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Monday, October 23, 2006

Jerry Brown returning to California state government

Jerry Brown, then-fiancee Anne Gust, Gov. Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver at an exhibition honoring Brown's father Pat Brown (who was also California Governor) April 2005

This photo provides a perfect image of the difference between Jerry Brown and the current California Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Here, Schwarzenegger mugs for the camera, while Jerry is actually reading one of the informational signs.

SFGate.com has a podcast available, Jim Zamora interviews Jerry Brown (Part 1), in which the Oakland Mayor, former California Governor, three-time Presidential candidate and soon-to-be California Attorney General talks about his two terms as mayor of Oakland. (May load slowly.)

He talks about his work, particularly on crime and development. It's a good example of Brown's pragmatic, personally-engaged style. But you also get a good glimpse at Brown's reflective side, as when he explains his idea of "re-inhabitation".

Brown's race for attorney general has not received a lot of attention, largely because Brown has had such a large lead all along over his Republican opponent, Chuck Poochigian.

As attorney general, Brown will deal directly with criminal-law issues. One of his major goals is to improve the parole system, so that inmates being released from prison will have better opportunities to re-integrate into the community and so that the public will be better protected from the recidivists among them. A large part of the attorney general's job also has to do with consumer-protection enforcement, which I'm sure Brown will also give a lot of attention.

Despite the negative headline, this article gives a decent look at some of what Brown has been doing on the crime: Oakland slayings define Brown's legacy: Increasing homicides are ripe fodder for foe in attorney general race by Jim Herron Zamora San Francisco Chronicle 10/23/06

As mayor, Brown has announced more than 16 anti-crime initiatives, including a variety of crackdowns on repeat felons, parolees, loiterers, drug dealers and customers who seek prostitutes. He has imposed curfews on probationers and placed monitoring devices on high-risk probationers.

Not all his efforts have focused on enforcement. Brown has visited San Quentin State Prison several times to meet with inmates about to return to Oakland upon their release. He has funded rehabilitation programs, support groups and job fairs for the city's 4,000 ex-convicts.

Part of the problem is that Oakland's police force is understaffed. The City Council imposed a hiring freeze on the police in 2002 that was only lifted after voters approved a parcel tax increase in November 2004. Voters twice rejected earlier proposed tax increases to hire more officers.

Unable to hire reinforcements, Brown spent years creatively redeploying officers - which often has meant shifting beat officers, traffic cops or vice investigators to beef up task forces that focus on the city's most violent areas.

Brown's personal focus group has included Ivan Illich, a prominent critic of development in the 1970s; Noam Chomsky, linguist and political polemicist; S.I. Hayakawa, a semanticist before becoming a U.S. senator from California; and St. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order. As a Jesuit seminarian, Brown studied the "spiritual exercises" of Ignatius, chief among them the Latin maxim, *age quod agis* ("do what you are doing"). Temptation and ambition can nullify this admonition.