The Oakland Police Chief a game of power for Jerry Brown

Simond Griote

There have been a number of forums hosted by the Oakland Tribune Newspaper columnist and others about who the new police chief should be and the type of attributes such a person should have. But that person has not been selected.

In Oakland, the mayor has the sole authority to select that person. But the community and the Oakland City Council have asked to have some input. The only input the mayor has allowed is a free-forum discussion, which he has said that he would consider in his decision.

Some of the community placed their input at the feet of the mayor who has not even appointed an intermin chief. Consequently, the City of Oakland is without a chief of police while Brown goes through his unique way of thinking about this matter.

Mayor Jerry Brown is taking too much time to make a selection on a police chief, especially in a city like Oakland, where crime is a real problem. And the reason he has not appointed an intermin escapes many of us. But he has not.

Whomever his selection may be, the next Chief of Police of Oakland should not be a political lapdog for the mayor, as was Richard Word so used to vindicate the mayor's long-time friend Jacque Barzaghi.

When the police were called to the domicile of Barzaghi, instead of the regular police going to a regular spousal abuse case, the Chief Word himself went, and of course, made no arrest.

Such behavior should never occur with the next police chief. It may have been this embarrassment of lapdogism that drove Chief Word into accepting a job in a smaller city, northheast of Oakland. Usually, people move upward in their political or employment aspirations, not downward. But Jerry Brown did bring a new political paradigm to mobility, having gone from governor of the largest state in the union to a small city of some 400,000 citizens in that state. []