Ya think?
How come she didn’t see that years ago? I did. You did. What kept Libby’s blinders on or, more accurately, why did she keep them on herself? When Carroll Fife was running for City Council, in the Fall of 2020, proposing an outrageous assault on the Oakland Police Department, why didn’t Libby sound the alarm? Anyone could have seen the danger Fife posed to public safety. Why didn’t Libby have a press conference and say, “Don’t elect this crazy person.” It might have made a difference. We might still have Lynette McElhaney-Gibson, a fair-minded, responsible council member. Instead, we have this—well, you know. The Marjorie Taylor-Greene of Oakland.
Libby made her “went too far” comment to Politico, the national publication that reports on politics. It came during an interview about “the root causes of violent crime.” Libby acknowledged that the grotesque excesses of the “defund the police” rhetoric have led to cities across America, including Los Angeles and San Francisco, strengthening their police departments, in a backlash that anyone could have seen coming. But—with Libby Schaaf there’s always a “but”—she could not quite bring herself to condemn the defunders who “went too far,” radicals like Fife, Nikki Bas, Rebecca Kaplan and Cat Brooks. No, her criticism of them was oblique, a mere tut-tut, as if it were the phrase “defund the police” that was the problem, and not what that phrase actually means. Instead, Libby insisted that Oakland still needs to focus on “justice,” by which she means “racial justice,” by which she means addressing “income inequality, food insecurity [and] housing insecurity.”
Well, those things require money, and that is exactly why Fife, Kaplan et al. proposed “defund the police” in the first place: to take millions of dollars away from OPD and invest it in their pet schemes. And this is where Libby gets hoist on her own petard: In trying to have it both ways, she comes across simply as naïve and incoherent. Naïve, because she didn’t denounce “defund the police” the instant she heard it (as you and I did), and incoherent, because Fife, Kaplan et al. have at least an intellectually sound argument: as stupid as defunding the police might be, it is logically valid to suggest doing so and then investing the money into social services.
But Libby Schaaf’s position makes no sense at all. It’s like trying to have your cake and eat it, too: if I can paraphrase, it’s “Let’s not defund the police, but let’s take the money that we would have saved by defunding the police and invest it in social services.”
Confused? So am I. Look: Libby will be out of office after January, 2023, and presumably she will be looking for her next election (wherever that might be). With her record, she’ll have a tough time getting elected dogcatcher. Libby Schaaf is the mayor who let the “defund the police” rhetoric get too far without denouncing it. She is the mayor who invited the Bay Area’s homeless population to come to Oakland, and then was stunned when they did. She is the mayor who refused to clean up the camps before they got out of control. She is the mayor who presided over the most shocking crime wave in recent Oakland history. And by the way, she’s the mayor who lost two of Oakland’s major sports teams, the Raiders and the Warriors, and may be on the verge of losing its third and last, the Oakland A’s. Would you vote for her for anything?
Steve Heimoff