Last year, on Febuary 18 at around 9pm, Berkeley resident Peter Cukor was murdered by a mentally ill intruder in front of his home. That same night, Occupy Oakland activists staged a ‘fuck the police’ march, which was to march from the Uptown area of Oakland to UC Berkeley to support activists there who’d faced police repression. Initially, Berkeley police blamed the Occupy march for slowing police response time; BPD later backed away from the claim, perhaps because of how obviously useless it would be to use Occupy Oakland’s march as a cover for BPD’s actions. The march began in Oakland at around 9pm, and would, by the most conservative estimate, take at least an hour to make it to the Berkeley border. That is if it even did, there were times when most marchers were skeptical, and that the march–accompanied by an unmarked OPD vehicle–came perilously close to dipping under double digits. It would be an example of remarkable incompetence if, indeed, BPD was diverting resources away from crimes in Berkeley for a march several miles away that might not make it to the Berkeley border. Not surprisingly BPD distanced itself from the accusation almost immediately.
So its really inexplicable why “reporter” Ted Friedman has written this, the perhaps worst sourced and most innacurate article ever posted to a blogsite. The innaccuracies begin mildly, with a misstatement on the year with the highest number of homicides in Oakland. Both the number and the date are incorrect, the high was 148, not 125; the year was 2006, not 1998. But that’s just the beginning. This article is so inaccurate, that even the date of the march and Cukor’s murder–February 18th–is misstated as November 18th, not once but twice! This is all the more remarkable, in the context of Friedman revealing that he joined the march when it arrived in Berkeley at “10:20pm” on “November 18th”.
Despite having the date wrong, he would obviously know–since he joined the march when it arrived in Berkeley nearly two hours after Cukor called BPD for help–that the march was miles away when Cukor placed his call to BPD. Yet, after a meandering jumble of apocryphal crime statistics, Friedman states, uncategorically that: “ The Fuck the Police march killed Peter Cukor, and that demonstration began in Oakland.”
I’ll grant that the entire article is a hair’s breadth away from being flatly dismissed as hallucinatory. And it should be noted that even by the flexible definition of the term ‘reporter’ in this day and age, Friedman hardly qualifies as such. But these constant attempts to lay heinous crimes at the feet of a movement that on its worst day broke a few windows, are grotesque and nauseating. The apparently deliberate inaccuracies of date, time and place; the hysterical Munchausenian accounts of harmless street theater; and the febrile misuse of loaded accusations to describe mundane encounters: it all needs to stop. You idiots are dealing with real people’s lives. Seriously.
Alan Kurtz
January 25, 2013
Thank you for revisiting the February 18, 2012 murder of Peter Cukor. This tragic event deserves to be better known, and I wholeheartedly concur that writers must bring factual accuracy to such an emotionally charged incident.
In that spirit, then, I beg your indulgence as I try to understand your account of the Berkeley Police Department’s position on this issue.
Four days after the crime, the San Francisco Chronicle’s Henry K. Lee reported BPD Lt. Andrew Greenwood’s Feb. 21 statement that police did not to respond to the initial nonemergency call from Mrs. Cukor because “only criminal, in-progress emergency calls were to be dispatched” on the evening of Feb. 18. This restriction, Lt. Greenwood explained, was “due to the reduction in officers available to handle calls for service,” given that a large BPD contingent was being held in reserve to respond as necessary to Occupy Oakland’s expected Fuck The Police march into Berkeley that night.
I presume this is what you mean when you write, “Initially, Berkeley police blamed the Occupy march for slowing police response time.”
However, you also tell us that “BPD later backed away from the claim” and, indeed, “distanced itself from the accusation almost immediately.”
This is where you lose me. On March 8, BPD Chief Michael Meehan told a community forum: “The information that we had, and it was all public information, was that an F*** The Police march—not the peaceful Occupy folks but the F*** The Police march, the folks that had busted up Oakland pretty badly—were coming to Berkeley … to the University police department, where they were going to take over the police department.”
So at what point did BPD “distance itself from the accusation,” and where is that documented? It obviously could not have happened “almost immediately,” as you claim, since nearly three weeks elapsed between Cukor’s murder and the community forum.
Please publicly respond to my question. You have rightly held Ted Friedman to a standard of accuracy, and ought to live up to that same standard yourself. Thank you.
Jaime Omar Yassin
January 26, 2013
A word to my readers about Alan Kurtz. This person has, time and time again, shown himself to be irresponsible and driven by antagonisms and fixations rather than a real desire to evaluate and interrogate events and actions. All letter writers are welcome here. But those who have continuously shown themselves to wallow in bigotry, homophobia, irresponsible accusations and misogyny are not. I am banning this person from my letters section. This will be the last letter you see from him here.
ted friedman
January 27, 2013
World’s Worst Reporter Replies:
Micah M. White (if memory serves) and a “co-founder” of Occupy, who moved to Berkeley last year, where he denounced my Occupy Berkeley stories as the worst in the nation, got me used to the worst reporter label.
When the label is re-applied, I wear it comfortably. Somewhere in my blogs at berkeleyreporter.com I have a piece on what I call errorism in journalism on-line. I could be the worst, yet I have written pieces that were error free.
The errors cited here resulted from references to the murder of Peter Cukor. I was too lazy to go back and check my original stories which were highly accurate. I just didn’t put out the time to go back and check my own correct reporting.
I am way too busy for my own good.
Mea Culpas aside, I have a firm analysis, based on my on-the-scene reporting the night of the murder. I have written several articles on this for the Berkeley Daily Planet, and vouch for the veracity of those pieces, not the veracity of the Oakland Crime Wave piece, which appeared as a “thought-piece” at berkeleyreporter.com.
Here is my bottom-line assessment of that murder and BPD’s response. Peter Cukor’s death should have been prevented. But I see why BPD and UCPD, in retrospect, may have over- reacted to the Fuck the Police march the night of the murder. I covered the march from when it entered Berkeley to when it disbanded early the next morning.
The City of Berkeley is presently being sued by Cukor’s family, or BPD would have long ago apologized. I will never get my friends at BPD to admit that they have changed the policies
which led to Cukor’s death.
Our motto at Berkeley Reporter. To err is human, to forgive divine–Alexander Pope
Ted Friedman/Steed Dropout (at Berkeley Reporter.
Jaime Omar Yassin
January 27, 2013
Laziness as an excuse in an article where you assert that a group of people is responsible for someone’s death? Really? In any case, your reasoning is pretty specious throughout the entire piece. The lawsuit hinges on the fact that the BPD chief NOT ONLY over-reacted to a march that was an hour and a half away, that he also neglected his other responsibilities by telling dispatchers to ignore calls received on a non-emergency line. In a country that is ostensibly democratic, there is never the excuse that a murder might happen during a constitutionally protected march. This is like saying that the drivers in a traffic jam are responsible for the death of someone being rushed to the hospital in an ambulance. They aren’t; traffic is one of the issues ambulance drivers must negotiate on the way to the hospital. Responding rationally to freedom of speech actions is also a duty of the police.