Cat Brooks told KTVU News, regarding overwhelming support in Oakland for hiring more police officers: “We keep getting on the exact same rat wheel and expecting different results. The only thing we haven't done are the progressive policies.”
Allow me to deconstruct this statement. What Brooks means, of course, by “the same rat wheel” is providing Oakland with enough cops to fight crime—something that hasn’t been done in years. Brooks hates the police, because they mainly arrest her constituents. For her to equate cops with “rats” is highly offensive, but then, Brooks is in the business of offending just about everyone.
If you want a real example of someone who gets on “the exact same rat wheel” over and over, it’s Cat Brooks. Her demand that we fund “the progressive policies” she’s loves completely ignores the fact that, over the past 60 years, since Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, the United States has sunk at least $25 trillion (with a “t”) into anti-poverty programs. That is more than the total amount spent on all the U.S. Defense Department budgets since 1964, according to the World Bank.
Keep in mind, these trillions have mainly benefited people of color. And now, of course, we have reparations looming—from Alameda County, from Oakland, from San Francisco, from the State of California—which will add untold more billions and billions of dollars.
No doubt the Black community is better off, economically, today than it was in 1964. But in other respects the community is worse off. Crime has soared, as we know from our experience here in Oakland, and the crime mainly impacts Black people themselves. What have we got for $25 trillion? An insurrection of assaults, robberies, car thefts, car jackings, purse snatching, larcenies, and murders that is absolutely out of control, in Oakland, San Francisco and many other places. This is not to say that the perpetrators are all Black. But Black people, mainly young men, are committing criminal acts out of all proportion to their percentage of the population. And yet, Cat Brooks insists that $25 trillion isn’t enough. She wants to throw even more money into “progressive policies.”
That is the definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Talk about rat wheels!
We, the people, aren’t fools. People like Brooks might have fooled a lot of us once, but she can’t fool us forever. We’re catching on. Evidence? The fury we’re seeing in all sectors of the population over crime, and the resulting demand for more police. I’ve never seen anything like it. In many respects it reminds me of the anti-Vietnam War movement of the 1960s and early 1970s. That movement started small, but quickly grew to massive proportions, to the extent President Johnson had to resign. Likewise, the pro-police movement (which the Coalition for a Better Oakland is proud to be a leader of) started small, but like a snowball rolling down a hill, it’s getting bigger by the hour. Has the tipping point finally been reached, where the anti-police cult is decisively beaten? I think so. It’s too bad that it’s taken so much death and suffering to bring it about, but better late than never. The important thing is that it’s arrived. We will have more cops on the streets in Oakland, a lot more. And, if we keep up the pressure, we’ll have LeRonne Armstrong back as Chief, to lead that force.
Steve Heimoff, President
Coalition for a Better Oakland