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(06-28) 17:20 PDT — Overlooked in the court hearing that ended in former BART police Officer Johannes Mehserle being ordered tried for murder in the slaying of Oscar Grant was testimony about another officer’s explosive outburst just 30 seconds before Grant was shot.

Matier & Ross

BART ‘N-word’ bombshell waiting to go off 06.28.09

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One of the videos made by riders at the Fruitvale Station in Oakland early New Year’s Day caught Officer Tony Pirone standing over the prone Grant and yelling, “Bitch-ass n-.”

Pirone and his attorney say he was parroting an epithet that Grant first hurled at him – though Grant’s voice is not audible on the tape.

The sound-enhanced tape shows Pirone delivering a shoulder chop to Grant and bringing him to the ground. Pirone can be heard saying twice, “Bitch-ass n-, right?”

Prosecutors showed the tape in court on the last day of Mehserle’s preliminary hearing, but the headlines went to the judge’s decree hours later that there was enough evidence to send Mehserle to trial for murder.

Under questioning from Mehserle’s attorney Michael Rains, Pirone insisted it was Grant who had first “called me a bitch-ass n-.”

Asked if he had repeated the slur to Grant, Pirone testified: “I don’t remember, but it very well may have happened.”

“Is that something you would have initiated on your own, calling him names?” Rains asked.

“No, I don’t talk like that,” Pirone said.

Oakland attorney John Burris, who is representing Grant’s family in a lawsuit against BART, called Pirone’s words “shocking and disturbing.”

“Pirone was out of control,” Burris said, “assaulting Oscar Grant and taunting him with racial slurs, and none of the other officers seemed to put him in check.”

Pirone’s attorney, William Rapoport, dismissed Burris’ assertion – reiterating that Pirone, who is white, was simply reacting in surprise to being called the “N” word himself.

Mehserle, who is white, was not accused by prosecutors or Grant’s family of a racial motive in the shooting of Grant, a 22-year-old African American whom BART officers pulled off a train after receiving reports of an onboard fight.

A spokesman for the state Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training in Sacramento declined to weigh in on whether Pirone’s comments would be cause for discipline or even firing, citing an internal BART probe of the shooting.

Peter Keane, a Golden Gate University law professor and former San Francisco police commissioner, said that determining whether Pirone’s comments were grounds for discipline depends on whether he was intending to use a racial epithet or just echoing Grant in a “sense of incredulity.”

But without Grant’s voice on the tape, Keane said, “the burden of proof moves heavily to Pirone.”

The race is on: State Attorney General Jerry Brown bests San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom by 20 points in a new, two-way poll for next year’s Democratic gubernatorial contest.

The poll by JMM Research of 525 Democratic and decline-to-state voters is the first snapshot since Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa announced last week that he wasn’t running.

With Villaraigosa in the lineup, the numbers read:

— Brown, 33 percent.

— Newsom, 20 percent.

— Villaraigosa, 17 percent.

Take the L.A. mayor out, and it’s:

— Brown, 46 percent.

— Newsom, 26 percent.

Brown does best with the voters over 40, who tend to turn out in bigger numbers on election day. Newsom thrives with the younger crowd, which he hopes to turn out big time, a la Barack Obama.

Geographically, Brown beats Newsom everywhere but the Bay Area.

Whichever candidate they support, the one thing Democrats overwhelmingly agree on is the sad state of the state, with 73 percent saying California is headed in the wrong direction.

Budget bingo: Publicly, San Francisco’s budget battle is being pitched as a fight with Mayor Gavin Newsom, cops and firefighters on one side, and the Board of Supervisors and advocates of social programs on the other.

But behind the scenes, the fight is also between two major labor groups: the Service Employees International Union, which represents most of the city’s health and social workers, and the police and fire unions.

Service worker unions have helped elect a number of the supervisors. The police and firefighter unions are big backers of the mayor, and opposed many of the supervisors.

The first round went to the service workers when the supervisors voted to cut $82.9 million from the police, fire and sheriff’s departments and use it for health and social services.

But now, it’s dawning on everyone that the city will probably need even more money to keep everyone happy, which means going to the ballot in November with some kind of tax hike. And any kind of tax hike is going to need police and firefighter support to pass.

Which may explain why the service and firefighters unions have been meeting on the QT in the hopes of working out a compromise.

And if they do – City Hall will follow.

Banmiller bows: After taking a good, hard look at the numbers, business newscaster Brian Banmiller has decided to stay out of the race to replace outgoing East Bay Democratic Rep. Ellen Tauscher.

“They weren’t kidding around when they redistricted the 10th,” the Republican said of the district, which includes portions of Solano and Contra Costa counties. “They said they were going to make it safe for Democrats, and it is.”

EXTRA! Catch our blog at www.sfgate.com/matierandross.

