In November, Jeff Holzworth of the Santa Rosa Junior College Police Department was arrested on suspicion of grand theft and embezzlement. His responsibilities included maintaining campus parking meters and delivering parking fees to the accounting department, a duty which he is accused of abusing by stealing some of the money he was meant to collect.

While Holzworth’s arrest is bound to give self-appointed “social critics” an example of injustice to complain about while they sip coffee imported from impoverished nations in the southern hemisphere, it is, at worst, a case of one small-minded crook taking advantage of a relatively insignificant amount of power.

Meanwhile, Oakland Police Department agreed to the appointment of a federal compliance director last week. In this case, the compliance director will have the authority to overrule the police chief, even fire him, and also require the department to make expenditures of up to $250,000. The city made this unprecedented deal to avoid having OPD put into federal

receivership. If that were to happen, a federal official would assume virtually unlimited powers within the department. The reason Oakland’s finest find themselves in this pickle is they have failed to meet a list of court- ordered reforms that were part of a civil settlement following a high-profile scandal in 2000. The case involved four officers who assaulted suspects and made several false arrests.

I don’t doubt that the Oakland police have a very difficult job; the city they serve is the third most dangerous in the country, according to a study by Forbes magazine. But police brutality and intimidation are inexcusable and similar abuses continue to plague the department’s record. OPD has been publicly shamed by federal monitors and an independent study for its mistreatment of Occupy protestors. Far from being an isolated event, the violence with which peaceful protests were met in Oakland is a recurring problem.

The Occupy movement was given a sinister cast by media coverage, which was then helped along by its very small but active minority, the “black bloc” of anarchists who tried to start the revolution by smashing some windows at the Whole Foods. It’s an interesting

case study in priorities, by the way, to observe that Giants fans who may have caused more property damage in a single night than all of Occupy Oakland were never systematically blacklisted, while a valid social movement was handily dismissed due to the angry posturing of a fringe group. But even if the protests had been violent, civil rights violations like the near-killing of Scott Olsen should never happen.

The bottom line is, police departments are given an enormous amount of power. That may be necessary for them to carry out their mission as institutions, but when you get to the level of the individual police officers, authority can inspire some truly perverse shenanigans.

At least with Sgt. Holzworth, if he is found guilty, the abuse of power did not involve physical violence. In fact, the accusations against him seem almost trivial when compared to the rest of the state in recent years. Nonetheless, it is encouraging to see some oversight in law enforcement, even if it is retroactive. Hopefully, investigations like the one at SRJC and the reform program within Oakland Police Department will help to change the culture of law enforcement in California in the years to come.