Berkeley mayor apologizes for trashing campus newspapers

By The Associated Press

12.09.02

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Editor's note: Mayor Tom Bates was charged with an infraction for trashing the newspaper copies, it was announced on Dec. 12. Bates was fined $100 on Jan. 8, 2003.

BERKELEY, Calif. — Newly elected Mayor Tom Bates has apologized for an incident in which about 1,000 copies of a university newspaper endorsing his opponent were trashed the day before the election.

"I deeply regret my involvement in the activity. I was tired on the last day of a difficult campaign and I made a mistake. There's no excuse for it," Bates said on Dec. 6.

Bates, 64, a former state assemblyman, won the Nov. 5 election with nearly 56% of the vote to incumbent Shirley Dean's 42%.

The copies of The Daily Californian were stolen Nov. 4, the day the paper endorsed Dean. The student newspaper reported about 90% of the papers were recovered from trash cans in Berkeley's Sproul Plaza, known as the birthplace of the 1964 Free Speech Movement.

Campus police have forwarded the case to the district attorney's office, said UC Berkeley Police Capt. Bill Cooper. Prosecutor John Adams said he would decide what to do with it sometime in the next week.

"We're all kind of shocked," said junior Steve Sexton, one of four students who allege they saw Bates tossing the papers. "It causes us to question what he would do behind closed doors at City Hall."

The four students are affiliated with the California Patriot, a conservative campus publication. But Sexton said politics didn't play into their decision to come forward.

"We're a conservative student group. We're certainly not going to lie to help elect one liberal Democrat over another," he said.

Dean said she was "absolutely astounded" by the affair, but would need to learn more about the facts before suggesting a course of action.

"He painted himself throughout the whole campaign [as] a man of years and years of integrity who was running a positive campaign, etc., etc., all of which was simply not true," she said. "I'm appalled, I really am, but what can be done about it I don't know."

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