic center. Doubtless we'll be reading about more sexual assaults and other attacks in the coming days--the exact sort of things which caused Oakland to gather together a multi-jurisdiction task force to clean up the occupation in the first place--an expensive multi-jurisdiction task force, whose work has now been entirely frittered away.
Because the Occupation is back, the economy of downtown Oakland continues to suffer. Merchants very near it are reporting that their receipts are down 80% while even those blocks away are reporting a downturn, because people are now afraid to come to Oakland. (The reality of the Occupation is--as far as I can tell, and I've biked by it and walked through it--that it offers no danger except to those people in the encampment, but with typically lazy press continuing, that's not what other folks see, and so they unfairly fear the city.)
So, in the last month Mayor Quan has managed to undermine both the policing and the economics of Oakland, which are probably the city's two biggest challenges. It makes you start to wonder if allegedly corrupt career politician Don Perata would have been worse after all.
One of the sad things about Quan peter-principling herself is that people are now blaming instant runoff voting. I personally think it was amazing that Quan was able to win against such an entrenched politician as Perata and that it offers a dim ray of hope for a country that is sinking into the morass of political radicalization because of its two similarly entrenched political parties. It's a shame that one of IRV's first poster politicians turned out to be such an idiot, but there are plenty of elected idiots who were voted into office via regular voting methods.
Just look at the tea baggers who managed to make it into congress in 2010.