Good news! Jim Beere, the Oakland Police Department\u2019s interim chief, isn\u2019t the interim chief any more. After an eight-month search for a department leader, Mayor Barbara Lee has taken the \u201cinterim\u201d out of his job title. He\u2019s now the permanent chief.<\/p>\n
In his short time as interim chief he made great progress on the OPD\u2019s federal reforms and presided over a declining crime rate. I\u2019ll bet morale has been sky-high among the rank-and-file ever since his appointment was announced.<\/p>\n
I met him more than two decades ago, right after he returned to Oakland and the city\u2019s Police Department after serving as a Marine sergeant in Iraq, where he led the first platoon to enter Fallujah. Their first assignment was to seize two bridges where the bodies of four civilian contractors were hanged after they were lynched by a mob.<\/p>\n
He was awarded a Silver Star for disarming six different bombs, which were wired to be detonated by an insurgent who was watching secretly nearby, waiting to set it off when Jim got closer. Jim cut the wires before the insurgent could push the button, though.<\/p>\n
Jim was wounded twice, first when an AK-47 round shattered on a rock, riddling his hand with shrapnel. He thought it was just a bee sting, and he kept fighting for two more hours until his hand started swelling badly. A Navy corpsman took one look at it and said, \u201cMan, you got pieces of a bullet sticking out of that hand!\u201d<\/p>\n
They offered to send him to the rear to have his wounds treated; but an attack was just about to begin, and Jim didn\u2019t want his boys, as he called them, to have to face it without him. So he told the corpsman to cut out as much as he could, right there in the field, then he went back to fighting. He was still pulling pieces of metal out of that hand a month later.<\/p>\n
The second wound happened on Highway 1, the road to the airport, aka \u201cthe most dangerous stretch of road in the world.\u201d The bad guys detonated a 155 mm artillery shell right under his vehicle, and the people in the car behind him were sure that Jim and everyone else in the car were dead.<\/p>\n
Fortunately, he survived, but he sustained a concussion and a damaged left ear from it and still has permanent nerve damage in his hand from the first wound. He was awarded another Silver Star, but he insists he\u2019s not a hero though his wife is.<\/p>\n
He was working undercover when she first met him. He had long, straggly hair and a beard, and she thought, \u201cIf he ever cleans up, he could be a good-looking guy.\u201d The wedding was a bittersweet occasion because his Marine unit had just been called up, and he shipped out to Iraq shortly afterwards.<\/p>\n
She kept the home fires burning, and it wasn\u2019t easy. She put on a brave face and never complained, not even when she was awakened by a 5 a.m. phone call to find out about his first wound.<\/p>\n
When Jim got back home to Oakland he rejoined the Police Department\u2019s Special Victims Unit, which protects the most vulnerable people in our community from the most predatory, and he was soon back to making life more difficult for rapists, wife beaters, child molesters, elder abusers and human traffickers. One of his biggest coups was rescuing two girls, only 12 and 14, from a pimp who was raping and prostituting them.<\/p>\n
His nearly three decades with the department include serving as interim chief, assistant chief, the Bureau of Field Operations\u2019 deputy chief and the Criminal Investigations Division\u2019s Commander. In the final analysis, though, it all comes down to character.<\/p>\n
You can be a bad person and still be a good writer or plumber but never good cop, much less a good police chief. This guy is the real deal. When I first met him I was so impressed that I thought, \u201cI sure hope he becomes chief one day,\u201d and now he is. Kudos to Mayor Lee. She\u2019ll never make a better appointment.<\/p>\n