Adi Sambamurthy/The Bay Citizen

Occupy protesters clash with officers from the Alameda County Sheriff's Department at the Port of Oakland.

On the afternoon of Jan. 28, as the police grappled with Occupy Oakland protesters, dispatchers received a flurry of 911 calls from people at the Port of Oakland who reported something strange swaying in the wind. Was it a leftover Halloween prop? An Occupy ploy?

When the police finally arrived, they discovered it was the body of a San Leandro murder suspect, a man who the authorities said had stabbed to death the 15-year-old mother of his child, then fled and hid for a night before he hanged himself at the Port. 

With the Oakland police and neighboring agencies busy arresting about 400 protesters, it would be 12 hours before the man’s body would be cut down, according to police investigators.

The calls about the swaying body were among the 1,700 the police received over the course of 24 hours on the weekend of Jan. 28 while dealing with the largest showdown to date with Occupy Oakland protesters. The movement has, since its inception, provided a lens less into the hypocrisy of the 1 percent than into the deep dysfunction of the beleaguered and depleted Oakland Police Department. While police were trying to control the Occupy movement over that weekend, police responded to at least five murders and more than 450 calls were made to 911. 

As the department faces the impending possibility of a federal takeover — the result of several missed deadlines in a nine-year court-ordered reform effort — showdowns with protesters have consumed the diminished force, leaving crime scenes and emergency calls unattended, protesters and agitators emboldened and a federal judge increasingly exasperated.

“Between the court and Occupy and the chain of command and with the crime — having four, actually five homicides — you take any one of those events and give it to a city of equal size and they would be running frazzled,” said Sgt. Chris Bolton, the Oakland Police Department’s chief of staff. “For us, that’s just day to day.”

In interviews, city leaders said Occupy protests gave the police department little choice but to leave the rest of the city unprotected.

“It’s terrible,” said Ignacio De La Fuente, a city councilman who joined Mayor Jean Quan and top police officials at a downtown command center on the night of Jan. 28. But “when you have hundreds if not thousands of people, and you never know if they are going to break windows or vandalize businesses, you have to respond.” Protesters broke into City Hall that night, smashing display cases, painting graffiti and burning an American flag.

De La Fuente said the Occupy protesters had also pushed Oakland to the financial brink, costing the city millions of dollars in overtime pay for police officers even as officials tried to cope with the loss of $28 million in state redevelopment money. 

The violent clashes have also placed Oakland under nationwide scrutiny, renewed concerns about excessive force and solidified the city’s soiled reputation as a place where protesters and criminals, and even sometimes the police, run amok. 

Since the department’s eviction of Occupy Oakland from Frank H. Ogawa Plaza on Oct. 25, it has received hundreds of complaints about police misconduct, including accusations of excessive force and concealed name badges. 

The department is still investigating the case of Scott Olsen,  an Iraq War veteran whose skull was fractured on Oct. 25 after he was hit by a projectile allegedly fired by the police at the Occupy encampment. Some other accusations of misconduct have prompted lawsuits.

“A lot of these things would be obviated if they followed their own policies,” said Bobbie Stein,  a lawyer affiliated with the National Lawyers Guild who helped draft Oakland’s crowd control policy in 2005. The guidelines were developed under federal court supervision after the police fired wooden bullets and shot-filled beanbags at antiwar demonstrators at the Port of Oakland in 2003.

On Jan. 28, Stein said, the police repeatedly gave dispersal orders before they had evidence that demonstrators had acted aggressively. She said they fired tear gas canisters unnecessarily, and “corralled people into places where they had no means to escape.” 

The department is hurrying to complete a series of changes ordered by a federal judge nearly nine years ago after the Riders case, in which a group of officers were accused of planting evidence, using excessive force and falsifying police reports. Last month, Judge Thelton E. Henderson  of the United States District Court in San Francisco, expressed concern about the department’s slow progress.