The Madness of Mayor Quan

Based on a recent interview given by Ms. Quan to the Mills College campus newspaper, I now suspect she may suffer from an affliction similar to that of King George III. She babbles incoherently, appears muddled in her thought process, and is apparently hallucinating and/or suffering from impaired vision. You can find the full interview here. http://www.thecampanil.com/2011/01/25/the-campanils-exclusive-interview-with-oakland-mayor-jean-quan/

When asked for her thoughts on my litigation, she first claims that I “didn’t support Measure Y to begin with.” Actually, Jean, I have repeatedly stated that in fact I did vote for Measure Y, because I wanted a community police officer for each beat. Not that this is what we’re currently getting, but I digress….

Next, she says: “…and she’s always been out there saying, ‘oh well, you could not have the money until you had 803 officers.’” No, I never claimed that. Actually, my first lawsuit alleged that the City should have been precluded from collecting Measure Y taxes unless it employed the 739 baseline staffing from 2004. The City, on the other hand, claimed that all that was required was “appropriation” for officers, as opposed to employment of actual officers. This nuance is entirely lost on Ms. Quan. The next couple of sentences are so incoherent I can’t even understand what she’s trying to say, but if you can figure it out, let me know.

She goes on to claim: “Cops tend to retire as soon as they can and go on to get a second pension, if they can.” The cops are gonna love you for that one, Jean.

Then she starts moaning about how difficult it was to recruit cops after Measure Y passed, with this zinger: “…was at the time when LA decided they were going to hire 10 thousand new cops, too, so it was very, very difficult….” Really? Hire 10,000 new cops? The entire force isn’t even that large. But hey, what’s a few zeros to a woman who drove the school district into bankruptcy, and is well on her way with the City?

She attempts to explain the most recent legal ruling as follows: “I was really happy because I had helped write it [Measure Y] and I was like ‘we wrote in recruitment and training for beat officers’, but her complaint was that the people we hired and trained didn’t become beat officers right away. But the point is that beat officers have to be more experienced officers. We used the new cops to back fill the older cops, who then became beat cops….. I would have spelled it out more, but it just never occurred to me that the judge would think that we could immediately hire these people to be beat cops…and that’s basically what the law suit was….” Wow. Did you, like, get that? OMG! She’s, like, totally incomprehensible. Maybe she was translating from Ebonics?.

But never mind her insufferable syntax: she’s completely off the mark, because that was never my argument at all. Rather, I argued that the City used Measure Y funds to hire non-Measure Y officers, and an equal number of veteran officers were NOT deployed to Measure Y positions. An Alameda County Superior Court judge ruled that there was no justification for the City’s actions in logic or in law. Moreover, there is nothing in Measure Y that refers to “recruitment and training,“ so she must be suffering from delusions. Not to mention, given the total disaster Measure Y has been, why is she still bragging about it?

Then she concludes with: “…basically, she wanted us to keep more cops and to not do the violence prevention program in all of her negotiations. So her whole thing was that she really wants more cops. She doesn’t believe in the violence prevention program and she was pretty outspoken against it during the original campaign.” First, she’s not supposed to discuss the negotiation process. But yes, I really do want more cops, and I have publicly stated that given our extremely limited budget, we should prioritize police over violence prevention programs, because we can’t afford both. But I had no involvement in the original campaign whatsoever. Sounds like she’s mixing me up with Charles Pine. For those of you who don’t know both of us, we don’t look anything alike. Except we’re both white. Maybe we all look the same to her? Or maybe the affliction she’s suffering from is affecting her vision. Hopefully her new trusted advisor, Rasputin Esq., will brief her on what my litigation is actually about (if he even knows), and counsel her to keep her trap shut in future.