LET'S NOT PUSSYFOOT AROUND A TOUCHY SUBJECT
by Jack Saunders, Recording Secretary, Coalition for a Better Oakland
The Coalition for a Better Oakland, this town's leading pro-law enforcement pressure group, agrees with NYC mayor Eric Adams that unnecessary force makes a cop not only a menace to the community, but also an enemy of justice.
Our president, Steve Heimoff, has blogged about his own observation of cops beating a prisoner. We don't stand behind brutality. Look, this has always been the number one rot in policing going back to the Roman army -- sadistic and psychotically belligerent men will be drawn into careers that allow room for physical punishment to break resistance (of mostly powerless people). Men who delight in hurting subordinates -- and there are such people -- will apply for that job, consciously yet deceptively wanting in on the action.
I'm sure every good cop, clearly a substantial majority, is constantly watching for signs that one of their colleagues might like the rough stuff too much. They rein them in or weed them out.
But it's a never-ending process. Finding a new case is not a sign of backsliding. It's a sign of keeping on top of an unavoidable hazard.
New cops are joining the force all the time. And the academies attract very few sociology majors. It's a disgusting job that requires that its sworn officers be willing to get into a fight on behalf of the city. You know a lot of such people? Physical courage is quite rare.
It seems to CBO that Mayor Adams is correct, that departments need to explicitly demonstrate the weeding out of excessive force, not cover it up with bureaucratically convenient confidentiality claims. That's the kind of reform that will put police departments into a stronger position against the forces of crime .... which, until now, have held the upper hand.
Yet things do change. A Black Republican has a strong shot at becoming governor of Illinois this fall -- on a platform of stiff resistance to crime. The "crime is normal" people are on the run.
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EVEN LIBERALS WANT TO GET TOUGHER ON CRIME
by Steve Heimoff, President, Coalition for a Better Oakland
I love these remarks from a guy named Kash, reported in Saturday’s newspaper. Kash owns a bike shop mid-Market in San Francisco that was hit by thieves, who emptied it of pretty much all its inventory. Kash, a “veteran lefty activist,” was a bit disillusioned after that experience. There is a tendency for progressives, he told a reporter, “to dig in our heels and defend” antisocial behavior like theft. “We want to be good and help people down on their luck,” he said, but “we naively think the way to do that is to be nice…being a caring person doesn’t mean being a pushover in the face of bad behavior.”
Readers of this blog know that I’ve been saying the same thing all along. So-called “progressives” on the City Council contend that criminals are just misguided, misunderstood humans, victimized by white society, doing what they must to stay alive. Kash used to think that way, but reality intruded. What’s that old saying? A conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged.
What most of us in the Coalition for a Better Oakland believe, I think, is that there’s no excuse for crime. None. We have to get tougher on criminals, not feel sorry for them. And that brings me to a related point.
We hear lots of talk about providing subsidized housing for tent dwellers, through programs like Project Homekey. The theoretical promise of such efforts is that, eventually, the thousands of homeless people in Oakland will be housed. But the 800-pound gorilla in the room, the question nobody wants to talk about, is What if homeless people refuse to leave their tents?
We’ve heard plenty of anecdotes about campers who simply will not go. Is there some way to estimate how many of Oakland’s likely 4,500 homeless people will refuse to move, even if offered a free space? Actually, there is. New York City is doing much the same thing as Oakland, spending millions on places to put homeless people, but the majority of those whom the city is trying to help have rejected such assistance, preferring to remain in the streets. In a recent sweep of 239 encampments, “only five people were moved into shelters.” The remainder said No, we’re not going. That’s a success rate of only .02%. If you assume 4,500 homeless people in Oakland, that means only 90 of them will accept housing. Even if that estimate is too low, it’s undeniable that Oakland eventually is going to have to face the question: What to do with the refuseniks?
A couple months ago, when we Zoomed with Rebecca Kaplan, I asked her if she would approve the use of force to remove campers who refuse to leave their tents. She repeatedly dodged the question, but I wouldn’t let her. She finally said, “Yes. I would approve the use of force.” Getting that from her was like pulling teeth. But I didn’t believe her. There’s no way this current City Council is going to use cops to roust campers.
Happily, we’re seeing signs that officials, including Democrats, are started to get tougher on the homeless. Gov. Newsom’s CARE Court contains a provision to forcefully remove recalcitrant campers, although its specifics are vague. But sometime later this year, with all the hundreds of millions of dollars for homeless services pouring into Oakland from various sources, we citizens are going to start demanding that encampments be removed. If we have to send in cops to take camps down and cite those who refuse, that’s exactly what we should do, because, when all is said and done, public camping is still against the law.