Oh, don’t worry about crime, say the defunders. MACRO and our shiny new anti-violence programs will take care of everything; we’ll all be singing Kumbaya pretty soon. The public will be safe. And besides, we didn’t defund OPD anyway. That’s all a Big Lie from Armstrong and Schaaf.
That’s the message from Fife, Kaplan, Bas & Co., who led the Defund the Police movement on the City Council. Now, under unprecedented backlash from the citizenry, they’ve launched a desperate public relations campaign to restore their shredded credibility.
A good P.R. campaign means that everyone has to be on the same page. The message has to be consistent. There’s no room for an errant tongue, an inconvenient remark that reveals the rot within the edifice. But that’s exactly what happened on Monday, when the contents of a letter from the defunders were made public.
Addressed to Schaaf, who has gone to war with the defunders over their reckless pillage of OPD’s budget, the letter shockingly reveals that the City Council understands perfectly well the damaging effects their action will have on the ability of the police to protect the citizens of Oakland.
All along, Fife, Kaplan, Bas & Co. have pretended that stripping millions from OPD and transferring it to their pet, unproven projects won’t have any negative impact on public safety. Now, their letter proves that they lied: “While one year from now…the impacts of the Budget may indeed be felt,” it says, “this should not impact response time for priority one calls for service now.”
In other words, “one year from now”--July, 2022, when the cuts really start to bite--all hell will break loose in Oakland. To be sure, the defunders state this as delicately as they can, using the bureaucratese “may indeed be felt” to mask the horrifying reality. Were they honest, which they’re not and have not been, they would say, “Sure, we know we cut OPD. We did it deliberately. But we can tell you that the results of our raid won’t be fully felt for a year.”
Oaklanders have a right to be terrified. Every day, they hear about more murders and carjackings, more robberies and sideshows, more gunshots fired onto innocent crowds. They see shoplifting on a daily basis in the stores, and the piles of stolen bicycles that dot homeless encampments across the city. They have no expectation that the future will be better than the present, but now they do know, courtesy of the defunders, that it “may indeed be” far worse.
What kind of idiots does this City Council take us for? Do they think we don’t see what we see, and hear what we hear? Do they think they can speechify their way out of the atrocious thing they have done? Apparently, they’re so used to hoodwinking the public and getting away with it, that they believe they can continue to do so indefinitely, telling lie after lie, hoping that we, the public, won’t notice our city sliding into decrepitude. They’re all on the make: Kaplan wants to be Mayor, so does Bas, and who knows what Fife, in her grandiose fantasies, wants, besides Power. I hate to say it, but in electing these people to high office, Oakland has gotten what it deserves, may God help us.
Steve Heimoff