Ask and you shall receive? Difficult to believe it was so easy. Recently obtained internal emails between Oakland City Hall and police through a public records request that give a look into the mindset of Oakland officials during the violent police raids of Occupy Oakland that began last October.
During that same confrontation, Scott Olsen, an Iraq War veteran with Veterans for Peace, was injured in the head, and images of his wounded body being dragged off and of officers tossing a gas grenade into a crowd of people helping him made him into a symbol of the Occupy protest.
Via:
In one message written Oct. 13, a sergeant said he'd been confronted by protesters camping at Frank Ogawa Plaza and that one implied they would remove officers by force if they entered the camp without permission.
Five days later, Deputy Chief Jeffrey Israel told Chief Howard Jordan,"We can either wait for a riot, or order them to cease their night time occupation."
Soon after, images of the protest began making national and international news.
A Washington, D.C., crisis manager recommended that Oakland apologize, but the mayor's team disagreed and re-crafted the message instead.
...
When Jordan received an update that crime was actually down 19 percent in the last week of October, he wrote an email to one of Mayor Jean Quan's advisers."Not sure how you want to share this good news," he wrote. "It may be counter to our statement that the Occupy movement is negatively impacting crime in Oakland."
Making no mention of the hell the Occupy Oakland protesters have suffered at the hands of the Oakland Police, KTVU does mention "just how stressful of a situation it was for leaders."
Not one email was written by Mayor Jean Quan in all of the over a thousand communications received. Face-to-face communication - her preference, says her office - leaves no evidence that could be used in a court of law. The emails sent out by police, the crisis manager, followed by their actions on Occupy Oakland protesters seem to indicate just what the Mayor's orders were.
A petition for the recall of Quan was certified just last month when she failed to heed calls for her resignation in the aftermath of the Occupy Oakland raids.
