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Why Can't He Win?
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V Smoothe
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Last Updated on May, 19 2008 at 12:46 PM
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With so little to recommend Jane Brunner's reelection, why is she certain to win a fourth term?
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Photo by Colin Hussey
Unless something exceptional occurs between now and June 3, Jane Brunner will win a fourth term representing North Oakland on the City Council. Ms. Brunner's easy campaigns are something of a political mystery in Oakland. Her constituents are angry about crime in Rockridge and Temescal. As developers have sought to build more housing along the Telegraph Avenue corridor, she has succeeded in rankling both the pro-development and the anti-development sides off the debate. The last serious idea to come from her office was a proposal dubbed Oakland Ambassadors, which would have put youngsters at BART stations during commute hours to serve as escorts. That was a year ago.
With so little to recommend her reelection, why is her first serious challenger in years almost certain to lose? Perhaps, it's because Patrick McCullough has never held political office before, and his name is only familiar to most Oaklanders as the man who shot 15 year old Melvin McHenry. But Mr. McCullough is hardly the angry vigilante one might expect. Instead, he's mild mannered, friendly, and witty -- just another Oakland resident who wants to live on a street free of drug dealing and crime, and who'd rather discuss cooking than politics. There's no reason to think this lawyer would not be an energetic, creative, and fair member of the Oakland City Council.
Mr. McCullough's introduction to the politics in Oakland will be familiar to many of the city's residents. A Chicago native, McCullough entered the Navy after high school, and after leaving in 1981, he settled in San Francisco, where he went to law school and met his wife. They moved to a basement apartment in Berkeley, and when they were finishing up law school, they decided to buy a home. They initially couldn't qualify for a loan, and ended up using Oakland's first time homebuyer program to find a place in the North Oakland Bushrod neighborhood fourteen years ago.
McCullough laughs now at how wily their realtor was, only bringing them to the house in the earliest hours of the morning, and inventing excuses why it couldn't be seen during the rest of the day. McCullough got a wake up call about his new neighborhood the day before he moved in, when he dropped by to measure the windows and met a security alarm installer who told him "Wow. I can't believe you moved here. Good for you."
A few weeks later, he was taking a short break from fixing a friend's car when the spot he had been working on was hit by a stray bullet. Fed up with the crime on his street, he started calling the police to break up the drug deals and loitering, only to find that they were often unresponsive, and would show up hours after he called, if at all.
After a neighbor's son was killed in a drive-by shooting in 1993, the City installed a traffic barrier at the entrance of his street. When McCullough received a notice eighteen months later that the barrier was being removed, he made his first foray into City politics, contacting then-Councilmember Sheila Jordan, who told him that the barrier's removal was required by law. A little investigation proved otherwise. Mr. McCullough went door-to-door gathering signatures from his neighbors asking to keep the barrier up, which had stopped the speeding and sideshows that plagued his street. Even after two-thirds of the neighborhood's residents signed his petition, Jordan insisted on removing the barrier. Mr. McCullough sued.
His initial suit was successful. But he had to win two more times before the city relented and made the barrier permanent. During the nearly five-year long struggle, he watched Ms. Brunner support an activist group's claim that the barrier was a racist blockade designed to imprison black people in their neighborhood.
McCullough spent the next several years quietly trying to clean up his street. He convinced public works to remove the remnants of a playground that had become a congregation spot for drug dealers. It's now a community garden, and advocated for speed bumps and crosswalks around Bushrod Park and the neighboring elementary school. Despite receiving threats to himself and his family, McCullough kept calling the police when he saw drug deals or truant teenagers during school hours, and began taking pictures of them when the department didn't respond.
Tensions continued to rise, and in February of 2005, on his way to Chinatown to buy some crabs for dinner, a group of neighborhood teenagers he had clashed with in the past confronted him in his yard. He shot one of them in the shoulder. Mr. McCullough claimed McHenry was drawing a gun, and the shooting was in self-defense, and the District Attorney declined to charge him. In reaction to the shooting, some Oaklanders condemned him as a vigilante, while others hailed him as a hero. After the shooting, things stayed quiet for McCullough and the neighborhood until February 2007, when he came home from church on the day after the two- year anniversary of his shooting to find his front window shattered by bullets.
It was around November of 2007 that McCullough began considering running for Council. Fed up with the City's inaction on crime, neighbors started talking about how Brunner needed to be challenged, but how people were afraid to oppose her because of her money and power. After people started asking him to run, he thought about it, and made running for City Council his New Year's Resolution.
McCullough is a classic single issue candidate - when asked about development, he simply says that he's not interested, and that the City should focus only on crime and the budget. He says he doesn't know that much about Oakland's government, but complains about the tremendous amount of waste he witnesses as a City of Berkeley employee, and says he wants to identify and purge similar practices in Oakland.
McCullough characterize his candidacy as "beyond grass roots, more like grass seed," and his campaign has struggled with fundraising. When we met, he handed me a single photocopied sheet of white paper, saying it was the only campaign literature he could afford. Ms. Brunner, apparently not threatened by McCullough, has campaigned very little, although she recently began advocating for an increased police force in response to McCullough's calls for a minimum of 1100 officers. In fact, McCullough's only real opposition has come from his longtime foes at Uhuru, who have followed his appearances protests and passing out flyers with the bold headline "no attempted child murderers on City Council!" and condemning McCullough for his "white-backed terror of the African community." Jane Brunner had declined to publicly denounce Uhuru's tactics.
McCullough left our meeting promptly at 3 because he had to go pick his son up from school. His parting words to me were "I'm running for City Council because I want my son to be able to take the bus to school."
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OAKLAND
NEW
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