I was curious about the 'Interim' label for Oakland Police Chief Harold Jordan so I looked back at some articles explaining what happened to the previous Oakland Police Chief Anthony Batts. It becomes very obvious from the articles that Mayor Quan is a micromanager of the Oakland Police Department. This is in sharp contrast to the statement she made yesterday.
Mayor Quan expects us to believe that she knew about the raid:
Quan told a news conference at City Hall on Wednesday that her input on the raid was limited.
"I only asked the chief to do one thing: to do it when it was the safest for both the police and the demonstrators," she said.
The mayor said "I don't know everything" when asked by reporters if she was satisfied with how police conducted the sweep. She said she spent Wednesday meeting with community groups.
Just not that it was going to happen Tuesday morning:
Quan, however, said she did not know that Santana and Jordan had planned the raid for Tuesday morning and, in fact, "I didn't think it was going to be last night."
This lack of knowledge and hands-off approach is in sharp contrast to an article published earlier this month regarding the resignation of former Oakland Police Chief Anthony Batts:
If there was one thing he would have liked to have changed, Batts said plainly: "Let the chief be the chief."
The level of control exerted by Quan's office had reached the point where Batts' public statements required prior review from the mayor's office.
"The mayor made it very clear that we're supposed to be in alignment and saying the same thing," Batts said in a phone interview Tuesday.
Does that sound like a department head who's allowed to take the initiative and develop and implement strategies? He was a chief in title only. And he refused to play that game. Who could blame him?
Looking at Quan's expression in the photo posted with that article says everything about their relationship. The important point here is that she micromanaged the department to the point that he could not perform his duties as the Police Chief. She was making all the decisions but he was being held accountable.
We are suppose to believe that a micromanager gave up control of the Occupy Oakland raid, the largest police action in Oakland since she took office. A police action that took a week to plan and about $1 million of city money. This lack of control and oversight from someone that will not let her Police Chief address the public without prescreening the remarks. If I know one thing about the workplace after a dozen years or so, it is that micromanagers are always micromanagers. They do not change.
There is little doubt that someone with her excessive need to micromanage would never leave this huge decision to the Interim Police Chief. There is little doubt that she wanted this to happen while she was on the east coast so she could put distance between herself and the raid. The coward got out of Dodge. That way if things went wrong, well she was not there and she did not plan those details. Yet we now know that propane tanks were removed by fire officials on Monday because the city was concerned that they could be used as weapons by protestors against the police, but the micromanager didn't know. The Police Department AND Fire Department knew, but the micromanger was left in the dark.
She now has people in positions that align with her and say the same thing that she says. Coincidently, this is exactly what I would expect a micromanager to demand of their subordinates. Shame on Mayor Quan and shame on those that have not come clean about the details behind a weeks worth of planning and decision making.