Oakland city government is incompetent even when there’s a functioning mayor at the helm, but now that Thao is MIA by the FBI raid, our city is like a ghost ship, with the engine running but no one in the captain’s cabin.
By its own rule, the City Council is required to pass a balanced budget by June 30. That date obviously has gone by, and we still don’t have a budget. The council could have met over the weekend, or even yesterday, but God forbid our Council members should work when the weather’s so nice! They’re now supposed to meet today (Tuesday).
There are plenty of important items in the budget but by far the most important is public safety. Thao’s proposed budget contains massive cuts to the Oakland Police Department; the Oakland Police Officers’ Association warns the proposed budget “will drive the Oakland Police Department to historic lows in staffing levels at a time when community members and business owners are already suffering, with public safety being their number one priority.” A few council members, notably Kalb, have said they’re anxious to avoid such cuts, but Kalb talks endlessly and, eventually, he ends up saying nothing at all. We have no idea if he’ll actually vote for the budget. He probably will: he’s never shown the slightest sign of standing up to the anti-police coalition on the Council.
Who is that coalition? Led by the racist Carroll Fife, it also includes Nikki Bas and Rebecca Kaplan. They truly don’t want a strong police force. They want one in name only—just enough to alleviate the fears of their constituents that Oakland is lawless, but not enough to actually get criminals off the street.
There are plenty of items in Thao’s proposed budget—the one the Council will debate today—that can be tinkered with to save money and prevent the OPD cuts. Nearly every “equity” department in the city is being awarded with new staff positions. One blatant example is the addition of a full-time position to the City Administrator’s office to keep yet another eye on the police. The reason: “BIPOC people, particularly Black people, are likely to be victims of police misconduct,” and therefore OPD has to be scrutinized more closely. Forget about Black people being likely to be the murder victims of other Black people. No, it’s the police that Black people have to fear.
Another egregious proposal of Thao’s is to “civilianize” 16 FTE sworn police positions in OPD and transfer them to the Reimagining Public Safety Task Force “to have more independent review of OPD police misconduct.” Here again we read the signature of Fife: so widespread is police misconduct, in her fantasy world, that it’s more important to spend money, not on cops, but on cop watchers, most of whom are predisposed to find fault with everything cops do. Another position that Thao proposes to create is a new Public Information Officer “to communicate with the public on high-profile police misconduct issues.” Really? We’re giving up an FTE position on the police force for a propagandist to twist facts and make sure the Fife-Bas disinformation is disseminated?
This woke obsession with “police misconduct” is pathological. Actual, demonstrable police misconduct (as opposed to allegations of it) is as rare in Oakland as snow in July. The real misconduct is by progressive politicians. (Hello, Mayor Thao!) Yet these perpetrators of disinformation seldom if ever get caught, because the local media loves a juicy police misconduct story—even if it’s false.
The actual freezing of OPD positions is quite extensive and violent. Let’s start with a 15% reduction in OPD’s sworn overtime budget. That pays for the officers who voluntarily agree to work overtime. We wouldn’t even have a police department if we didn’t have enough officers willing to give up their evenings or days off to protect us. Overtime is necessary due to persistent underfunding of OPD by the City Council. Yet that overtime budget is being slashed. Another Thao proposal is to reduce the number of Police Academies to three per year. Academies are where new cops come from; without Academies, no new cops. And with OPD losing an average of 5 cops per month (for numerous reasons), that is going to be very dangerous. Even the City Council admits that “With fewer academies, the risk that OPD may not be able to keep up with its monthly attrition grows as does the possibility of increased response times for calls for service because less police officers are on duty.”
There’s a lot more horrible stuff contained in these proposed cuts to OPD. Suffice it to say that, if Thao’s budget passes, Oakland will be considerably more dangerous. Crime is guaranteed to soar. And yet there doesn’t seem to be anything we can do about it. With progressives running the City Council, we’ll be lucky if they don’t reduce OPD’s budget even more today than Thao wants to. Stay tuned…
Steve Heimoff