I’d bet that most people who’ve heard of Oakland’s “Reimagining Public Safety” task force think of it as the progenitor of the “defund the Oakland Police Department” movement, which culminated in the City Council cutting $18 million from OPD’s budget last month.
That’s what I thought. To me, the Reimagining task force was created by City Council anti-police zealots intent on reducing OPD’s budget by 50%. These extremists on the Council wanted to wreck OPD but, not having the authority or the chutzpah to do it on their own, instead formulated a phony “task force” that would do their bidding.
So I was surprised yesterday to learn how internally divided the Reimagining task force itself was last December. Turns out that five of the task force’s 17 members issued a public statement repudiating defunding the police. The five members, all Black, did some long, hard thinking and decided that, with the murder rate in Black neighborhoods so alarmingly high, “Even more lives will be lost if police are removed without an alternative response being put in place that is guaranteed to work as good as or better than the current system.”
One of the five, Ginale Harris, of East Oakland, said, “People aren’t fighting for equity, they’re fighting for ‘defund the police.’ Well, let’s fight for the equity piece, first.”
I’m always happy to learn new facts. Sometimes, I have to confess, I jump to conclusions that don’t take into consideration all the facts. So I was wrong in my conclusions about the “Reimagining Public Safety” task force. Many of its members may indeed have been defunders, but five turned out to be rational, sane, fair-minded individuals, who understood that the rhetoric behind “defund the police” was empty and dangerous.
This is exactly what our Coalition for a Better Oakland has been saying all along. “Defund the police” is a stupid slogan, an ideology that endangers public safety, and does nothing except let its advocates puff themselves up as models of woke progressivism. In reality—as the residents of East and West Oakland know—cutting OPD’s budget results in more murder and more unsolved murders, as well as more violent crimes of other sorts. I could not have put the case better than another of the five dissident task force members, John Jones III, who said, “The five of us gathered because we were frustrated that ... at a time when the violence, and specifically the homicide in East Oakland was increasing, there appeared to be an unwillingness to have a conversation about it.”
That conversation is happening throughout Oakland. I saw it up close at Chief Armstrong’s #SafeOakland rally, where representatives of anti-violence groups spoke so passionately about the work they’re doing in their communities. They spoke just as passionately about the dumbness of defunding OPD. And even as they spoke, and held photos of young, slain murder victims, whose weeping families were present, anti-police thugs screamed through megaphones, violating the spirit of peace and mourning and showing just what kind of people they are.
I am so happy that our Coalition can join our Black neighbors in support of OPD. I’ll be meeting soon with one of the five task force members, Carol Wyatt, as well as with Chief Armstrong, to learn from them how our Coalition, which is largely comprised of White people, can better help in the struggle for peace in Oakland.