Nikki Bas, the City Council president, has challenged Sheng Thao’s proposed budget, demanding “more support for the vital services residents rely on, including fire services, public safety, violence prevention, housing and economic development.”
How about the Oakland Police Department? You might think that by referring to “public safety” Bas means strengthening OPD, but she doesn’t. By “public safety” Bas specifically calls for increasing funding for “24/7 crisis response, community ambassadors in business corridors, two civilian police investigators and dedicating resources to allow MACRO to fill vacant positions more quickly.” In other words, nonsense. Bas doesn’t seem to believe that cops are integral to public safety. If she did, she would have included OPD in her “more support” list.
The last thing OPD needs is “two [more] civilian police investigators.” OPD already is by far the most regulated police department in America. (I’ll have more to say about this tomorrow.) We have to question the motives of people who want to throw layer after layer of additional scrutiny on the Oakland Police Department. The premise of these politicians is hard to understand. Either they believe that “all cops are bastards,” as the popular graffiti says, or they know it’s a lie, but are simply catering to the ignoramuses that believe it. At any rate, your tax dollars are being wasted on this never-ending search for scandal in OPD—a search that grifters like Carroll Fife, Pamela Price, Nikki Bas and Sheng Thao are addicted to.
I can’t imagine waking up every day looking for new ways to harm the police. But that’s what these woke pols do. They know that the dummies who vote them into office hate the police. They understand that their political futures depend on appeasing these cop haters. And so, all day long, they look for evidence of “corruption” in the police department, and if they can’t find it, they invent it. They can’t even begin the process of finding a new police chief, four months after Thao wickedly fired LeRonne Armstrong for no reason other than that the unions demanded it.
Bas’s silly proposal was co-sponsored by two council members with a long history of antagonism toward OPD: Rebecca Kaplan and Carroll Fife. They were joined by a new council member, Kevin Jenkins. Many of us have been watching him to discover just where he sits on the “woke” spectrum. Now we know. I had hopes he’d bring some sanity to the City Council, but it’s clear that Jenkins knows where his political future lies: undermining OPD. He tweeted “Help bring fair and just policing to Oakland communities by applying for the Police Commission.” You know and I know that whenever someone uses rhetoric like “fair and just policing,” it’s wokespeak for “all cops are bastards.” We can expect Jenkins to move further and further to the left until he’s virtually identical with Carroll Fife. As the Mercury News, which endorsed him, noted prior to the election, “We worry that, if elected, Jenkins would be a part of the hard-left council faction.” That’s exactly what’s happening, and it’s a shame. The fact is, there are no longer any moderates on the Oakland City Council. The entire apparatus has been seized by a cabal of woke radicals intent on driving Oakland into the gutter. Their philosophy is, “Tear everything down, wreck every patriarchal system so that we can rebuild from the bottom up.” They’re talking about your life, your safety and security. Are you better off now than you were four years ago, before we were saddled with the likes of Kevin Jenkins, Carroll Fife and Pamela Price?
Steve Heimoff