Willie Brown: Look at police mentality for answers to brutality.

Baltimore could be a turning point in the national debate about police misconduct.

This case isn’t like many of the others that have come up in recent years: This time, the mayor, police chief and prosecutor are black, as are three of the police officers charged in connection with the death of Freddie Gray.

This is not about white cop versus black citizen. This is about cop versus citizen, which is really what the issue ought to be when it comes to police misconduct.

Cases of police being disrespectful or outright violent are not limited to black citizens or white cops. Cops can be bad to everybody. It just becomes news when when it’s a black person on the receiving end.

This time the media should go where the dialogue needs to be, and that’s the cop mentality, something we’ve never really dealt with in this country.

Back in Mineola, Texas, the high sheriff was everything. They called him “big boy,” and he was the police, the district attorney, judge, jury and sometimes executioner, all rolled into one.

Times have changed, but the level of power given to law enforcement on the street hasn’t. The only difference is that now, not only is everybody watching, they are recording it as well.

I bumped into Gov. Jerry Brown the other day at a big climate change event in Los Angeles.

“Are you thinking about running for president?” I asked.

“That’s a step up,” he said a bit icily. “In your last column you suggested I run for vice president.”

The city settled a former Police Department civilian attorney’s wrongful termination suit against Police Chief Greg Suhr for one reason: It didn’t want the chief and Mayor Ed Lee to take the stand and face crossexamination.

The suit was brought by Kelly O’Haire, who said Suhr had canned her for filing a complaint against him in which she said he had mishandled a domestic-violence incident.

I can’t say what would have come out under cross-examination, or if her lawyers had any dirt. But you never want your mayor or police chief on the stand, no matter what.

My only question is why the city attorney didn’t settle before the price got to $725,000, which ensured the story would land on the front page of The Chronicle.

Alameda City Manager John Russo, who is moving to Riverside to take that town’s city manager job, had a nice send-off the other day at Oakland’s Rotunda Building.

Russo is also a former Oakland city attorney and city councilman, so the place was packed with politicos from all over the East Bay.

The hot topic was real estate, with Russo’s experience serving as the prime example of a rocketing market. His twobedroom, 2,200-squarefoot home in the Oakland hills sold within two weeks of going up for sale, and at far over the asking price.

Then he and his wife went down for the weekend to Riverside and bought a place twice the size for half the money.

Oakland isn’t just coming back. It’s moving ahead.

It’s time the airlines laid down the law on all those oversize backpacks passengers are lugging onto planes.

Every time they come down the aisle, they turn and smack the pack into whoever is seated in the aisle seat.

I know. I was on Southwest and was clobbered at least five times by people oblivious to what they were doing. I thought I was on BART.

There ought to be a requirement that when you board, the backpack becomes a front pack.

Movie time: “True Story.” This jailhouse drama is based on a true story (what else) about a man convicted of killing his wife and three kids, and a disgraced newspaper reporter trying to make a comeback.

Not much action: Most of the movie is set in the interview room of a prison. But there’s great drama between James Franco as the accused killer and Jonah Hill as the reporter.

The real scene-stealer, however, is Felicity Jones, who plays the reporter’s librarian wife. It’s heavy drama, but if that’s your thing, this film is for you.

For a glamour banquet being held at a porn studio, the San Francisco Film Festival gala at the old Mission Armory the other night turned out to be quite an entertaining affair.

In the middle of dinner, a guy dressed in a white jacket and floral print tie, his collar askew, came over, grabbed me and said, “Willie Brown, you forgot me already?”

I must admit, I drew a blank.

“I was your neurosurgeon. I’m the guy who operated on your brain.”

“And cut some of my memory out as well,” I said.

The best line of the night, however, was the one about Bruce Jenner.

“Jenner has had six kids and three wives and only now, at age 65, he’s deciding he’s mixed up?”