Oakland BART Police Shooting Update News

This is a review of the latest (to this date) information on the BART Police shooting of Oscar Grant. The Grant family lawyer John Burris has filed a $25 million damage claim. Two protests are planned for Wednesday one at 3 PM at Fruitvale BART.

On The Oakland BART Shooting By Police at Fruitvale Sta

The Oakland BART Police Fruitvale Station shooting was a horrifying act of an individual police officer that, upon reflection, went insane for a moment. I'm glad people had video cameras and used them. But I'm not happy with the state of the police in Oakland and the East Bay.

What the officer did to young Oscar Grant was shameful. If you look at the videos, the officer first drags Grant over the station floor then positions him against the ground, and then pulls out his gun slowly then shoots him, but then looks up as if to say "Oh, that was an accident."

It did not look that way.

This should prompt a major investigation into how police are trained and the backgrounds and attitudes of the people that are recruited and how they're trained. There's something wrong and where there's smoke,there's fire.

Now, Oakland Lawyer John Burris has introduced a $25 million lawsuit against the police department and BART, and given the look of the videos -- there are two with very clear angles -- the evidence is clear and hard to refute.

That police officer deliberately shot Oscar Grant.

Paul Cobb On Chauncey Bailey, Mayor Ron Dellums & Oakland

 

Paul Cobb is a long-time Oakland, California writer, activist, community organizer and now publisher of the Oakand Post. I met Paul at his office in Downtown Oakland to talk about a wide range of subjects, but the two I was most interested in talking about were who killed Chauncey Bailey and what Paul thought about the current Mayor of Oakland, Ron Dellums.  

Bailey was an Oakland journalist who was supposedly murdered by people associated with Your Black Muslim Bakery (YBMB) on August 2, 2007.  But Cobb and others believe that the chain of events that led to someone, perhaps Devaughndre Broussard of YBMB,  murdering a journalist in the line of duty is more complicated and may lead to people and institutions one would not expect. 

Cobb's assertions regarding the relationship between Bailey and members of the Oakland Police Department would seem to match the concerns expressed in this website article by the Chauncey Bailey Project.  The person who shot Bailey was wearing a ski mask so true identification was never done.  Broussard confessed to the killing, but this to may be a coverup.

Related blog post on Bailey's passing:

http://zennie2005.blogspot.com/2007/08/oakland-journalist-chauncey-bailey-in.html

In our talk for this video, Paul got in some interesting information.  Without coming out and saying it directly, Cobb believes that an Oakland Police officer had some role in Bailey's eventual death.  He says this twice in the video.   In this video, Cobb also said that California Attorney General Jerry Brown took Bailey's research files from him and never returned them.  A view that's controversial, considering that Mayor Dellums has asked Brown to investigate the matter of Bailey's murder. 

Cobb talks about Barack Obama and what his friend the late Dr. Martin Luther King, would think about Barack's historic success in becoming as of this writing the first African American presidential nominee of either party.  What Cobb says is not just that he would be proud, but it is the culmination of his dream.

Those are some of the highlights of a man who's life goes back to his personal relationship with Martin Luther King.