After Nikki Bas was publicly shamed by Police union head Barry Donelan yesterday (I blogged about it), she has agreed to “a sitdown meeting” with him “to address officers leaving OPD.”
Attrition in OPD has been ongoing for some time now, due mainly to officers growing sick and tired of being political punching bags by anti-cop types and by a majority of the current City Council, including Bas herself. Of the council’s 8 members, the following 6 have aggressively tried to defund OPD: Bas (who is City Council President), Fife, Kaplan, Thao, Kalb, and Gallo. Only two council members, Taylor and Reid, have supported adequate funding for the police department. This November, Bas (District 2) will be running for re-election. Thao (District 4), who is running for Mayor, apparently will step down, as will Taylor (District 6), who also is running for Mayor.
For Bas to agree to sit down with Donelan must have been distasteful to her. The Oakland Police Officers’ Association President has been a thorn in the side to Bas and her City Council, consistently pointing out the anti-police rhetoric emanating from the Council and especially from Fife, Kaplan and Bas herself. Donelan has not been shy about attributing much of OPD’s attrition to those 6 Council members; in 2021 alone, 86 Oakland cops left the department (out of a current total of 673 cops, or nearly 13 percent). Of those 86, 37 transferred to other police departments. As Donelan pointed out, “Oakland’s City Council President [Bas] and her colleagues continue to vilify hardworking, dedicated Oakland Police Officers, and then they are surprised when scores of well trained and experienced Oakland Police Officers leave to work elsewhere.”
An objective observer has to scratch her head to figure out why the City Council has been so abusive to OPD. Is it that they don’t know the crime statistics? That defies common sense. Is it that they don’t care about rising crime? We can’t know what goes on in their heads, but we can make inferences based on their observed behavior; and my inference is that these 6 City Council members care more about other things than they do about crime. Their ideology is so race-based, so saturated with the objectives of “social justice warriors,” so rigidly extremist, that they have lost sight of the concerns of normal people, who just want safe streets for themselves and their families.
We’ll have to see what results from the Bas-Donelan sitdown. It’s hard to see Bas apologizing for her destructive behavior. It would be nice if she heeded Donelan’s plea that she say “Thank you” to our cops, but it’s not likely; Bas is stubborn, and were she to say anything positive about cops, the Fife-Brooks cohort of cop haters would turn on her like a snake on a mouse. With a re-election on her hands, she can’t afford to have Cat Brooks organize a picket outside her home.
But Bas has miscalculated this. Like Putin’s stupid move in Ukraine, she failed to predict the consequences of her attacks on the police. Most Oaklanders respect and support OPD. A super-majority of Oaklanders—some 78% according to a poll the Council itself commissioned—want “the same level or more” of police staffing. Bas’s miscalculation has been that she chose to support the most dead-end, anti-cop extremists, instead of listening carefully to her constituents. Surely that should endanger her re-election chances. The Coalition for a Better Oakland is actively seeking candidates interested in running against Bas. If you are, or know of someone, please let us know.
Steve Heimoff