Talking to the Chief

Last week was The Week of Three Chiefs.  Can we get into the Guinness Book of World Records for that?  How many cities have 3 police chiefs in 5 days?  At the end of the week, OPD held their annual Open House at 7th Street, which I attended.   Worst. Timing. Ever.  The OPD open house last year was great, with massive crowds, but attendance this year was very thin.  Standing next to a woman and a cop talking, last Friday, I suddenly realized the cop had 4 stars on his collar - Chief Whent, out on the street, talking casually to a passer-by.  I introduced myself, said hello, and moved on.

With all that background, I was very interested Monday morning to get a phone call from our Neighborhood Services Coordinator, asking if I was available at 2:30 PM to meet with the Chief - he wanted to talk to "some people from Rockridge and Temescal."  You bet I was.  I wrote down the address - Sagrada, on Telegraph Avenue near 51st - and showed up.  This is the story of that meeting.  I don't hesitate to blog it because it was on KGO.

I arrived to find our NSC and three other people I knew:  Chris Jackson and Louise Rothman-Riemer, of the Rockridge District Association, and Barbara Minton, Vice-Chair of the Greater Rockridge NCPC.  No police of any rank visible.  Sagrada, like almost everything else on that block of Telegraph, isn't open on Mondays.  Slowly over the next 20 minutes or so, the group gathered:  another NSC, Sgt. Christopher Bolton (Chief Whent's chief of staff, in uniform), Johnna Watson (OPD press relations officer, plainclothes), and eventually an unmarked car with two men in it, one of them with 4 stars on his uniform collar.  Oh, and 2 other civilians, one carrying professional video equipment (KGO). 

The chief got out of his car, walked up to us, and recognized me from our brief meeting Friday.  I'm impressed; I can't always do that myself. 

We took a slow motion tour of the area.  Pizzaiolo was between shifts but the door was open; we all walked in, camera hovering, and stood while the chief talked to the manager on duty about crime in the area.  Then we strolled down a couple of doors to Ruby's Garden, the only store on the block open on Monday, and the chief talked to that store manager.  In between visits he talked to the KGO reporter, on camera.

As we left Pizzaiolo, the manager came out with a take-out box full of donut holes, and one donut.  I took it, and tried to pass it around - both uniformed police officers recoiled in horror and said, almost identically, "I can't eat that in uniform!"  There must be a rule somewhere.  Since no one else wanted the donut holes (and I wanted to stop eating them!), I gave the box to the manager at Ruby's Garden.

After Ruby's Garden we crossed the street and went into the little strip mall where Walgreen's is, leaving the camera behind.  We walked down to the Round Table Pizza there and took over some couches in their seating area, where the chief continued to discuss crime with us.  We sat there for some time, and none of the customers did any more than glance at us sideways.  After the discussion, the chief went on to his next meeting.

I like that he gets out and talks to people in north Oakland; I don't remember seeing Chief Jordan do it.  In fact, I can't ever recall seeing a police chief just walk into a store and talk to the manager.  He understands what the problems are and is determined to do what he can to fix them. I liked the suggestions he made - more local officers, walking officers, faster response times, civilian staff doing investigations.  The staff shortages in OPD and the city at large hung over the discussion - OPD is trying to hire large numbers of support staff (dispatchers and evidence techs in addition to more academies for sworn officers), and personnel cuts in the city's Human Resources area are making it hard to get the work done.  Also, OPD is disastrously short of functional police cars and other equipment.  But the interim chief seems determined to work around all this.

In fact, I'm not quite sure why we're spending money on a "national search."  We did that once and got a nationally recognized expert that no one wanted to work with.  Why don't we give Interim Chief Whent a chance to show what he can do?