Every so often I watch meetings of the Oakland Police Commission on KTOP, the city’s public access T.V. station. I have a negative reaction to the Police Commission to begin with, and seeing it in action is a ringing confirmation of that impression.
These people are yentas. That’s the old Yiddish word for a nosy busybody. When I was a kid, living in a tenement building in the Bronx, there was an old Jewish lady, Mrs. Weintraub, whose second floor window faced the front courtyard. She would sit looking out from that window all day and night, seeing everything, everyone coming and going, watching every interaction, as though the orderly existence of our building was her responsibility. Of course, it wasn’t; Mrs. Weintraub was a yenta. If we’d had nextdoor.com back then, she would have been all over it.
I feel the same way about the Police Commission. The Oakland Police Department would be just fine without them putting OPD’s every move under a microscope, but of course, the Police Commission is there, and so these commissioners feel they have to see every sparrow that falls in OPD and have an opinion on it. And not just an opinion: a position. Nothing is too minor for the Police Commission to ignore.
Yet sometimes it seems that the Police Commission’s favorite topic to meet about is itself. In true bureaucratic style, the Commission actually has very little of substance to do, so they meet constantly to re-examine their own rules. Tweak a little here, fuss a little there, and pretend that the taxpayers’ of Oakland are actually getting their money’s worth from a city agency that is fundamentally irrelevant.
For instance, their last meeting, on April 22, which I watched, concerned “some of the things which need to be changed” in their internal structure. Their agenda included these items: should Commissioners receive stipends? (They currently are unpaid volunteers.) Should the city be required to provide more human resources assistance to the Commission? Should alternate Commissioners be allowed to attend closed sessions? And should the Office of Inspector General (yet another police watchdog agency) audit the Negotiated Settlement Agreement (NSA) between OPD and the Federal Monitor, Mr. Warshaw?
While these items may be theoretically interesting, especially to the Commissioners themselves, the fact that the Commission spends so much time on this navel gazing suggests that it has too much time on its hands, time it spends in self-absorbed narcissism. If the Police Commission feels it needs more human resources help, let them ask for it. As for stipends, the Commissioners knew that the position was unpaid when they volunteered. If they wanted to be paid, they shouldn’t have gone on the Police Commission. As for OIG getting involved in the NSA, why is this being taken up more than twenty years after the fact? Just fire Warshaw and get on with it.
The latest example of the Commission’s meddling is their recent criticism of the California Highway Patrol, which Gov. Newsom sent to Oakland to help with the crime spree the Police Commission is unable or unwilling to resolve. Despite the fact that CHP “made 112 arrests, impounded 73 vehicles, recovered 215 stolen cars, took 7 firearms off the street, and issued 536 citations during a recent week-long period,” the Police Commission, in their anti-cop hysteria, managed to invent a series of complaints against CHP, including “a lack of information about civilian complaints against CHP officers” for such things as racial profiling, rudeness, harassment and bad service. These allegation are what the Police Commission loves: they enable it to get on their high horse and pretend they’re helping “the community” when, in reality, all they’re doing is enabling criminals and crushing cops’ morale.
I point out these things because Oakland is a super-bureaucratic city with scores of agencies and departments, and as with every bureaucracy, no matter how small, its members feel they have to meddle in everything. They feel, also, that they need to be bigger and bigger, and this only adds to the spiderweb of burdensome regulations that already smothers Oakland and, therefore, all of us. We have a government that has grown so large and intrusive that there’s barely an inch of Oakland that is not scrutinized by some minor functionary who rules from his manager’s chair like the dictator of some banana republic.
Not only that, these functionaries all subscribe to the same political philosophy: wokeism. You can’t work for city government at any level of power unless you’re woke. DEI rules everything Oakland does. Race is king: nothing gets done without racialist rules intruding into the affairs of every shopkeeper, every school, every family. Every one of these dozens of city bureaucracies has a race and equity component that puts the color of people’s skin above all other activities and considerations, and manufactures directives and rules demanding racial outcomes. When literally everything is seen through the lens of race, the world becomes a very different place from the way you and I and normal people see it. Race (which many anthropologists argue is a synthetic concept) becomes the sine qua non of every government action, its underlying motive force and raison d’etre. No good can come of this, as evidenced by the deteriorating conditions in Oakland over the decades. Seeing everything as a function of race has been the ruination of a once-great American city. And yet race continues to be the obsession of our politicians.
And racially-obsessed people are yentas. Like the McCarthyites of the 1950s, who found Communists under every bed, Oakland politicians find racists and racism everywhere. The McCarthyites came close to destroying America, and were stopped only by a fortuitous and rare resistance of media and public opinion that came to its senses, almost too late. In Oakland, we have not yet been successful in bringing the media and public opinion around, although we continue to work at it. And so the bureaucracy metastasizes, spreading cancerously throughout our body politic, infecting everything it touches. We are a city run by incompetent, racially-obsessed yentas.
Steve Heimoff