During his campaign for a fourth term as President, Franklin D. Roosevelt said, in a speech in New York, “A policeman would not be a very effective policeman if, when he saw a felon break into a house, he had to go to the Town Hall and call a town meeting to issue a warrant before the felon could be arrested.”
FDR—our greatest President—was referring to the Security Council of the United Nations, then still aborning; he meant that the Council should have the power to act “quickly and decisively to keep the peace by force.”
This is only common sense. But we now find ourselves in Oakland, in the 21st century, when a policeman who sees a felon breaking the law is, more often than not, unwilling to intervene, which is why we have rampant shoplifting, sideshows, and other brazen examples of contempt for the law. This is not to accuse Oakland police officers of being irresponsible; rather, they are hobbled in their ability to make arrests by forces beyond their control.
These forces are many, starting with a Police Commission whose raison d’etre is that it suspects police officers of “inherent bias”; therefore, in the Commission’s view, officers are guilty of racism and excessive use of force without any evidence of either. In fact, anti-police extremists say the reason for lack of evidence in cases is because of coverups in the department. The Department also is hobbled by severe, chronic understaffing, the direct result of a cop-hating City Council that wants to shrink OPD into oblivion.
Roosevelt knew that a lawful society could be protected only by the intervention of the police in every instance possible. Today’s anti-police faction in Oakland—Carroll Fife, Cat Brooks, Rebecca Kaplan, Nikki Bas—believes in protecting criminals rather than the general public. Their beginning assumption, upon which their politics are based, is that criminals are simply misguided individuals, pushed into wrongdoing by the evil forces of White supremacy. According to this viewpoint, criminals should be rehabilitated, and the costs of their rehab must come from money taken from the Police Department. Hence “Defund the Police,” a term that has become so odious to the American people that the defunders are loathe to use it anymore; but their goal remains the same.
Next time a drugstore or convenience store in your neighborhood closes, causing you hardship, thank Carroll Fife, Cat Brooks, Rebecca Kaplan and Nikki Bas. And, starting next month, our problems will vastly increase, with the swearing-in of Alameda County’s next District Attorney, the notoriously anti-cop Pamela Price. A self-described “civil rights attorney,” she realized the financial and political advantages of a career dedicated to harassing cops. When she promises to “end mass incarceration and root out racial, socioeconomic and gender disparities within Alameda County’s criminal justice system,” what you’re hearing is the voice, amplified a thousandfold, of Cat Brooks and her progressive colleagues.
Wouldn’t it be nice for Price to promise to “end mass lawbreaking” instead of ending mass incarceration? As far as I can tell, the reason so many people are in jail is because so many people break the law. And—keep this in mind—the ones who actually make it to jail are the worst of the worst; they’re the ones who actually got arrested despite the efforts of the anti-police squad to prevent cops from doing their job. If you think Oakland is bad now, just wait until Pamela Price gets her wish, and the prison doors open, spilling out their tenants onto our streets and into your neighborhood.
Steve Heimoff