The City Council, pissed off because their effort to defund the Oakland Police Department blew up in their faces, managed to do it anyway by more devious means: they voted unanimously late yesterday to eliminate funding for OPD’s Public Information Office (PIO), a blow that will eliminate two of the department’s positions. This will make it that much harder for OPD to communicate to a public that hears only one side of most police-related issues.
Which is, of course, exactly what the Fife-Kaplan squad wants. Their bill, Agenda Item 10, was a City Resolution to strip $493,000 from the PIO. Fife-Kaplan’s ulterior motive (they always have one) was to silence, or censor or cancel, OPD from talking to the citizens of Oakland. They prefer to allow the people to hear only from themselves and their puppet master, Cat Brooks: their lies over the years have been epic, ranging from Brooks’ rants about “police terror” (lol) to Fife’s “by any means necessary, y’all” [sic] recycling of discredited Black Panther rhetoric.
Of course, Fife-Kaplan don’t cop to their real motive (no pun intended). Rather than come out and say “We don’t want OPD talking to the public, because we wish to control the narrative,” they’ve justified this current round of defunding by saying the $493,000 will “go to East Oakland police resources,” as Kaplan put it in a Dec. 21 memo to the City Council and to “Members of the Public.” Just in case people failed to get the Panthers connection, Kaplan signed her memo “In solidarity,” a favorite Panthers’ coinage of bygone years; by “solidarity” they meant with what Fred Hampton called “the international proletarian revolution,” a war Fife and Kaplan are still fighting, exactly 40 years after the Panthers, ravaged by internal contradictions. ceased operations.
It’s clever politics. If anyone complains about taking a wrecking ball to the Public Information Office, Kaplan-Fife can counter with, “Oh, are you in favor of murder?”
On Jan. 18, 2022, Kaplan reissued her Dec. 21 memo, in amended form. It was virtually identical to the original memo, except for two changes: One, she inserted a new paragraph in response to charges that she was trying to muzzle the PIO. Far be it from me, Kaplan purred, to have such a nefarious motive. In her historical revisionism, she assures us that, even with only one information officer remaining, the PIO“will [still] allow the department to disseminate objective, truthful and unbiased information.” But hold the laughter, folks, there’s more. This time, Kaplan signed off with “Best wishes.” I guess “In solidarity” went away with the old year.
Now, none of what I’ve written suggests that I’m opposed to more policing in East Oakland. The entire city needs more police (see my post from yesterday on the need for 1,100 officers in OPD). Oakland’s entire annual budget averages about $3.85 billion. The $493,000 Kaplan-Fife are chopping off from the PIO represents .0012% of the budget. Are they seriously claiming they can’t find $493,000 someplace else? If you comb through the budget line by line (no easy task), you’ll find plenty of dubious expenditures. Take, for example, Measure HH, the 2016 ballot measure that placed a tax on sugary drinks. It raised $25 million over the first 30 months of its life. Does anyone know where that money went? It’s important to note that the measure “did not dedicate [these] tax revenues for specific purposes.” The money went into the General Fund, meaning the City Council can do anything they want with it. If sending more police into East Oakland is so important, why not take the money from Measure HH’s mysterious practices? And it’s not just HH: there are hundreds of strange, dark places that Oakland bureaucrats pump money into—and often these are pet projects of the City Council and their friends.
It’s probably pointless for anyone to expect anything other than rubbish from Kaplan, Fife, Bas and the rest of them. They are intent on destroying the Oakland Police Department, or, if not thoroughly ruining it, then neutralizing it to a point of emasculation. They then can argue that OPD’s very inefficiency is reason to take even more money from it. Why throw good money after bad? The brave new world this City Council dwells in is a very scary place indeed.
UPDATE: I incorrectly wrote that the Council passed this Resolution. In fact they kicked the can down the road, unanimously approving a motion to postpone a final vote until Feb. 1. This is good news: it means that the public now has time to rally. We can call in overwhelmingly to the Feb. 1 meeting and demand that the City Council not muzzle OPD! I’ll be distributing information on how to do that.
Steve Heimoff