It was a hard thing for a supporter of the Oakland Police Department to sit through today’s special City Council hearing on the budget.
Hard, but educational.
The hard thing was that OPD supporters were vastly outnumbered by those demanding that the police department be defunded. I stopped keeping track after the 32nd public speaker, but by my count, 29 of them were anti-cop, while only three were for the police: someone from the Chamber of Commerce, and the Coalition’s own Leslie Landberg and Jack Saunders. (I tried to speak but was not selected by the City Clerk.)
But the hearing also was educational for me. It would be all too easy for cop supporters to say that the anti-cop speakers are a bunch of woke bozos who have no idea what Oakland is facing if and when they get their dream of vastly shrinking, if not entirely abolishing, the police department. I do have a tendency to characterize them that way, but on the other hand, I understand they tend to characterize me in ways I don’t like, so it’s important for me to at least try to comprehend them.
A few overarching themes emerged from those 29 anti-cop speakers. One was pro-MACRO, Oakland’s proposed Mobile Assistance Community Responders program. It would, in essence, send social workers or paramedics or firefighters to deal with the mentally ill on our streets. The MACRO supporters seemed to be organized in advance, with rehearsed talking points: they demanded that MACRO employees (whoever they end up being) be paid at least $70,000 a year, with good benefits. Many of the pro-MACRO speakers also demanded that Black- and Brown-skinned residents of Oakland be hired into these jobs.
Another theme that emerged was that the police cannot prevent crime—indeed, even Chief Armstrong conceded that the mass shooting on Juneteenth could not have been prevented no matter how many cops were present at Lake Merritt—and so it’s pointless to keep “pouring money into OPD,” as several said; the real solutions, according to them, are providing housing, good schools and jobs, healthcare, recreational opportunities and so on. Some of these speakers were irrationally biased against the police, but others were quite thoughtful. I disagree profoundly with their desire to cancel all upcoming police academies (where new recruits are trained), but several did raise a valid point: Some of these recruits get the excellent training that OPD provides, but then they go on to get policing jobs in other cities. I don’t know how much of that is true, and I’m going to look into it. It seems to me that if you’re accepted into an OPD academy, you ought to commit to working for OPD, at least for a period of time.
Both groups—those who support MACRO and those who demand defunding the police—strongly supported the so-called Bas-Fife budget. It has been the most antagonistic toward OPD, as opposed to Mayor Schaaf’s proposed budget (which largely preserved OPD funding) and Council Member Loren Taylor’s compromise budget, which was sort of halfway between Schaaf’s and Bas’s. Many of these pro-Bas speakers liked what they called the “social justice” aspects of her proposal.
As someone who believes we all have to figure out ways to get along, I listened carefully to those 29 speakers. Sometimes I cringed at their remarks, and sometimes they made me so angry I wanted to switch off my computer. But what good will anger do? The anti-cop people aren’t going away. I truly don’t believe they represent the majority in Oakland; the City of Oakland’s Budget Advisory Committee’s well-known poll proves that “78% of Oaklanders want the same number [of], or more, police officers.” For better or for worse, the kind of people who will take the time to sit in front of their computer for hours in order to speak at a Zoom City Council meeting tend to be more politically active, younger, and leftist. That’s cool. It’s how democracy works. I think the City Council understands that those anti-cop speakers are not truly representative of Oakland. But then, when politicians are as ideologically-driven as, say, Council Members Bas and Fife, they tend to not care about such trivialities as “majorities” or “the people’s will.”
Still, listening to the meeting was an eye- (or ear-) opener. I heard and respected those who disagree with me. I can only hope that they hear and respect me and people like me. I sometimes fear they don’t, that their minds are so made up that they’re unwilling to compromise on anything. We’ll just have to wait a little longer to find out how much the City Council is actually prepared to cut from OPD’s budget. And then we’ll have to wait to find out what the impact of defunding will be on public safety. As we enter this long, not summer, I think defunding will be disastrous for the people. I pray to God I’m wrong.
Steve Heimoff