There are a lot of spurious anti-cop organizations out there. They claim to be “fighting for social justice” but in reality they’re contributing to the outrageous explosion of crime in Oakland by excusing bad behavior and instead blaming cops and “White supremacy” for all these robberies and attacks. Nothing gets me angrier than stupidity like this:
“Close Youth Prisons, Build Youth Leaders
By 2030, we aim to end youth incarceration in California. Every young person is sacred and every young person is a gift. But too many are silenced and disempowered by the impacts of the criminal, immigration, foster care, police, and education systems. We work for transformation and liberation through a combination of individual and collective healing and significant shifts in policy.”
This statement is from an Oakland organization that calls itself Communities United for Restorative Youth Justice, which aims to excuse young criminals no matter how violent their crimes. I heard of them through this story on KTVU News, which was about Sheng Thao promising to crack down on crime, lol. Never mind that she never worried about crime while she was on the City Council. She only became aware of crime when, under her watch, it exploded in Oakland, imperiling her own political future and infuriating her base voters who were beginning to wonder why they had voted for her. Suddenly, Sheng Thao wanted to be admired as the crime-busting Mayor issuing stirring rhetoric: “We are not going to allow for our residents and our businesses to feel unsafe in our communities.”
What a joke. For all of her political career, Thao has belittled the Oakland Police Department and tried to siphon money from it. She has offered no solutions for criminal behavior. Solidly aligned with other cop haters, like Carroll Fife, Nikki Bas and Cat Brooks, Thao actually voted against funding a desperately-needed police academy in June, 2021. Although she later flip-flopped on that—the San Francisco Chronicle noted that “Thao’s changing position signals a shift among some city leaders as public safety becomes a top issue”—she did so only under intense public pressure. She continues to believe that we ought to throw more money at addressing the “root causes” of crime rather than in strengthening OPD.
When Communities United for Restorative Youth Justice claims that “every young person is sacred,” I really have to wonder what in God’s name they’re talking about. If young people are sacred, so are middle-aged and old people. That means that the following people also were sacred: Adolf Hitler. Pol Pot. Slobodan Milosevic. Jeffrey Dahmer. Salvador Ramos, the Uvalde school shooter. Derek Chauvin, whose knee choked George Floyd. So it’s unclear just what Communities United for Restorative Youth Justice’s point is. Everybody may be sacred, but we punish even sacred people for violating the law. We don’t let them off the hook because they’re under the age of 18, or 21, or 25, or whatever the wokes are now defining as the age of adulthood.
I simply don’t accept this phony sympathy for young, violent criminals. If a 15-year old is mature enough to do a carjacking, or tackle an old lady to the sidewalk to steal her purse, she’s also mature enough to go to jail, where she may have years to think things through and realize the error of her ways. Especially if they’re running with a gang, these thugs are dangerous packs of predators, and may be irredeemable. Fifteen-year olds who assault innocent passersby aren’t children having fun, they’re dangerous and must be stopped.
Getting tough on feral juveniles, though, is almost impossible in Alameda County, where elected officials insist over and over that young murderers and muggers are simply misunderstood kids. Here’s Carroll Fife on the topic: "The reality is that when children engage in this type of criminal activity, it's probably connected to some adults somewhere in the pipeline.” I’m not sure what she’s trying to say—are parents responsible for the criminal activity of their children? I wouldn’t mind seeing some of these irresponsible parents fined or imprisoned for letting their kids turn sociopathic. But I don’t think that’s what Fife is saying. In the end, it doesn’t matter what she means. Fife never makes sense, and it would be a waste of time to try and analyze her psychobabble. It’s enough for us to conclude that she’s just putting more garbage out there to excuse feral juveniles, to try to convince us that the nine young men and women, aged 12-17, whom OPD just arrested for strongarm robberies, are “sacred” and “gifts.”
I don’t know about you, but those are nine “gifts” I don’t want. What I want is for them to be detained and dealt with, without possibility of being freed, until we’re convinced they no longer pose a danger to the rest of us. I’ll try to find out what happens to those nine criminals, but I can’t promise anything. Price operates in the shadows. It’s nearly impossible to determine the disposition of any of her cases, because she doesn’t want us, the people, to know.
Steve Heimoff