Saturday night and Sunday may have been the worst 24-hour period in Oakland’s sad, sorry recent history. Crime swept the city, from rioting sideshow thugs who shut down the Bay Bridge to corpses strewn from West Oakland to Fruitvale. Yet the oblivious Sheng Thao (She/Her) is out there gloating about the Oakland Ballers, fabulous street parties, and an “upgraded 9-1-1 system” no one believes will work any better than the last one.

The number one issue in the upcoming local elections ought to be the continuing meddling by outside, unelected agitators into the Oakland Police Department via the Negotiated Settlement Agreement, or NSA.

The S.F. Chronicle’s front page story today, headlined “Town halls reveal a divided Oakland” (online, the headline is “Fighting recall, Mayor Sheng Thao hosts citizen town halls across Oakland”), set me to thinking about political divisions that tear entire communities, if not nations, apart—what causes them, how Oakland reached this point, and where we go from here.

For the last few weeks progressive media in the East Bay have been pushing a narrative that there’s a powerful anti-Recall movement afoot, in response to the efforts to recall Pamela Price and Sheng Thao. This story is little more than a wishful fantasy on the part of anti-recallists; but it is true that the pro-Thao and pro-Price forces are panicking, and will stop at nothing to keep their leaders in power.

The thing people need to recognize about James Chanin and John Burris is that both lawyers are opportunists whose self-interests are served as long as they keep the Oakland Police Department under federal receivership.