Chronicle columnists Phillip Matier and Andrew Ross appear Sundays, Mondays and Wednesdays. Phil can be seen on the KPIX morning and evening news. He can also be heard on KCBS radio Monday through Friday at 7:50 a.m. and 5:50 p.m. Got a tip? Call (415) 777-8815, or e-mail matierandross@sfchronicle.com.

source: http://www.sfgate.com/columnists/matierandross/

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KARMIC JUSTICE — 4 KILLED COPS

by Joseph Anderson

March 27 2009

Most people of color know that the cops, and police departments as an institution, *historically* represent the street enforcement arm of white American racism. Indeed, the police were born out of the white slave patrols.

People of color and conscious white people have seen how the cops have brutalized, especially, many members of the Black and Brown community — just the latest, in a long series of notorious cases in the Bay Area and all over the country, being the police murder of Oscar Grant — and sometimes (which doesn’t get as much notice) even members of the Asian community — and now (even just recently in San Francisco) peaceful protesters and members of the Arab community (specifically women and children). And just relatively recently, in Oakland, 11 cops were fired for falsifying a whole series of search warrants, and the head of OPD Internal Affairs was put on leave, pending the investigation of his having effectively beaten, in his custody, a Black suspect to death years ago. How soon we forget the Oakland Riders case, and the damage control performed there to politically limit the corruption investigation and exposure to those corrupt street cops, but not the department in whose culture and corruption they were spawned. I’ve heard that Oakland alone pays out (at least averaged over time) about 2 million dollars a year in police brutality cases.

U.S. flags were flown at half-mast for these dead cops — tried, sentenced and executed in the streets just like they do with people of color — but no flags were flown at half-mast over city hall by the Black mayor of Oakland for Oscar Grant. Ron Dellums took a week to say anything about Grant, and then only spoked in carefully indirect and tepid terms. But Dellums, of course, immediately, personally and vociferously condemned the killings of the cops right away. So, much for some of those docilized middle-&-above-class negroes (male and female above the intersection of race and class) who condemn the cop deaths (on TV, radio, even one Black female on KPFA’s Hard Knock Radio) by saying that “all life is equal”. Since when, right from its founding and upon who’s lives it was established (Red, Black, Yellow and Brown), has all life ever “been equal” in the history of AmeriKKKa?

At least a couple of the TV local news stations have shown a servile Rev. Philip Ellinberg, some neegro (probably what we Blacks call “a jackleg / bootleg preacher”, since I tried to look him up online, and in the phone book, and with telephone directory assistance, and found nothing) who’s supposed to sing for Massa at the dead cops funeral, but he didn’t sing at Oscar Grant’s funeral and I haven’t seen him anywhere at the Oscar Grant Movement meetings almost every Saturday in Oakland at Olivet Missionary Baptist Church.

Where were the flags at half-mast, and the state and mass media coverage funeral, for Oscar Grant and other unarmed, innocent victims of killer cops vigilantism and street executions? All the Bay Area cities have to do is to look at the names on the boards of the Stolen Lives project and portable mural. Do you think that any of the Bay Area cities would even just fly their flags at half-mast just one day, collectively for ALL of those victims of the police?

And we forget (or don’t know) that one of the cops who was only wounded, but should have been killed, was Sgt. Pat Gonzales, who shot a young Gary King Jr. (Black) in the back and killed him. Cops up in (or north of) Napa/Sonoma valley even went and gratuitously killed the Black adopted son of an affluent white married couple who made the mistake of calling the cops to help calm down their emotionally distraught son.

You know the old saying, “When The White Man is hurt evvveryone must cry.” But LOTS of people AREN’T CRYING over 4 killed cops — including even a lot of politically conscious white people — and AREN’T MOURNING in this state mass propaganda funeral. While the cops and the media even come up with suspiciously last-minute stories to try to tell us just “how bad” Lovelle Mixon was (how about research into those dead cops background to see how abusive and dirty they were?), many of us realize that _IT’S KARMIC JUSTICE_ whoever killed the 4 cops all in an afternoon’s work. And it’s KARMIC JUSTICE that, just as many Blacks in America have been murdered by cops during a “routine” traffic stop, these cops were killed during a “routine” traffic stop. Ha-Ha.

The cops called Lovelle Mixon, “A cold-hearted individual who doesn’t have any regard for human life.” Well, the cops should know: they behave exactly the same way.

Cops 2; Oakland residents 4.

———————————–

Joseph Anderson

Berkeley, California

March 27, 2009

(Written as the Oakland cops funerals are occuring.)

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White Cop Calls Oscar Grant a ‘Bitch Ass Nigger’ -Moments Before He was Shot

Matier & Ross

KARMIC JUSTICE — 4 KILLED COPS