The Coalition is pleased to announce that our 2025 Person of the Year is Loren Taylor. He’s running for Mayor of Oakland, as you probably know. While the bureaucrats who purport to run this town have anointed Barbara Lee, we stand with Loren as a centrist, moderate citizen who is far more qualified than Lee, who is owned lock, stock and barrel by the unions. I’ll have much more to say about this in the following days and weeks.
As for Alameda County’s next District Attorney, I continue to support Butch Ford. He spent decades prosecuting criminals in the D.A.’s office but then Pamela Price arrived, and when Butch perceived what she was up to and criticized her, she fired him. He was immediately hired by Brooke Jenkins, in San Francisco, who knew quality when she saw it. The Alameda County Board of Supervisors is set to choose the top five D.A. candidates on Jan. 16, with their selection of the winner scheduled for Jan. 28 and the swearing in of the new D.A. on Feb. 4. I assume Butch will be among the Final Five, although with Nikki Bas—who was a strong Price supporter—now on the Board, that’s a little less likely, as she will probably lobby against him. Of course: Butch is tough on crime while Bas feels sorry for criminals.
Today, Jan. 14, the City Council will consider yet again the Oakland Police Department’s status with regard to the Negotiated Settlement Agreement (NSA), under which an unelected bureaucrat named Robert Warshaw has been essentially running OPD for many years, at a salary of at least $1 million annually. Warshaw is a con man and everyone in Oakland government knows it, but this city’s “leaders” have never had the courage to tell Warshaw to shove it. Warshaw’s shtick is this: every time OPD comes close to completing all of his performance conditions, Warshaw “discovers” some new scandal, by which he justifies renewing the NSA. It’s a total absurdity and miscarriage of justice, but cowards like Libby Schaaf and Sheng Thao remained silent in the face of this travesty; and if, God forbid, Barbara Lee becomes mayor, she too will kiss Warshaw’s rear end, because he comes from the same woke, anti-police ideology she does. Warshaw’s latest excuse for his cushy salary: his claim that OPD is out of compliance with Task 5 of the NSA. Oakland City Administrator, Jestin Johnson, described it this way in a memo to the City Council: “[Warshaw] found the Department out of compliance with Task 5 due to investigations conducted by the Community Police Review Agency (CPRA) and an outside investigator that resulted in serious discipline against senior members of the Department. In their report, they stated that the personnel findings and systemic deficiencies call into question the integrity and capacity of the Department’s internal investigatory process.”
Look, CPRA is just another woke Star Chamber comprised of police haters. As if the cop-hating Police Commission isn’t bad enough, OPD also is saddled with CPRA, whose bureaucrats revel in their power to persecute and defame cops. The entire system of police oversight in Oakland is rigged in favor of criminals and is a disgrace. The City Council should defund CPRA and the citizens of Oakland should put no trust into anything they say.
And with that, I’m off to Kaiser. Wish me luck!
Steve Heimoff