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He wants to show me the city's new computerized crime-tracking equipment, but it's slow to boot up and we both lose patience. But while we're waiting, I ask about a rumor that he tried to recruit former New York Police Commissioner William Bratton to be Oakland's chief (a staple of the paranoia that Brown is turning into the Giuliani of the West). He scoffs. "No, but we brought him out here to talk to us. And he taught us a lot. You know the first thing he told us? You have to reduce police brutality." Giuliani fired Bratton, Brown points out, because they differed over community policing. He leaves unstated the implication that his critics' fears of Bratton shows their ignorance.

When I ask him how he's going to share the wealth with the city's still-large poverty population and bring jobs to the unemployed, he gets defensive. "Unemployment is only 5 or 6 percent in Oakland now. Jobs are going begging," he tells me. I respond that unemployment is much higher in black West and East Oakland, and the city's welfare population has dropped, but only half as much as San Francisco's. "That's interesting," he says. "I've never seen that statistic. I'd like to know more about that." But soon he's defensive again.

"You're coming at me from the left," he complains. I disagree, telling him I've thought in recent years he'd moved to my left -- he was the one with his radio show on rabble-rousing Pacifica station KPFA, I remind him, the one who ran for president in 1996 ranting against corporate power.

He softens, but doesn't quite smile. "Well, you want me to be talking about the things I talked about on KPFA: global trade, technology, class stratification. I can't affect any of that. All I can do is make Oakland a better place to live. And the attraction of capital, making the neighborhoods safe and friendly and improving the schools will do that. It will take us to much higher ground."

A little bit mollified, he returns unbidden to the racial complaints that dogged his early months in office. "There are many consequences to poverty and racial division. That's all real. I don't mean to say it isn't real. The resistance is still there. But I think people are ready to ask not 'Who is the police chief?' and 'What race is he?' but 'What is he doing?'"

And he may be right. (It also helped that the police chief Brown selected, Richard Word, is black, and popular with the East Oakland neighborhood where he was commander, and that blacks still hold almost every department-head post in the city.) Brown still has his black critics. "The word on the street is that Brown is surrounded by some elitist-wannabes who are isolating him from blacks and browns," says author Ishmael Reed, who supported Brown's candidacy and wrote and recited a poem at his inauguration. "I hope that 'elegant density' doesn't mean black and Hispanic removal."

But it may be that most of the black community is ready for Brown's brand of change. "We've been through 20 years of addressing the most hideous discrimination of the past by using the same methods the oppressor used to govern: cronyism, favoritism, corruption, the attitude of 'They got their piece, and I'm gonna get mine,'" says Musgrove, who is black. "A movement of good government for cities has swept the country, and all good mayors -- African-American, white, Latino -- are governing that way."

Maybe surprisingly, Bazile agrees. "I think black hegemony is not our concern anymore," he says. "We have talented individuals, and if they lose their job in Oakland, they'll find jobs elsewhere. The concern now has to be how many children will be left behind and become prison fodder. We want results, and the color of a person doesn't make any difference anymore.

"I ran against him, but maybe Jerry Brown is the perfect person for Oakland right now. Other mayors would bring a flashlight to our problems, and Jerry brings a spotlight. He's certainly got the mule's attention."
salon.com | June 23, 1999

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