I bet you haven’t even heard of Measure NN, which will appear on the Oakland ballot in November. Officially titled “Oakland Community Violence and Emergency Response Act of 2024,” it purports to be “a results-driven approach to public safety which balances investments in community violence prevention and law enforcement strategies…”.
It’s not. What Measure NN really is, is kick-the-can-down-the-road rhetoric, designed to do absolutely nothing about public safety, but promising us that, by 2030 if we’re lucky, the City Council may be able to begin to approach our crime problems. It should properly be called the “Oakland Community Violence and Emergency Increase Act of 2024,” because that’s what it does: increase violent crime.
The measure was approved for the ballot unanimously by the City Council, with the curious exception of Nikki Bas, who was “excused” from the final vote. No explanation was ever offered why Bas chose not to participate in the vote. My surmisal is that she’s been widely criticized for her unending efforts to defund the Oakland Police Department, and now that she’s running for supervisor, she’s trying to hide her anti-police policies from suburban Alameda County voters who are very pro-police.
So what does Measure NN say?
It would institute a parcel tax and parking fee tax that would raise about $30 million a year for the next nine years “to pay for…a holistic approach to the prevention and reduction of violent crime in Oakland.” The key word is “holistic.” Progressives love that adjective because it means nothing, except that anything they decide is “holistic” is included. What “holistic” emphatically does not mean is more cops. It means precisely what “equity” and all those other woke buzzwords mean: skewering policies to favor people of color over all other Oaklanders, resulting in a dirtier, more dangerous and more economically unviable city.
A brand-new commission (just what we need!) would be formed whose members would be appointed by the mayor. Its first task would be to “develop and approve a Four-Year Community Violence Reduction Plan.” That means it would do nothing until at least 2028, and probably longer, while the murders and robberies continue unabated.
Do we really need yet another “violence reduction plan”? What the hell has the city been doing with the tens of millions of taxpayer dollars we’re already throwing at the Department of Violence Prevention? A big part of the commission’s purview would be to “review” the number of sworn police officers in anticipation of “the 2030 budget.” Again, do we have six years to screw around while the commission meets to figure out how many cops we need? We know how many cops we need: At least 1,100. It’s been said over and over again. Now, the cop haters on the City Council are asking for another five or six years to figure it out!
That “violence reduction plan” is basically a rehashing of the stale old “root causes” theory of crime so beloved by progressives—namely, a plan with an infinite series of increments (cf., Zeno’s Paradox), an endless timetable, and unmeasurable goals (eliminating poverty, eliminating inequality, housing everyone). Because these things are completely unachievable, so then is public safety. So long as one person remains unhoused, so long as one “youth” is “vulnerable,” so long as any form of “violence” remains “uninterrupted,” so long as any madman isn’t receiving “mental health services,” so long as anyone is unemployed, the City Council cannot and will not guarantee public safety—meaning, in other words, that the Council will never act to bring about public safety, because their demands for doing so are impossible of fulfillment.
This is why 75% of the funds raised by Measure NN will go directly to “unaccountable nonprofits.” As the No on NN people point out, “This measure [NN] provides no guarantees that the money will actually go to those programs, or that those programs will even exist. The City [Oakland] does not know what true accountability looks like. If they did, our 911 and public safety systems would not be as broken as they are.”
Measure NN is a scam. It’s an insult to our intelligence. It’s Carroll Fife’s and Rebecca Kaplan’s, Sheng Thao’s and, yes, Nikki Bas’s way of telling us citizens of Oakland who worry about public safety to go f**k ourselves. They don’t give a damn about public safety. You know it, I know it, they know it. All they care about is pleasing the unions that fund them and transferring wealth from the middle class to their crooked cronies in the equity/anti-cop cult. Please, don’t be fooled by the phony rhetoric of Measure NN. Vote no on Measure NN!
Steve Heimoff