Yesterday’s Oakland City Council meeting on police funding was a wild ride. Council Member Loren Taylor had introduced his own OPD funding plan, in competition with Sheng Thao’s. The Council initially refused to consider Taylor’s. The Coalition for a Better Oakland’s Recording Secretary, Jack Saunders, created a petition demanding the Council take up Taylor’s plan, in addition to Thao’s. It seemed arbitrary that the Council would consider Thao’s measure but not Taylor’s, and it looked like political maneuvering: both are running for Mayor, but Thao is president pro tempore of the Council, and it appeared she might have sidelined Taylor in order to “own” the issue for herself and get the resulting publicity. A lot of people signed our petition, and even more called in to the meeting, after we promoted it on nextdoor.com, Facebook, through blast emails and on this blog. The Council got the message loud and clear: Don’t you dare sideline Taylor. It was, I dare say, the Coalition’s finest hour.
Yet the cop-haters tried their best. The way I saw it, Thao, Rebecca Kaplan and Carroll Fife got their shanks out for Taylor, the District 6 member. It’s clear they don’t like him. I can only presume it’s because, unlike them, he has shown an ability to support the police and actually vote to protect Oaklanders from crime. Why these other City Council members so consistently and irrationally hate on the police is hard to understand. Kaplan’s antipathy toward cops seems based simply on her outsider status; as a male-appearing Lesbian, she probably has experienced a lot of rejection in her life, and that built-up resentment may express itself as lashing out at an authority structure she views as largely male, straight and supportive of the status quo.
Fife’s cop-hatred is easier to understand. She’s a leftwing, Antifa-style ideologue, and a rather vengeful one at that. Her political career, heavily influenced by the philosophy of her friend Cat Brooks, has been built on weakening OPD; anger drips from her every utterance, anger toward a social structure she deems racist. She sees racism in everything; it warps her perception of reality, including the proper role of police in a crime-plagued town like Oakland.
As for Thao, she voted to defund OPD last June and then, when she decided to run for Mayor and realized that defunding is a political dead end, she suddenly discovered the cop lover inside her. I don’t trust her. I don’t like what she tried to do to silence Loren Taylor.
In the end, the Council finally gave OPD a partial victory last night when they voted to approve two new police academies. They kicked the can down the road another two weeks on whether to offer signing bonuses to new cops; that vote will happen on Dec. 21, and once again, we’ll be circulating a petition urging them to approve the bonuses, and we’ll make sure our friends flood the Council with comments during the meeting. Of course, last night, when she saw how drastically the Council was moving against her, Cat Brooks said she was “disgusted” to see so many members voting to increase OPD’s budget. Perhaps we can add to Brooks’s disgust in the future: the Coalition will increase its call for a police force of at least 1,100 sworn officers.
Steve Heimoff