Drummond: Former Oakland police Chief Batts in hot seat in Baltimore

◼ Baltimore police Commissioner Anthony Batts, formerly Oakland's top cop, has been having a rough time.- insidebayarea.com

Batts is no stranger to police brutality protests. Ten months into his Oakland tenure, there were violent protests in Oakland after former BART police Officer Johannes Mehserle was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter in July 2010 for fatally shooting Oscar Grant III, 22, on the Fruitvale BART platform. How Batts dealt with those protests and his public comments about how he would have handled Occupy Oakland demonstrations differently had he been in charge -- provide some interesting insight into Batts recent performance in Baltimore.

In July 2010, many people in Oakland were outraged by the Oscar Grant verdict of involuntary manslaughter instead of murder. Grant, an unarmed African-American man had been shot in the back while he was handcuffed, an event captured on cellphone video. A relatively small number of people vandalized cars, businesses and looted.

Batts would later say that he had made a strategic decision to give the protesters room.

"We allowed the protesters to start breaking into Foot Locker. ... But we had to do that because we didn't want to look like this was a police action, where we were responding too soon," Batts told Oakland North in an interview in November 2011. "Then we had a very coordinated plan. It took us time to just kind of corral them, bring them in and take them to jail."

Batts said people came up to him on the streets to congratulate him for how OPD handled the situation. Though, I recall a lot of people being angry about the destruction and OPD's hands-off approach.