WEATHER NEVER ENDS
We had defended our 1st Amendment rights and won-at least for that round. "History is like weather, not like checkers," said Rebecca Solnit, a protester at the docks on May 12th. "A game of checkers ends. Weather never ends."
The next matter was to find out who had been behind the shootings. We had already asked the Oakland City Council to make an investigation into the events of April 7th, and had given them a statement of what needed to be looked into. We also specified who should be questioned. This included city, port and shipping company officials who'd not in all cases been present at the scenes of shootings. We wanted to know who had planned and authorized the attack.
The city council responded to our request, and voted to have an inquiry. The logical body to carry out this inquiry would have been the Citizens Police Review Board (CPRB), and we had specifically requested that the CPRB be in charge of it. Unfortunately, the CPRB was insufficiently staffed, and had a tremendous backlog of investigations, because Mayor Jerry Brown hadn't made the necessary appointments.
The most obvious remedy would've been to provide the CPRB with a full complement of investigators and commissioners. That had been another of our requests. However, the city council was apparently unable to do that, possibly because the mayor himself was unwilling; instead, they decided to hire an outside panel, and the task of setting it up was entrusted to City Attorney John Russo and City Manager Robert Bobb.
But neither Russo nor Bobb was a disinterested person in the matter. The city manager was among those suspected of authorizing the police to attack us in the port, and we had stipulated that he was to be among those investigated. City Attorney Russo wasn't on the suspect list, but he had been working all along to cover up the facts of the attack. He was the one who'd laid the "ground rules" for the April 29th hearing in which the police officers were not allowed to testify. There was a conflict of interest, and it was hard to avoid fearing that they would look for a way to sabotage the inquiry.
Their chosen panel included three retired judges, a civil rights attorney, and a former assistant police chief. These five panelists agreed to do the investigation pro bono, and their conclusions were to be made public in September 2003. The panel, however, didn't have the CPRB's power of subpoena, without which it couldn't compel any of the suspects to appear and testify. These suspects included not only the mayor and city manager, but also company officials of APL and SSA.
When ILWU's Steve Stallone asked what use the investigation would be without subpoena power, relating to our request that the port authorities and shipping company executives be questioned, the City Attorney's Office said that the investigation would not go into the actions of the shipping companies. It was apparent that Bobb and Russo had set the investigation up in a way that would protect the culprits from scrutiny.
It seemed that the panel would be limited to doing little more than a rehash of the well-known facts and fictions of the morning of April 7th, and so what I expected to see in the final report would be little more than an excruciatingly detailed minute-by-minute account of the attack.I wondered how the panel members might feel about their task of performing what now looked to be a superficial investigation.
Later, when the panel actually met, it only met twice, and behind closed doors. During their second meeting they decided to disband. This happened in August. The panel chairperson, retired Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge LaDoris Cordell, said in a statement:
"The sheer number of plaintiffs and attorneys involved, the continuing threat of further litigation and our panel's desire to hear from all interested persons would so constrain our investigation that any report that we might ultimately produce would be of little, if any, value," she said.
And City Attorney John Russo issued his statement, saying, "I sincerely wish the situation could have been different."