Oakland, J’accuse!

This article by Tim Gardner first appeared in the SF Standard. I’m republishing it because of its importance.

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Oakland’s crime data mess: How politicians are playing shell games with public safety

Oakland politicians have a simple playbook on crime: When crime is rising, they wave it off as a broader state or national trend, or they blame it on the previous administration. When crime goes down, they take full credit. They close with a virtuous spiel on violence prevention and policing alternatives as the future of a more just public safety system.

But this playbook is not grounded in data about the reality on our streets or law enforcement. Politicians and elected officials cherry-pick incomplete data that suit their political objectives. Much of the public accepts their spin at face value.

If the electeds did take a deep look, they'd find out the data were full of issues that could impair correct interpretation, because data gathering, management and curation are difficult undertakings, and they are systemically underfunded.

Instead, they base public safety policy on political expediency, which in recent years has disrupted and dismantled the resources needed for fair and just policing. 

Take the Oakland Police Department’s crime-reporting system, which is more than twenty years old. It’s so degraded that the department can no longer use it to centrally track police investigation documents. Instead, employees use Microsoft Word, saving files on desktop folders and sharing by email.

That system is supposed to automatically transfer uniform crime reporting data to the state for its annual crime compilation. But that too is broken. The state recently released 2023 data showing 11,169 aggravated assaults in Oakland in 2023—a 3.4-fold increase over 2022. But that’s an error. OPD’s own report shows about 3,500 aggravated assaults.¹ The state data is flawed due to an unresolved bug in data transmission discovered a month ago.

Police sources tell us that OPD is now “beta testing” a new $12 million computer-aided dispatch system for 911 operations, funded by a state grant. The new system has a records module that could replace OPD’s current system, but police can’t use it because it won’t communicate with the myriad of archaic OPD data and reporting systems required by local, federal and state oversight policies.

As record-keeping gets worse, it invokes a downward spiral. Trust plummets as a skeptical public demands transparency but does not get it. OPD is inundated with more than 10,000 public records requests each year, which are fulfilled by the same overtaxed staff—primarily its investigative staff of about 40 officers and administrators (excluding the homicide division) who are also tackling a caseload of over 40,000 crimes.

Poor records and technology infrastructure are just the tip of the iceberg. In the past decade, policy changes and decisions have upended Oakland's policing. These include reducing police stops by about 80%, limiting criminal pursuits, intensifying oversight, limiting crowd control practices and closingthe local jail. In parallel, the city reduced police staffing to the bare minimumrequired by law and may go further. 

One of these policies—the pursuit policy limiting the speed and type of chase—is not inherently a bad policy. It aims to protect the lives of innocent people who are frequently harmed by pursuits. These tragedies also cost the city tens of millions of dollars in lawsuits—a cost cut in half with the new policy.

However, this policy has consequences; it means non-violent and most violent criminals escape arrest. If we curtail this tool of law enforcement, we also need to replace it with effective technologies, strategies and resources to track and intercept offenders without a direct pursuit. But the city has not done that. So, in essence, they have issued a ticket to freedom for criminals.

The city has made all these changes like an uncontrolled clinical trial using Oakland residents as guinea pigs—except this “trial” has no principled design, no measurement of outcomes and no guardrails to ensure the experiment does no harm. In 2020, a small but prescient group of individuals foresaw this; they implored the Re-imagining Public Safety Task Force not to replace proven policing methods until first proving that alternatives work.

It’s clear the experiment is not working. The state of lawlessness is so severe that Oakland has become a destination for crime tourism.

Adding to the pain, the police department has been under a federal monitor’s control for more than two decades, the longest federal oversight of any department in the country

Its 50+ requirements have fundamentally reshaped the department's operation. Officers are constantly scrutinized by the monitor, an investigator general, a police commission, the Community Police Review Agency, a media machine, a public primed to expect misconduct, and by those who may profit from maintaining the public perception of misconduct. 

The department was just three months from ending its oversight when Mayor Sheng Thao fired Chief LeRonne Armstrong in February 2023. Subsequently, an independent arbiter cleared the chief of wrongdoing. But the oversight continues.

Analyses done in 2013 and 2017 found that 67% to 78% of Oakland’s homicide victims are Black.

Many in the city believe in hopeful theories about police and criminal justice reform—theories based on comforting labels like “violence prevention” and “police alternatives,” or on shame-inducing phrases like “mass incarceration” and “police militarization.” But these are words, not data, nor evidence, nor rigorous analysis of effectiveness. 

Oakland’s Department of Violence Prevention (previously called “Oakland Unite”) has produced only one report on its efficacy in its 20-year history. It showed the department’s practices didn't reduce arrests or victimization of program participants. Yet the city has generously expanded its funding since, without any demand for performance accountability.

The argument for these alternative policing programs is that they better serve the communities that are hurt by the criminal justice system. However, this approach disregards the impact of unchecked crime on those same communities. Analyses done in 2013 and 2017 found that 67% to 78% of Oakland’s homicide victims are Black. The city’s own surveys show that Black residents, those most severely impacted by crime, prioritize policing and police data transparency more than any other demographic.

Certainly, there are deep, inscrutable sociological factors contributing to crime that deserve to be addressed with public action. But those factors aren’t unique to Oakland. Oakland’s crime problem is much worse than in nearly any other city in the country because we don’t enforce the law.

Criminals will exploit that gap in law enforcement no matter how much we spend on alternatives.

As a community, we chose this path because we voted for the leaders and ballot measures that implemented those policies. 

We can have a safe Oakland, but we have to choose it.

Steve Heimoff, with thanks to Tim Gardner