At 10 a.m. today the rally for Chief Armstrong begins at City Hall. We’re hoping for a very large turnout. It’s important that we show up in force to get the message across to Thao, to the other police bashers, and to the media: We the people are tired of the cop hatred that’s been on sickening display in Oakland in recent years, of which Chief Armstrong’s firing is the latest and most visible symbol. We’re not going to take it anymore.
When I refer to the cop haters, you know who I mean. Besides Thao, first and foremost on the City Council is Carroll Fife, the paranoid rabble rouser whose partner recently (and allegedly) beat up Vincent Williams, the Coalition for a Better Oakland’s Person of the Year in 2022. I include also the incorrigible Cat Brooks and her minions. When I refer to “the media,” I mean that portion of it that thinks it’s their job to bash cops every chance they get, in the name of “social justice.” Number one on this list is the San Francisco Chronicle.
Not a day goes by when that woke publication, owned by some of the richest and best-protected people in America, doesn’t hurt the police in some way, thereby endangering the public. They lie, twist and distort, and selectively choose which stories to emphasize and which to ignore, in a virtue-signaling preening that grows ever more bizarre. Their racist-in-chief columnist is Justin Phillips, who never met a criminal he didn’t like or a cop he did. Yesterday’s paper provided yet another example. On the front page, column-to-column, in lurid 60-point bold black letters, ran the headline: “D.A. shrank unit probing police” (the online version’s headline is “Exclusive: S.F. District Attorney Brooke Jenkins shrank unit investigating police”). The paper’s complaint: Jenkins “reduced the unit responsible for investigating police violence and misconduct.”
The Chronicle’s reporter, Joshua Sharpe, conveniently overlooks several important facts. First, reasonable people do not buy into the propaganda that the police are on some kind of racist binge of violence and misconduct. That’s the kind of slander routinely chummed to the public by the Chronicle and individuals like Brooks, whom the Chronicle permits to write a column. Whenever there’s an incident like the Tyre Nichols killing, cop haters make it sound like all of the nation’s hundreds of thousands of cops are murderous maniacs. If there’s not a recent incident to exploit, the cop haters dredge up decades-old cases, like the Riders in Oakland. Although that happened 23 years ago, Brooks and her pals routinely peddle it to bolster their slur that “all cops are bastards.”
What a load. What an insult.
The second fact Sharpe ignores is that Brooke Jenkins’ predecessor, Chesa Boudin, was recalled by San Francisco voters, who were fed up with his anti-police, pro-crime policies. These two facts in themselves should indicate that the premise of Sharpe’s article is bogus. San Franciscans like their cops; they know there’s no problem with their police department. Nor is there any reason to be wasting taxpayers’ money and police resources on a bloated and unnecessary “investigative” bureaucracy that has little or no reason to exist, except to satisfy the cop-hating vengeance of “progressives.” Jenkins, thank goodness, has the intelligence to realize that, and the courage to act on it. She knew she’d come under vicious, vulgar attack from haters like Cat Brooks, who just retweeted a tweet calling Jenkins a “piece of shit.” What a refreshing change Jenkins is from Alameda County’s D.A., Pamela Price, who’s letting criminals go free even as she persecutes cops.
The woke Chronicle, in alliance with Brooks, treats Jenkins’ reduction in the size of the unit as a major scandal. Watergate Revisited! Appoint a special prosecutor! Haul Jenkins before a Grand Jury! Incite the public! But that’s not how normal people react. Instead, we see this tedious manure in the Chronicle and think, “There they go again.”
I might mention KQED radio and the Oaklandside as other exemplars of this woke, politically-correct behavior. I listen to the former in the morning, and every day there’s another hysterical story about racism; meanwhile, over at Oaklandside, their support for Brooks, Fife and other wokes is as evident as their anti-police bias. No wonder ordinary people sometimes wonder if their cops can be trusted: whenever they pick up a newspaper or turn on the radio, they find defamation of cops from supposedly “objective” news sources.
We have such a big job in front of us, my friends. The odds are so stacked against cops that it’s a staggering task to knock down the shield of lies with truth. And yet, we have to try, grateful for every small success, assured in the knowledge that, someday, we’ll erase this woke stain from our city.
Try, please, to be at Frank Ogawa Plaza (City Hall) today by 10 a.m. The weather is awesome. It will be a great and memorable day.
Thank you.
Steve Heimoff